#all while dealing with Grownup Real Life Things like changing jobs

[empressofthelibrary]

"I can write seven small fics for an event," I said. "It'll be easy," I said.

One of these has taken at least four drafts, and I still have three more ficlets to write

[four-rabbit]

Game Night

I don’t really know what this is, I’m just glad I was finally able to finish a sanders sides’ fanfic for the first time. 

This fanfic was born from the last video, obviously, and the realization that the creativity twins canonically feel physical pain when their ideas are desregard or their function is “offended” let’s say, which I had to exagerate and turn int angst, of course, so enjoy!

Summary: Remus get sick so frequently that those nights have became his idea of a sleepover. 

Ship: platonic dukeceit. Or romantic. You can interpret it however you want

Characters: Remus Sanders, Virgil Sanders and Janus Sanders 

Warnings: swearing, kinda grapphic descriptions of pain and sickness, mentions to vomit. Also maybe some umsympathetic Virgil? I don’t see it like that, but I guess it depends on how you interpret it. 

Word Count: 1729

Sorry for any mistakes, english is not my first language

-----------------------------------------------------------------

If Remus was real, he would be dead. 

And if snakes could demonstrate worry, they would make exactly the same expression that Janus had after looking at the thermometer. 

"How do you manage to get so bad so quickly?" 

"What can I say, being bad is the only thing I'm good at" Remus joked, the words scratching his throat as an unwanted cough came with them. Janus rolled his eyes, trying to seem calm. And falling. 

"Any idea what was the cause this time?" Remus' focus went down to the old and familiar sheet, which he fiddled with, avoiding the question. 

"How hot am I?" He vaguely pointed to the thermometer. 

"You have a 113°F fever" 

"Well, fuck. That's a new record" he touched his own forehead, smiling almost maniacally right after "Shit. How long do you think it takes until my brain melts? 

"Bold of you to assume it hadn't already" Virgil was the one to answer, entering the room with a bowl of hot soup in his hands. 

"Wow Virgil, that was fast " Janus lied, raising an eyebrow. "What happened?"

"I was trying to actually cook something real for once"

"Please don't tell me your burned the kitchen" the half-snake child replied, with some amount of actual fear behind the dramatic hand to his chest and horrified expression. 

"Ha ha" pause "...not on purpose" Virgil replied, looking away. 

 "Yeah, that's my job!"

"Remus, eat your soup, the grownups are talking" the embodiment of Fear interrupted jokingly, even though any of them was older then twelve. Then he turned to Janus again, already guessing what he was going to say "but... it's fine now. I took care of it" Janus made a mental note to go take a look at the damage as fast as possible. They could all be kids, but Janus knew very well he was the only responsible there. 

"I don't like it...!" Creativity replied, sounding like a child who doesn't want to eat salad. Janus sighed as his thoughts were interrupted, conjuring a bottle of perfume and poured it in the meal. 

"Now eat" and so he did. Virgil raised an eyebrow, but he was smiling, trying not to be so worried. Or at least not demonstrate it. After so many times, he should be used to it, but... well, he was Fear. It was his job to keep track of the worst case scenarios.

"Did he get better?"

"On the contrary. The fever is higher than ever"

"And I also feel like someone ripped my bones out of my skin and then put them back, but like... in the wrong way" Remus added, spilling hot soup all over the sheet and his clothes by trying to communicate with his mouth full. 

"So it's one of those nights" Virgil mumbled.

"I'm afraid so" 

Remus finished his soup smiling like there was no tomorrow, opening his arms despite how much that simple gesture hurted "Game night while I'm dying!" Janus smiled, with more sadness in his eyes than anything else. 

"I'll get the monopoly"

•••

"I won"

"No, you did fucking not" Remus immediately answered, not even looking away from his cards.

"You can see for yourself" Janus showed his game, which clearly meant a victory, indeed. Remus tossed his cards on the sheet like it was their fault. He was so fucking close!

"You cheated" Virgil said sharply, as if it was an undeniable fact. 

"Do you have any proof? Janus challenged, not losing a beat or his mischievous smile.

"Yeah. It's the only thing you know how to do" the teenager replied, his tone as cold as a lake in the winter. Janus looked down before he could help himself. Couldn't he keep it down for at least one night? The night Remus needed both of them?

The cards caught fire. It was an accident, but Remus decided to go with that, jumping out of the sheets, trying to ignore the terrible twist that movement gave to his stomach. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he threw up. At least that way these two would stop fucking fighting. 

"What the hell?!" Virgil exclaimed, tossing his game away like it was burning. Which was the case, indeed.

"Let's watch a horror movie!" Well, he got their attention. 

"Did you need to burn things before saying that?!" Virgil screamed. He was standing and seemed even more distressed.This was a mistake, Janus realized. It was foolish to think they could ignore their differences for the sake of Remus. 

"It's more fun this way! What can it be? One of the classics? Some shitty obscure one?" He kept trying, getting out of bed and walking toward Virgil, who walked away from him. Janus immediately got up too, already anticipating the disaster that situation could turn to. A worst one. Because it was already a disaster. 

"Please, control yourselves"

"I'm controlled! I'm not the one burning things" Virgil replied, the trace of the tempestuous tongue in his voice proving that he was anything but in control. 

"Remus, please. Apologize for burning the cards"

"It's just some stupid paper!

"Now"

"It was a fucking accident"

"We all know it wasn't" Janus almost, almost told Virgil to shut up after that. But he didn't need to make things worse than they already were.

"It was a fucking accident" his voice started getting threatened, his eyes started shining with a red danger "But you know what wouldn't be a fucking accident? if I..." his vision went black, a headache that felt like someone had opened his skull being everything that existed and then not even that. 

Anxiety got out of the room immediately after his friend fainted, keeping his gaze to the ground, knowing that he wouldn't be able to stand any amount of time alone with Deceit. 

•••

   Remus wished he was real, so he would be dead. 

   He felt like someone had catched his body on fire, then hit his head with an axe, then exchanged his blood for poison and his bones with knives. 

   "I knew you were stupid, but not stupid enough to try and suggest an idea for Thomas. On your own. After terrorizing him the whole night. Literally hours after recovering from your last..." Janus looked down at his friend, in one of the only moments he didn't try to hide his emotions. Fear. Somebody had to fill the vacancy now that Virgil is gone, I suppose. 

   "It was..." He coughed blood. "A good idea"

   "Oh yeah, I'm sure he thought the same" Janus rolled his eyes. Remus tried to say that he would be fine, but his throat still hurt from the acid of his stomach and the scratching of his coughs. 

   "I told you to not do anything too dangerous. We are..." he looked down to his gloves which, as he knew, covered up for the scales that apparently had decided that half of his face was not punishment enough. "In a delicate situation, now that..."

   "The emo is gone. I know" Remus completed, his voice not much more than a whisper. 

   "Oh please, no. We are better off without him haunting us all day. If he prefers to deal with them, the only thing I feel is pity" anyone else would have believed that. Remus knew it was bullshit the second those words left his mouth. But he didn't say that. Mostly because he was feeling nauseous again and he learned that, apparently, people don't like if you throw up while trying to talk to them. 

   Janus stayed in silence for a couple more seconds, then something changed in his eyes and he got up.

   "Well, if you need me, I'll be reading" said, but before he could go too far, Remus grabbed the bottom of his coat, deciding to make use of his positions of creativity, as with a snap of his fingers green words appeared in the air:

   "It's game night, not a fucking book club"

   "I don't think you're able to play games right now"

   "I've never been better in my entire fucking life"

   The words glitched as his consciousness stumbled. 

   "Remus"

   "You've been reading, studying, planning, whatever every fucking time we were together" he finally was able to find his voice again "Is it me, Virgil, or just you being a dick? 

   "You need to rest"

   "I'm gonna vomit on your shoes"

   Janus sighed, sitting again on the bed. 

   "What do you propose?"

   "Truth or dare" Janus never plays truth or dare. The two of them, Virgil and Remus, would play it at any given opportunity, on the other hand. 

   "Don't test me"

   Floating words again: "I'm gonna take it easy"

   "You never take it easy."

   Remus frowned. 

   "Ok" the half-snake man sighed "let's find a compromise: I can play Never Have I Ever" 

   Remus smiled diabolically. So they had a deal. 

•••

   "Finally! It's been so long since our last sleepover!"

   "This is anything but a sleepover" Janus replied, not looking away from his book.

   "Yes it is! We're sleeping together not in a sexual way and wearing pajamas.

   "I'm not-" Remus snapped his fingers and suddenly Janus had a yellow onesie on. "...I'm not having a sleepover with you. And you're not even that bad"

   "But I'll be. And in the meantime... Please play truth or dare with me just this time please please" he said in one breath. 

   "You already know my opinion about this game"

   "I know that you like it! You would always laugh and even participate when me and Virgin played!" Janus flinched.

   "That was a long time ago"

   "Just two rounds!" 

   "I..."

   "C'mon! You're not gonna lose an arm if you play just one time. And even if you did, you would still have five perfectly good ones left"

  Janus hesitated. He knew Remus would get worse. It was obvious by the tiredness in his voice, even when he was so excited. And how pale he was. How deep his eyeshadow appeared, making him seem like a dead body. 

   He sighed. Remus smiled from ear to ear. Literally.

   "Truth or dare?!" Asked as if he was a child whose birthday had come earlier.

   "Dare, obviously" Janus said, unable to stop himself from smiling at his friend's happiness, even though they both knew it wouldn't last long. 

   But that was okay. Because they would have one another. And that was enough. It had to be.

[natusvincere]

A Talk to Remember || Morgan and Vic

Who: @mor-beck-more-problems and @natusvincere Where: Morgan and Deirdre’s house When: Current What:  Vic wants her dagger back, Morgan wants to chat first. Warnings:  Mentions of suicide ideation

It was a familiar trip to Morgan’s home, but somehow, each time Vic made the journey there, the unfamiliar anxiety associated with the journey swelled a bit stronger.  Today was no exception.  She kept telling herself that the only reason she was even taking such a journey was to get her dagger back, but even she wasn’t so disillusioned to think that was the whole truth.  The multiple spare daggers she had back at home weren’t the only thing that proved it.  The things Morgan had been saying had been swimming in her brain, and she didn’t know if she wanted to hear more of it or set her friend straight for good.  She’d been mulling over it for weeks now, exhausted at the back and forth her mind was constantly flip flopping between.  One minute she’d be convinced Morgan was wrong and ready to write her off and the next she’d be drowning in guilt at the idea of Morgan being right.  The latter seemed to be happening more frequently. After several moments of internal struggle, she found herself rolling her eyes as she buzzed the doorbell, switching her weight back and forth to quell the anxiety.  Her face remained blank when the door opened, but her stomach flipped uncomfortably. There was so much she wanted to say, but “I was in the area” was all that came out of Vic’s mouth.

 Morgan knew Vic had too much pride to come straight to the house as soon as they made their plans and too much pride to never show up at all. But it still came as a surprise when the doorbell rang and her friend, or once-friend, appeared on the other side. Morgan took several moments to process the woman’s presence and decode whatever Vic was hiding under, I was in the area. Maybe nerves, maybe agitation, but hell if Morgan knew what for, exactly. 

“Uh. Hi.” She said at last. “Can I help you…?”

 The silence between them was loud, and Vic was sure she’d squirm right out of her skin if Morgan didn’t say anything soon.  And then she did, and Vic wanted to squirm away even more.  She looked between Morgan and her car, contemplating if she should just turn and run back.  Instead, she said, “You have my dagger.  Did you forget?”  There was something keeping her from holding Morgan’s eye contact, her gaze instead traveling from her chin to the doorknob to the plants she kept on her porch.  “I just want it back.  Then I’ll leave you alone.”

 “No, I remember,” Morgan said, smirking. “Come on in, have a seat in the kitchen. I have to grab your knife from the shed anyway, so I can get stuff for a blood cocktail while I’m at it. Your kind can still taste stuff, right?” As frustrated as she was with Vic, she got some satisfaction in confounding her as often as possible. “That wasn’t a request. You’re gonna deal with my rusty southern hospitality or you’re not getting that knife back. How’ve you been, anyway?”

 Vic couldn’t suppress her eye roll at the sudden change of plans.  She had not expected to be invited inside, and it threw her off completely.  At the invitation, though, she stepped through the door, her eyes quietly searching for evidence of the girlfriend Morgan spoke so fondly of.  “That wasn’t the deal”, she said, hanging by the doorframe of the kitchen.  “First it was I have to come by to get it, now we have to chit chat?”  She blinked, crossing her arms over her chest.  “I’m not thirsty, thank you.  And I’ve been great, just dandy, Morgan.”  No existential questions coursing through her brain at all hours of the night. None at all.  Her voice held a bite of sarcasm that she usually shielded Morgan from. “How about you?”  She hadn’t planned on being cross, and yet here she was pushing away the only person who’d been patient enough to listen for years.  She wanted to rip her own hair out.

 “In Texas, it’s rude to turn down hospitality, Victoria,” Morgan said. “But, if you must know, I’ve been doing alright. I’ve recently become the guardian of a really great kid, I’ve just managed to hold onto my job for another semester, and my girlfriend and I are like, pre-engaged. I don’t know if that’s a word, but I don’t know what else to call deciding we want to get married but wanting to wait for a better time to do some fancy proposal stuff. Don’t know what we’ll do about the cats whenever we eventually honeymoon but--oh!” She squealed as Moira padded up and butted her head against her legs. Morgan laughed and picked up the little cat, smiling indulgently. “But we’ll figure it out. It’s a long ways away.” She held out the cat to Vic. “Do you wanna hold her while I get the stuff? She’s real friendly and with how much me and Deirdre carry and cuddle her, she’s used to cold bodies. Doesn’t bother her a bit.” 

 “We’re not in Texas.  But I’ll be sure to remember to never relocate there.  It sounds horrible,” Vic answered, though she was slowly losing the bite and bitter tone she had first entered the home with.   She blinked in surprise at the new information, letting herself leave the doorframe and enter the room further.  She was intrigued, admittedly, and desperate to know more.  “A guardian?  For a child?”  She couldn’t imagine how something like that just fell into someone’s lap- even someone like Morgan with all her southern hospitality and gentle charm.  The next bit of information Morgan fed her was perhaps even more intriguing.  “Engaged to be married?”, she asked, wishing to clarify.  The term was so different now than it was when she had been engaged.  Barely anyone was betrothed anymore.  Instead, young people of all classes and creeds had a choice in who they spent their lives with, and even freedom to leave when things became unbearable- and with barely any societal backlash.

She had been deep in thought when the cat was held out to her, and so she leaned back suddenly, looking at it in front of her with her eyes nearly crossing to refocus.  She wasn’t sure if she trusted that the cat wouldn’t hate her- she smelled like dog and death and any cat worth her salt might be wary of such a thing.  She looked up at Morgan hesitantly before she reached out to it, pulling it against her chest immediately.  “What’s her name?”, she asked, scratching behind the small beast’s ears and pressing her lips against its head.  “And where are your w- Deirdre and child?”

 “Well, a grown child but, yeah,” Morgan said with a shrug. It still felt weird to say, and her results were definitely mixed at best so far, but playing nonchalant while Vic sputtered to catch up with what a woman’s life could be in this time gave her a shot of confidence. “And, technically not engaged because no rings, which we both want, but, I guess we have what you used to call an understanding?” She put on her best BBC voice as she said the word. “We’ve done the grownup part, but not the romantic, fluffy part. You know that’s a thing two women can do now, right? We don’t have to surrender our happiness by default, and we don’t have to hide it either.”

Her voice tapered off, softer, as she watched Vic handle the kitten. The vampire already knew where to scratch, and how to hold her, and Moira was curious and interested as ever at the prospect of making a new friend. “Her name is Moira. She’s only a year and a half old right now. Still a big baby.”

As she backed away, ready to give Vic some time to get a little less tightly wound, she couldn’t help but choke down a snort. Did she just try to call her family her women? “Uh, Bexley, the girl I take care of, is out with her girlfriend. Deirdre has a thing.  Which means you’re stuck with me. When I get back in a minute, at least. I’m sure you’ll find a way to manage, right?” She winked, then backed her way out to the garden yard. She intended to take just a little bit longer than she needed to. She wanted Vic to have the chance to feel like a person and she didn’t know if there’d ever be another one after her sort-of-friend went home.

 “However did something like that fall into your lap?”, Vic wondered curiously.  There was no way the government could just place a teenager with a stranger to be raised unless they asked for it, right?  Had Morgan been seeking out raising a child all along?  Had Vic been too self-involved to even realize that it was something so important to her?  Her focus was brought back to Morgan, and she had to press her lips together to suppress a smile at Morgan’s silly voice. “An understanding”, she repeated with a nod after she pulled herself together. “It seems that that’s what most young people come to these days before engagement.  I know- I remember when the law allowing people to get married as passed”, she recalled nonchalantly.  In truth, she had sat by her television with rapt attention that day back in 2015, unable to focus her attention on anything else until she knew what the ruling would be.  “Have you ever hidden it?”

“Moira”, she whispered, pressing her forehead into the cat’s.  “You’re rather funny looking”, she remarked, giving the beast another scratch behind her ears.  “Winnie is 5 and still a big baby.  I doubt she’ll ever grow out of it.”  Vic had been wishing to see both Morgan’s new teenager and her… betrothed, for lack of a better word, but for now she’d just have to settle for groveling for her own dagger.  Her shoulders seemed to drop when she was left alone with the cat, as if tension had physically escaped her body.  She let Moira on the table, holding up a hair elastic she had in her pocket for her to swat at.  

Moira rolled onto her back, lazily grabbing at the elastic and the tips of Vic’s fingers, eliciting a small chuckle from the woman.  “How lucky you are to live without worries”, she whispered, playing tug of war with the cat. 

 Morgan left Vic’s questions linger in the air for when she got back. She wasn’t sure if ‘fallen’ was the right word, or how to tell what had happened without sounding a little conniving, even desperate. And then the other thing. She shouldn’t have been surprised that Vic assumed she’d always been out and confident. Vic seemed to think the best and worst of everyone, whichever way kept them as far away from her as can be. 

She plucked the knife off its shelf in her shed and wrapped it up in a nice cloth and put it in the bottom of a basket, which she then piled with some bottles and then filled with blood from the murder shed. No death should go to waste, not if she could help it. 

She lingered in the entryway when she returned, beaming as she watched Vic play with Moira. Animals had a funny way of revealing people, and Moira was showing a version of Vic that had been hiding for years. “Am I interrupting?” She said, beaming. “I’ve got everything right here, but that doesn’t mean there’s any rush.” She passed Vic a bottle of blood to make her point. Relax, make yourself at home.

“Also, I owe you some answers: the twenty-something kid is…complicated. We weren’t actively looking for each other, but we had similar social circles, she was my student for a semester, and she was staying with me here for a while before anything became even semi official. We just sort of…fit. Little by little. I feel kind of unfairly lucky to have her around.” Morgan shrugged it off, not wanting to get into her shortcomings. This talk wasn’t about her. “And as for the other thing: yes, I hid myself a lot and very well. The area I grew up in wasn’t kind to people like us, but thanks to ignorance, most assumed that a woman who likes flowers and dresses could never be one of them. And I say this casually now, because I’m out and I’ve slept around and dated, and now I’m this—” She gestured vaguely to the house, the frame of her life. “But that doesn’t mean those years didn’t kill little parts of me every day, parts that’ll never grow back. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t lonely and dark, or that I didn’t ever wake up hating the world almost as much as I hated myself. It just means the hurt has scarred over, and I get to be a whole person now. And I need you to know that you can be a whole person too, Victoria.”

 “Yes”, Vic teased, albeit pulling the elastic back from the creature, choosing instead to scratch behind her ears again.  She gazed inside the basket, her eyes searching for the dagger.  When the bottle was placed in front of her, she closed her eyes and swallowed, only opening them again to gaze at Morgan.  “Was this harvested ethically?”, she asked, her hand wrapping tentatively around the bottle.

She didn’t feed in front of people- she didn’t much like to feed at all, truthfully.  It felt animalistic and vulgar and monstrous to do it so callously, but Morgan seemed to expect her to drink right here, as if they were simply eating lunch in the park together.  Didn’t she see it was so much more horrible than that?

Her hand flexed and tightened around the bottle as she listened to Morgan explain.  “A found family”, she clarified with a nod, having heard the term more than once but never really grasping what it could mean.  “Is Deirdre also comfortable with this arrangement?”, she wondered.  Her explanation of her youth was a lot easier to comprehend- a life hidden and masked was definitely something she relate to.  “How old were you?”, she started.  “How old were you when you decided to let people know?”

She looked away as Morgan concluded her speech, leaning back in her chair in shaking her head.  “I’ve been hiding parts about me and letting them die since long before I realized I’m attracted to women, Morgan”, she explained, her eyes distant as if she were remembering some far away memory.  “It’s not just… that. It’s not as simple as you want it to be.  I can’t just undo who I’ve become.  Not after 400 years.”

 “It’s not human if that’s what you mean,” Morgan said with a roll of her eyes. “What kind of person do you take me for? It’s a very nice deer from yesterday, hit by a truck and left by the road. A fine vintage in the world of animal blood.” She watched Vic wrestle with this knowledge, or maybe just being treated as a person and a vampire at the same time, and sat back, making herself comfortable. 

“Deirdre’s fine. She’s...we’re not doing this particular thing together, per se, we’re in different places as far as that’s concerned, but she doesn’t resent me or the girl and she does care for her well in her own way. I don’t know what more I could ask for.” She sighed, feeling the space between all she knew she could have and all she wanted and all she dared not ask for. 

Vic’s next question took her out of her thoughts. She straightened and looked at the woman, her expression plain, her voice frank. “I was eighteen when I told my mother, because I thought my gayness was causing the literal curse that brought suffering to my family, that it was the reason my dad had died driving me to work. And I was twenty-four when I went to my first women’s only gay bar. And I was thirty, when I stopped being too scared to let women get close to me at all. It’s not something that happens all at once for anyone, I don’t think. So even if it is simple, or straightforward if you prefer, it’s not easy. A lot of straightforward things are really, really hard and that’s why we come up with complicated ways of getting around them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, Victoria. You can always make new choices.”

 With a lick of her lips, Vic let herself fully grip the bottle at the new information, her fingers fully wrapping around it as the need to study it dissipated.  “Okay”, she said hushed and tentatively.  Her eyes watched Morgan’s as she brought the bottle to her lips, but she put it down before she let herself take a sip.  She didn’t like to eat in front of anyone because for one, not many of the few people she let into her personal life actually knew what she was.  It was easier to keep it a secret, because the opposite would most likely mean losing them anyway.  But two, there was so much wrongness associated with it.  So much death and hurt and pain and… shame.  It made her feel vulnerable in a way she didn’t appreciate, and vulnerability in front of anyone was a recipe for disaster. 

And then there was the issue of fangs and red eyes while she was feeding.

It was too much, especially for Morgan to see her like that.  Like the monster she was deep down inside.  She let go of the bottle, choosing to cross her arms casually on the table instead as Morgan explained more.  

“She seems incredibly understanding”, Vic remarked, sitting back a bit in her chair.  She wanted to ask ‘Do you think she would like me?’, but it felt childish to ask something so frivolous.  It felt childish to care.  

As she listened to Morgan, her expression crumpled into one of sympathy.  “It must have been an incredibly awful burden to feel that way, Morgan.  Of course it wasn’t, you know that now, right?  I mean… to me it seems…”, she paused, gesturing around Morgan’s kitchen, “that all of this is because of who you are, not in spite of it.”  Morgan had a way of waxing poetry with her words, an artist in her own rite.  But her poetry couldn’t bend reality, not always.

“New choices, like putting an end to turning vampires in to hunters?”  She knew this is the conversation they’d been dancing around all along- the reason why she’d attacked Morgan in the woods and the reason she couldn’t face her after.  She knew the whole truth now, besides the details, and it was clear she didn’t approve.  “I decided after ten years that I’d make up for the monstrosities that come with being who I am now forced to be.  And the only way I know how to do that is by doing what I’m doing, Morgan.  Who am I if I just let myself be one of them?”

 Morgan saw Vic’s hesitance to drink and met her eyes sympathetically. Apropos of nothing, she rose when the woman finished, saying, “I think I need a snack too, actually.” One Pyrex of brain balls later, she was back, and nibbling on them with the help of a kebab skewer. After some more silence, she found the words she was looking for, or at least the only ones she knew she was going to find.

“It was terrible, yes. And even after I found out that, no, we were cursed because my great grandmother Agnes pissed off the wrong witch, eighteen years of hating myself didn’t just disappear. Sometimes I wondered if the curse made me gay so I could suffer more, and worse. That isn’t true either, but my point is: it took time and therapy doing things differently for me to figure that out. And yes, I think not conspiring to murder every vampire you meet might help you figure things out. I think not lumping yourself in with the people who wronged you would help. What I really think will help is admitting that every sapient vampire is as different from each other as you and I are. You are smarter than reducing your world to a flat simplicity for the sake of convenience. And I think you can be braver than that too. I think you might even want to be.” 

Another long, thoughtful bite of brains.

“Who is it that you think you’re being forced to be? You’re in control of your own choices, what monstrosities are there for you to ‘let’ yourself do that you don’t want?”

 There were two deliberate blinks from Vic; the first one of confusion, and the second of understanding.  Morgan was showing her that it was okay, in her own way. Their diets weren’t all that dissimilar, and neither was the way of acquiring them, she supposed.  Was hers really all that worse simply because she was a vampire?  This wasn’t a question that would have even crossed her mind a month ago.  

Letting out a slow breath, she built up the courage to grip the bottle again, taking a sip before she had the mind to stop herself.  Her eyes changed rather quickly, she was sure, and she could feel the fangs sprouting from her mouth; always so ready to reveal what she truly was.  Her mind flashed back to the early days after she was first turned, when she would stubbornly stare into mirrors for hours at a time, as if looking long enough might change the lack of reflection that stared back at her. Later, when she’d finally succumbed to feeding, her sire taunted her with the description of how she looked during (a punishment, she was sure, for her insistence that she would see her own reflection again). She spent years smashing every mirror she found after that. 

She hoped Morgan wouldn’t bring attention to it.   

“But the curse… is it over now?”, she asked, concerned.  Morgan was right that years of self-loathing didn’t just go away because you wanted it to, but the thought of going to therapy about such a thing felt so foreign to her.  “I’m not murdering anyone.  I’m a middle man”, she insisted, her body becoming rigid.  “Do you think hunters are murderers?”

“Forced to be a ...vampire, I mean.  I didn’t ask to become this, Morgan.   I would have much rather… I was so close to d-...”.  Vic swallowed, closing her eyes before taking another sip from the bottle.  “This wasn’t who I was meant to become.  This isn’t the Twilight, Morgan.  We do not sparkle in the sun and attend high school classes.  You wouldn’t believe… the thoughts that ran through my head when I was first turned.  The ones that do now if I don’t feed often enough.  They’re not natural...they’re not right.  And what if stopping all vampires I can is the only way I can stop myself from becoming who those thoughts want me to be?”

 “Oh, yeah, it’s very over. Witch magic fades after death, so after the ghost-girl who cursed us killed me a year and a half ago—” Morgan made an open gesture. “No more curse. No more magic. Just one zombie girl. Also, I would like to point out that I said conspiring to murder. Which, you have to admit fits the bill, right? And yes, I think hunters are murderers. All of them. Even the ones I like. If they intentionally kill a sapient being, they’re murderers. Some murders are…’necessary’ for lack of a better word. Because some people will refuse any solution that doesn’t end in death. But just because Vampire Serial Killer Number One won’t stop until they make someone stop them, doesn’t make what happens to that vampire anything but murder. If you’re going to extinguish a life from this world, you need to admit it and carry it. And I say that as someone who has murdered several people.” The soft humor her words had started with faded as she went on. By the time she stopped to pause, she could barely keep her eyes on Vic. This was bad, bad, dangerous shit to be admitting to. And even though she could fight, even though everyone knew where she was and who she was meeting with, Morgan’s cold blood prickled into ice under her skin with fear. 

She swallowed a lump in her throat (guilt; even if she didn’t have regrets for all of her crimes, she definitely had guilt) and pressed onto everything else Vic had brought up. “What you are isn’t who you are. And I get it, I do. I didn’t ask to be what I am either, and I spent a long time wishing that I hadn’t. That I had just died. It wasn’t a bad death. It was better than whatever’s waiting for me now. And it would have hurt so much less. And I didn’t feel like Morgan Beck, witch and teacher and chronic mess. She died, and I—this person who used to be her and will become someone else—woke up. But who I am, Morgan Beck the Second, the Undead, is not defined or limited by what I eat or what happened to me.” Slowly, she reached out a hand for Vic’s. “I don’t know if you know this, but zombies are born starving. And when we starve, the world is…small and clear. There’s one feeling, something strong and powerful and good and sick, and all you have to do is try to satisfy it. The ground is just a path to feeding. The wind is just a hindrance, or something that carries the smell. We don’t even think, really, we just do. And the early cravings…sometimes, I could feel it coming. Like having a second voice in my head, another shadow, something that took people apart like they were pieces of cow at the butcher, something that remembered what parts taste best, after brains, of course. And I live in fear of that…impulse, that piece of me. But I also live knowing that it isn’t me.” Reaching out farther, in earnest now, she looked into Vic’s eyes, pleading, “Is there anything you thought when you were young and lost and hungry that’s so different from what I did? And—-who told you that exterminating someone else will change something that’s a part of you? It won’t. You can’t change yourself by killing or erasing other people. You can’t change yourself with all the hatred in the world. You’ve had four hundred years; if it was possible, that would’ve happened by now. So what if—what if the way to become someone you like and can be proud of is to accept that you’re a real person who can be kind of wonderful when she gets out of her own way?”

 “Oh, it was her who-...  That makes sense.”  Vic blinked, processing what Morgan was saying to her.  After a long pause, she responded.  “I suppose, if that’s the sort of cut and dry definition we’re using, that would make me a murderer, too.”  She didn’t break eye contact with Morgan until the other woman looked away, and even then she still studied her face.  “In the beginning.  I didn’t know there was any other way to be.  And, well-  ...I suppose I murdered my sire as well.”  Her eyes fell back to her hands at that, as if she could witness herself doing it all over again.  There was no shame associated with what she did to her sire, but her stomach did flip flops at admitting it outloud.  How sweet it had felt when her thirst for revenge was finally satisfied.  How sick she felt to revel in that sweetness.  With a look back up at Morgan, it appeared she might have been experiencing a similar back and forth about her own murders.

It would have hurt so much less.  That was a thought that Vic had never heard articulated into words before.  Wishing for death felt so morbid and wrong, but had she been allowed to succumb to it, the hurt could have ended right then.  And for so long, she was sure she was alone in that feeling.  There were thousands of vampires and zombies walking around as if everything were perfect- like they were happy their life had turned into an afterlife.  Vic couldn’t believe how affirming it was to hear someone share her sentiments.  She looked down at the hand that settled into hers and listened and listened and listened as more of Morgan’s experiences seemed to mesh with her own, mixing and swirling like paint on a paper, until you could no longer differentiate between the two unless you tried your hardest.

She looked up into Morgan’s eyes, fresh tears prickling at her own.  She shook her head at the question posed, though it was slight and small, and if Morgan blinked, she would have missed it.  Nothing was different about their origins, not really.  Not when you dug deep and looked at them transparently.  

There was a long, teary pause before she finally answered again.  It was a collection of composure, more than anything.  “I wouldn’t even know how I would begin to stop what I do, Morgan.  I’ve hurt… so many people.  And interacted with so many slayers who would do the same to me if they found out the truth.”

 “I know,” Morgan said, coming around close to Vic and pulling her into a hug. “I’m not saying it won’t be hard or that it won’t hurt in its own way. But I am saying that it will be better than where you are right now. And you are a person who deserves a chance of happiness and peace and love. And you can be forgiven. And you can choose different for yourself. I’m saying you’re worth trying for. Okay?”

Against her better judgement, Vic let herself melt into the hug.  She let Morgan’s words cover her like a blanket, warm and reassuring and hopeful.  She wanted to believe what she was saying- that if she tried hard enough, everything could be okay, somehow.  It seemed much more likely that Morgan was wrong, but in that moment, she didn’t care.  She was seen.  Her experiences, as wild as it sounded, weren’t only her own.  And as she and Morgan held each other, Vic realized that that might have been the biggest evidence of hope she could ask for.

“Okay.  I’ll try.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why I won't buy an Ipad: ten years later

Ten years ago, Apple released the Ipad. I was in a hotel room in Seattle, jetlagged and awake at 4AM while my wife and daughter slept.

I had been thinking about Apple's impending Ipad release and what a reversal it meant for everything I loved about tech: taking away your right to decide whose code you'd run -- even your right to change the battery! I wrote about my feelings and many people read it. It even rated a mention in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

A decade later, the Ipad is ten years old and Apple has killed 20 state Right to Repair bills, in part to lock out third parties who might change you batteries for you.

I just reread that piece, and I still stand by it.

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)

I've spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn't come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it's come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public's eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O'Brien does a very good job of explaining why I'm completely uninterested in buying an iPad -- it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM "revolution" in which "content" people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web -- and the last days of CD ROM -- when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for "my mom" (it's amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I'd have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn't be worth much.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I'm a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was -- and is -- huge, and vital. I can't even count how many times I've gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I'd missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It's part of a multigenerational tradition in my family -- my mom's father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Infantalizing hardware Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Dale Dougherty's piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard programmer, and it was Hypercard's gentle and intuitive introduction to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in computers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel And let's look at the iStore. For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn't be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple's customers can't take their "iContent" with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can't sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn't make life better for Apple's customers or Apple's developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don't want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a string of apologies for Apple's abusive contractual terms for developers, but the best one was, "Did you think that access to a platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings attached?" I read it in Don Corleone's voice and it sounded just right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a drawbridge between me and my customers!

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who'll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of "content" isn't just that they can get it for free, though: it's that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it rough-hewn, some of it slick as the pros, most of it targetted more narrowly than the old media ever managed. Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We'll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we'll hardly notice it, and we'll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

Just like the gadget press is full of devices that gadget bloggers need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full of stories that affirm the internal media consensus. Yesterday's empires do something sacred and vital and most of all grown up, and that other adults will eventually come along to move us all away from the kids' playground that is the wild web, with its amateur content and lack of proprietary channels where exclusive deals can be made. We'll move back into the walled gardens that best return shareholder value to the investors who haven't updated their portfolios since before eTrade came online.

But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn't going to do much to stanch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won't bring customers back through the door.

Gadgets come and gadgets go Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/nascent-boulangism.html

[purplesurveys]

766

My dad is starting to gear me up for ~adult life~ and has made me start a Paypal, a social security number, and all that jazz and it’s making me immensely anxious, so expect more surveys than usual in the next few days lmao.

How frequently are you inclined to read, and how much? Not frequent at all. I’ll read only if I have to; and when it comes to reading for leisure, I’ll only reread books I’ve already read in the past. I find it sad considering how big of a bookworm I was as a kid. When was the last time you questioned the direction your life was taking? Right now, what with the Covid crisis. My life would have been mapped out ever so neatly if my life’s schedule went as expected - finish the sem, finish my thesis, graduate, travel for a bit, get a job. Now that that has been thrown out the window I essentially have to start from scratch and go into the world blind. And if you've been reading my surveys, you’ll know my least favorite thing to have to deal with is big change. Would you say that your personal views align with society's, generally? Not the society I have no choice but to be surrounded by, which is mostly Catholic, homophobic, sexist, and just very backwards in general. But when it comes to people I voluntarily choose to be with, like the friends I make and the people I follow on social media, I make sure their views are as liberal as mine so I don’t go completely crazy. ^ If not, in what ways do your opinions drastically differ? I just said it, but yeah Filipinos continue to be very resistant to more open-minded, modern views. Girls will still often be told to cover up, religions other than Christianity are viewed as wrong and of lower status, abortion is the most scandalous thing a woman could do, drug addicts must be handled with bullets and not rehab, etc. Basically everything you can roll your eyes over, that’s what Filipinos will tend to side with; and it’s very difficult to want to have your voice heard here because you will be ridiculed and thrown Bible verses instead of legit arguments. What small things have the ability to get under your skin? People who only start picking their orders once they’re the ones at the cashier, drivers who do have their turn signal on but will go THE OTHER DIRECTION, finding out there’s a car accident and I find out traffic has been building up only because drivers slow down to look at the crash site. The last one makes me especially mad every time it happens lol.

When was the last time you were caused to be upset with someone? I haven’t been upset with anyone in a while. If I’m upset these days, blame it on the weather. ^ Have you made up with that individual yet, or will you ever? I will never be ok with the summer climate over here. What is something small that has the ability to cure a bad mood? Hearing a favorite song on the radio as I’m driving, hitting all the green lights while driving, finding a parking spot near the mall entrance... man I really miss going out :(( What beverage is best capable of quenching your thirst? Water. What was the last big change through which you went? It hasn’t happened yet but I’ll be graduating and will officially be done with school forever in a few weeks. I mean, that’s the case unless I decide to take up a master’s but honestly the chances of that are super blurry as I’m over school at this point. ^ Do you deal well with change, typically? Have you always? I am honestly terrible at it and as much as I’m excited to get my first real job, I’m also scared to see how my adjustment pans out. I’ve had a pattern for not being able to adapt well to a new phase – I didn’t adjust in high school until my junior year, and I didn’t adjust in college until the latter half of my sophomore year. I really wish the trend doesn’t continue in the workplace because I can’t handle another mental slump. How do you feel after spending a great quantity of time online? I feel nothing? I mean I need the internet to do almost everything so it’s just become a part of daily routine; it’s normalized already. I would tend to feel some shame if I’ve been unproductive online when I could’ve been doing much more important stuff, but I’ve been avoiding that - I’ve been working on my thesis again, working on stuff for my org, participating in my other extracurriculars, etc. I feel relatively productive given the current circumstances. What do you consider to be the biggest drawback to being you? Like I said, I’m terrible with change. It takes forever for me to warm up to new conditions, and in that period I tend to feel very alone and miserable. I don’t know why I’ve never learned to just get out and make friends earlier. What do you consider the best part of being who you are? ^ Related to said drawback, once I have adjusted to the change, I do very well. I make lots of friends and am back to being my bubbly, social self. I just wish She could come out more easily. What kinds of things do you have on display in your room? Several Audrey Hepburn frames, a couple of paintings, and a poster of a Korean actor. What do you think your room and its contents say about you, if anything? I think more than anything you’ll see how my interests have shifted over the years haha. There’s tons of old WWE magazines, Paramore albums, Beyoncé albums and DVDs, crafty stuff like painting sets and coloring books, etc. When was the last time you felt insecure about something/some situation? Half hour ago when my dad was encouraging me to register for a bunch of grownup stuff. He doesn’t pester me a lot in small bits everyday (which I would really prefer); he’s more of a I’ll-dump-all-this-shit-on-you-in-one-go kind of person, which pressures me even more. I mean I’m excited for this new chapter but I wish he didn’t tell me to start a bank account and a Paypal and a social security number and a TIN all at the same time. What is something about which you are very confident or self-assured? I pride myself on being a good worker/co-worker. Do you ever stop to contemplate infinity? No. Are you comfortable amongst nature, or does the wilderness discomfit you? Sure, it makes me feel at peace. When was the last time someone or something caught you off guard? Andrew did a buuuunch of progress on our thesis this afternoon after a few days of passive-aggressively telling him that I’ve been doing all the work in the last week. How much time do you put into maintaining your appearance and hygiene? I don’t want to take a lot of time since I’m usually on a tight schedule but I do put enough effort to look and smell nice, if that makes sense. Like I wouldn’t take hours to do my makeup and put up an intricate hairdo, but I will still make sure I don’t exit the house looking shabby. Are there any foods you eat daily? . . . Or wish you could? I have rice and some sort of meat everyday. When was the last time someone new entered your life? Start of the semester when we had a new wave of applicants joining our org. ^ What was your first impression of that individual? They all seemed nice and fun to be around, and I’m glad their batch has had amazing chemistry from the get-go. But because of the lockdown I never got to know them all that well so I’m a little sad about it, since I’m already graduating. Do you put much thought into your handwriting? No? It’s not really something I can control anyway haha. What are some of the top priorities in your life right now? Ugh I’ve talked about this so much on here that it’s almost stupid because I take these surveys to begin with to distract myself from my current anxieties only for the surveys to ask about said anxieties ksksksks. Can I say pass for now? Lol In general, how do you feel about romantic relationships? They’re nice, and it feels good to have a person you can share everything to, be affectionate with, who supports you in everything, etc. I’ve been used to being in one for so long now I honestly can’t imagine being single. Which emotional sensation inconveniences or bothers you the most? As if I haven’t talked about it on this single survey enough, anxiety. Are you capable of consoling others in their grief? It depends on how bad is the thing they’re grieving and how accepting they are of help. I don’t know if I’m capable of talking to someone who has lost a parent, but I’ll be able to talk to a friend who’s going through a breakup. Do you ever find it awkward to compliment another being? No. I can give compliments, but I’m unable to take them. When was the last time you had a new experience? What was it? Earlier this afternoon when my dad made me make a Paypal hahaha. Skskss plz stop reminding me of scary things Do you dress more for yourself, or to the expectations of others? A little bit of both. I want to look nice, but I also make sure I keep up with the trends so others think I look nice. What kinds of things tend to stress you out? The stuff I’ve mentioned throughout this survey... What is one way you cope when you feel like crap? I watch videos, I eat whatever I’m craving, I talk about it with my girlfriend, I hug my dog... I have a lot of coping mechanisms.

Name an insult you regularly receive, if there is one? My mom tells me so many insults on a regular basis I can put each one of them in a spinning wheel and give you whatever comes out lol. Name a site that takes up a lot of your time? YouTube. What is something you used to believe about life that you no longer do? That money was easy to acquire. It was certainly so easy to fantasize about as a kid. What is a lesson you have recently learned? I don’t recall picking up anything new lately. Realizations, sure; but I’m not sure about lessons. Do you have a tendency to look on the morbid side of life? Sometimes. When was the last time you went shopping? What did you buy? A weekend before the quarantine. I bought a couple of new tops. When you shop for clothing, how long does it take you? 10-15 minutes tops. I just pick out whatever looks pretty. What is something fun you have done within the past week? It’s been a horrid week. I can’t answer this question. What is something you hope you never have to do again? Stay at home with nothing to do for this long. How does the rain affect your mood, if it does? It makes me feel happy and at peace.

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON JAWBREAKER’S LEAD VOCAL, LEAD DANCE HAN MINJU...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Siena CURRENT AGE: 22 DEBUT AGE: 17 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 13 COMPANY: KJH SECONDARY SKILL: Acting

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): Sina, given by her fans as a simple shortening of her stage name; Baby Giraffe, given by her family and soon spread among her members and fans, one would think it’s because she supposedly has a long neck but Minju was very tall when she was still a kid and her legs stood out, plus she was very clumsy and got hurt easily; Crying Baby, she cries easily and that’s known to the fans since the day they had their first win with La Ta Ta. INSPIRATION: As for people that she looks up to and aspires to become like them, Minju has in mind a couple of female soloists and groups, like Boa, Lee Hyori and Nixie. They were overall important figures that she had in mind before starting her training and even after when she became a trainee. SPECIAL TALENTS:

Sports: surprisingly, despite her usual clumsy behavior, Minju is very good at sports and events such as ISAC are meant to show that off. She can do archery decently and she has strong legs proper for running fast.

Ice skating: did for a very short while when she was a kid and wanted to become a figure skater. It has been years since she properly practiced but she can still pull a few decent movements.

Tongue twisters: while rapping is not her specialty (not even by far), during her training period Minju was told to practice tongue twisters to be able to improve her pronunciation and her breathing. After debuting, it became something she’d use on variety and radio shows.

NOTABLE FACTS:

Was a student at Hanlim Multi Art School from 2011 to 2014.

Has an older sister who also auditioned to Midas, but differently from Minju, her sister had success in her audition.

Started acting in the webdrama ‘Twenty Years Old’.

Despite all the lack of promotion for HER.oine, Singularity still tried to put Minju in a couple of dramas and fans complained saying she was being selfish for thinking about her career only. 

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

After almost losing this, Minju came to the realization that perhaps she’d miss this career more than she originally anticipated so, as cheesy as it may sound, she wants to make better use of the time she has in her group. Since she was highly criticized for her lack of enthusiasm in the ending years of HER.oine, she wants to prove those comments wrong by showing how invested she is in this, mainly by working in group related schedules and perfecting her performances and stage presence.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

Minju is, in some ways, pretty involved with acting and despite her bad start with it, she truly enjoys that aspect of her career and wishes to move into acting as something serious in the future if given the opportunity by KJH. But acting is not the only way she wants to use to keep herself in the industry and if she’s being true to herself, some wishful thoughts towards a solo career in music also popped up during some occasions.

IDOL IMAGE

She’s seventeen when she debuts, and she’s trilled and nervous and she feels like she’ll throw up as soon as she steps on the stage for their first performance as HER.oine.

She doesn’t and things end perfectly from her part. She’s rushing with adrenaline and pure joy and tears. She finally made it to debut despite of everything. After their debut stage, Minju became addicted to the feeling, of being up there in the spotlights with people cheering and screaming and showing their smiles and singing with them. She’d deal with everything that came with the job if that meant she’d be able to stand on the stage again.

In the beginning, the image they started selling was of a big-eyed, soft featured little sister. She’s young and innocent and that kind of image works well in contrast with her charismatic persona on stage. Singularity may not have done a good job in many things during the time Jawbreaker was still HER.oine but marketing Siena as their little girl with enchanting presence worked well during the four comebacks they had under that name.

Siena is not sweet nor has a stunningly beautiful image, she doesn’t look like a princess who came out from a fairytale and doesn’t speak sweetly or stumble over her words. She’s charming and smiles easily, she also has a funny laugh that is simply contagious. She’s not blunt. She knows her place, knows she must be perfect if she wants people to like her, but the younger child syndrome hits her from time to time and it works because people think it’s adorable. They buy this persona, the easy-going girl who looks wild when she’s performing but when she’s out of it, she’s just a regular-pretty-girl-who-smiles-at-everyone.

She has been acting for a while, but no one really notices. She acts when she’s having a bad day but must keep up with schedules and practice. She acts when she spends the day dieting and she’s starving, but she still says she’s fine. So, when she starts acting professionally, she tries to be extra careful. Siena must fit in the molds, she can’t rush herself, she must be composed and be elegant. She’s not chic, she doesn’t know how to act like that, and a silly smile will often popup in her face because being idol-Siena is much easier than being actress-Siena. That Siena is closer to whom Minju really is even though the real her lives under layers and layers of makeup and fancy-looking clothes. Her fans are happy to see her engage in new projects even if they aren’t necessarily good, some netizens just don’t buy it and say she wants to divert from her original path. The negativity didn’t stop Singularity from trying and suddenly, there she was again.

In KJH nothing much changes. She works with the carefree type of personality. Her fans like it and as far as she knows, what makes them happy, makes the company happy. Things are slightly different about her concept though, she’s nearing her 24ndbirthday in Korea and she wants to show that despite starting very young, she’s now a grown woman, and KJH seems okay to accept that because it will also help to establish a more solid image for their group. They are all grown women now and Siena wants to show them for what they are here for.

IDOL HISTORY

There is not one extraordinary plan. Minju worked with bigger events, big expectations and want to be too many things all at once. From teacher to veterinarian, a professional ice skater or even an artistic gymnast, she thought about following her mother’s career as a radio producer or become a lawyer like her father. Every other week she’d have things figured out and solved in her head, problems that would never happen under her watchful eyes, every other week she’d be something different. At the little age of thirteen she decided she wanted to be a singer and the difference that time was that the idea stuck with her for a long time.

The story of how her parents met remained a mystery in parts because it would slightly change every time any of the kids asked them how it happened. Her mother’s passion for music was evident and her father always looked at her in awe whenever she played some instrument or sang the chorus of a song she dearly appreciated. The three siblings would plan pranks and play for the whole day and in the end, the one thing that worked to sooth them to sleep were the couple of minutes of lullabies or stories told by the grownups.

She didn’t think of her life as boring but perhaps it could look like it for some people.

They grew up listening to music, given their mother’s background with the whole thing. Minju remembered how they tried to teach her music theory when she was younger and how excited she became when she got into class and realized she already knew some of that stuff. Her mother was the one teaching her guitar and sometimes, when she could, she’d sneak Minju into the studio where she worked after weeks of insistence from Minju’s side.

She honestly loved it. She loved music and loved singing and dancing with her father and despite already having a foot in the industry due to her mother’s connections, she didn’t think much about it until her sister mentioned she’d be trying to audition for Midas later that year. In the meantime, she weighted her thoughts. Be an idol was such an appealing idea, but she heard the discussions between her sister and their parents, and her mother specially, didn’t sound very pleased with the idea. Was only when she watched Boa performing on television that she made up her mind and perhaps it could be the aftereffects of the explosions and choreography, but she decided then that she’d be just like her role model. Her mother’s worries could only be normal, after all, she was their mother, so Minju decided to not worry with her worries.

She wasn’t as well prepared as her sister, obviously. Her sister was preparing for this fated day for months while Minju made her mind about it just a couple of weeks prior to the audition. In the end her sister was more successful than her in the attempt to be scouted and Minju felt the mix of happiness but also bitterness swirling inside of her. She remined herself that she couldn’t live out of raw expectations of good and great when she did nothing to deserve it, it didn’t mean the sour feeling simply faded away.

A couple of weeks later when the auditions for Singularity opened, Minju was once again on the game, this time by herself, relatively less confident of a positive response but more well prepared for what was about to come. It happened that since she had low expectations, all the results seem to be better than the expected and when they released the results and she saw she made it in, she was so happy she cried on the spot.

For months she lived just on the adrenaline of being accepted into a company. She trained hard and did all that was asked to her. She tried her best and gave her all, then things started getting lonely and being pushed for longer hours and eating less demanded so much more effort from her, but she refused to give up even though the thought did go through her head more than once after eight months of training.

Singularity wasn’t a company that she necessarily saw herself connect with. She didn���t feel like she had freedom to work herself in the best way, but when they started wanting to push her into acting training all together with the remaining classes she had to take, she started thinking that perhaps they had great plans for her.

When she was about to complete four years in the company, the news of a new girl group under their label were released and she was so excitedly tired when she told her parents that she was one of the trainees chosen to be part of the group.

HER.oine debuted and once again Minju started living under the adrenaline of the following months. And then they went on a hiatus and she became demotivated. The following comebacks were made based in the same formula. A preparation for the next comeback and then she’d be in high spirits while they were able to perform and then she’d be back to an unmotivated state because Singularity was uncapable of promoting them right.

She loved performing and loved being on the stage and that’s probably the main reason why she kept going and endured the entire situation. Because she wanted to give her best while singing to their two songs. She expected more and better of their debut and when she thought things couldn’t turn out sourer, Singularity decided to push her into webdramas that only created conflict among HER.oine’s fans and gave Minju a spot as selfish and greedy for neglecting the girls and having a very premature debut as an actress.

She almost didn’t sign up with KJH when they came from the skies and saved HER.oine from imminent disbandment after the fall of Singularity. Her members were the ones influencing in her decision and in the end, she was won by the pure pressure and insistence of her band mates to sign with them. She almost gave up not because she didn’t like doing it even though idol life was never easy to begin with, but she was so addicted to the feeling of being able to perform and receive the love from the fans that she didn’t mind that the system was a mess and sickening.

She doesn’t mind that they are in the bottom because she never truly felt like they were that high anyways. They have people expecting things from them. KJH wanting to know if they were a good investment, their fans who are probably looking for better management, the members wanting to know if this will work because that’s what she asks herself every day. There are a couple of life trials that she doesn’t know how to deal with, but she tries. Sometimes she gets tired of trying but she keeps going because, in her head, at some point, this will reveal to be worthy of the struggle.

[newstfionline]

I Took ‘Adulting Classes’ for Millennials

Andrew Zaleski, CityLab, Oct 29, 2018

On the eve of my wife’s 30th birthday--a milestone I, too, will soon hit--she posed a troubling question: Are we adults yet?

We certainly feel that way: We hold our own jobs, pay our own rent, cover our own bills, drive our own cars. Our credit is in order. But we don’t yet own a house and have no children--two markers commonly associated with fully-fledged adulthood (and two markers that both our sets of parents had reached well before they turned 30). And there are other gaps in our maturity: I don’t buy napkins or know how to golf; up until last year, I didn’t know how to change the oil in my car’s engine. Thankfully, last year we managed to throw a dinner party, our first, without burning the pork roast.

A vague anxiety over these known-unknowns is something of a generational hallmark. A Monday-morning scroll through the social media feed of the average 20-something might turn up a handful of friends sharing memes of dogs--looking bewildered, exasperated, or both--unironically captioned with something like: “Don’t make me adult today.”

Yes, Millennials have killed yet another thing. In this case, it’s something so fundamental that it may have seemed unkillable, but apparently isn’t: knowing how to be an adult.

Younger people need not look far on the internet to find popular condemnation from card-carrying grown-ups about our many shortcomings. We are, we are often told, simpering, self-indulgent, immune-to-difficulty know-nothings, overgrown toddlers who commute on children’s toys and demand cucumber water in our workplaces. But in our own social circles, such constructive criticism can be harder to find. Young urbanites tend to pack themselves into specific neighborhoods, cities, and living situations that have relatively fewer older residents. In such communities, knowledge on how to Seamless a meal to the doorstep is a dime a dozen, but first-hand experience in snaking a drain, cooking a meal for four, or operating a manual transmission comes at more of a premium. (To say nothing of the fact that a third of Americans between 18 and 34 are living with their parents.)

Luckily, the rough road to adulthood can be paved with adulting classes. The Adulting Collective, a startup venture out of Portland, Maine, made a big splash about two years ago after national news outlets reported on its in-person events. In its short lifespan, the Collective has offered up lessons, either guided or via online video, in such varied life skills as bike safety, holiday gift-giving for the cash-strapped, putting together a monthly budget, opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew, and assembling a weekly nutritional plan. Their target audience: “emerging adults,” the massive 93-million-strong demographic group composed of people in their 20s and early 30s.

There are similarly structured programs across the country. At the Brooklyn Brainery, for example, you can take classes on how to run a good meeting or what Seinfeld teaches us about love. Take an online course with the Society of Grownups, sponsored by the insurance company Mass Mutual, and topics will include budgeting and how to deal with student-loan debt.

The sheer banality of many of these courses is their salient quality. They’re teaching stuff that people neither look forward to nor seem to enjoy, but implicitly recognize as part of being a grown-up: paying bills, setting a budget, calling the car insurance company, looking after your health. The joyless, quotidian chores of post-adolescence.

“Adulting is something nobody prepares you for, but you know it when it happens. It’s the unglorified part of being on your own,” says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, assistant director of the writing and communication program at Georgia Tech who taught a class on adulting in the 21st century in 2016.

In a bygone era, the ordinariness traditionally associated with growing the hell up was something few noticed--in the first half of the 20th century, 20-somethings were too busy trying not to die of the Spanish Flu or fighting Hitler to worry too much about what life skills they were failing to develop. That has now been replaced by public displays of what it means to be a self-sufficient human being, Fitzsimmons says. At the intersection of these two competing truths is the cottage industry of adulting, one nurtured by Instagram hashtags and built around how-to classes for hapless Millennials.

Born in 1989, I am a card-carrying member of the oft-derided demographic. How hapless am I? To find out, I signed up for the two action challenges the Adulting Collective offered last fall: one on nutrition and another focused on monthly budgeting. Via email, I received instructions for each of these week-long courses, which had me tackling a new skill or task each day.

When I hit 30, I intend to complete emerging adulthood fully equipped for whatever comes next.

First lesson: Hydrate! Never would I have thought the amount of water I consumed would be a point of instruction. But it turns out that young adults are notoriously poor judges of this particular basic biological need. The crash course in nutrition from the Adulting Collective that arrived in my inbox last fall was titled “Detox Before You Retox,” and it heavily emphasized hangover avoidance. Billed as a way to prepare yourself “before the next happy hour,” the instructions contained multiple steps broken down over five days. Step one: Get your basics in order, like eating your veggies, exercising, and drinking more water.

So one evening I stood in the harsh glow of my kitchen’s overhead fluorescent lighting--pitcher at the ready, glass on the countertop--applying myself to my first adulting lesson. On my smartphone I made a quick calculation: my weight, divided by 2.2, multiplied by my age, divided by 28.3, divided once more by eight. The answer: eight. More precisely, I needed to drink 7.56 cups of water to hit my proper daily intake.

This was only one of the big takeaways I received. I also learned that a morning drink of lemon water and cayenne pepper mixed with said water can help boost my metabolism, apparently. Like the unnecessarily complex hydration formula above, some of this material had the effect of making a heretofore uncomplicated thing more daunting. It was months later it finally dawned on me that a simple Google search could yield a far simpler answer for the number of glasses of water I ought to drink every day.

How did it come to this? Did previous generations have so much trouble mastering the basics?

“In an ideal world, we would all be followed around by this combination of our grandmother and Merlin who would lovingly teach us how to do each and every thing in the world,” says Kelly Williams Brown, author of the 2013 book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 535 Easy(ish) Steps. “In the absence of that, it can be nice to have resources.”

Brown’s book seems to be largely responsible for the meteoric rise of the gerund form of the word (which was short-listed by Oxford Dictionaries as the word of the year in 2016). A revised edition of Adulting was published in March. The adulting industry itself is newer. Rachel Weinstein co-founded the Adulting School (now Collective) with Katie Brunelle in fall 2016. (Brunelle has since left the business.)

A professional therapist, Weinstein would sometimes encounter younger clients who spoke about the idiosyncrasies of grown-up life with a feeling of self-conscious shame. Being overwhelmed about how to manage money or clean out their kitchen pantry were things they felt they had to hide. “I just saw a lot of my clients struggle with life, trying to be competent in skills that we’re not necessarily taught. People had this sense of internal embarrassment,” she says.

To Weinstein, this seemed like a golden business opportunity. As a group, 26-year-olds are the single biggest age cohort in the U.S., followed by people who are 25, 27, and 24. Yet unlike previous generations, the young people of today are slower to reach the milestones usually associated with adulthood: living independently, forming their own households, having children, and getting married. “Today’s young people,” as the U.S. Census Bureau reported last year, “look different from prior generations in almost every regard.”

Tempting as it might be to identify the price of avocados as the culprit in this stunted generational progress, there may be other reasons to explain the shift. A research report released in the spring by Freddie Mac cited weak wage growth and the rapid rise of both housing costs and average expenditures as some of the principal reasons. “A popular meme, ‘adulting is hard,’ provides a humorous take on the challenges faced by young adults,” the authors wrote. “Like a lot of good comedy, the phrase has a tinge of cruelty.”

The typical adulting student is someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid told to get good grades.

Geography plays a role, too: Millennials tend to choose to live in the centers of high-cost cities, and their earning power hasn’t kept pace with housing costs. Since 2000, the median home price in the U.S. has risen by a quarter, from $210,000 to $270,000, while the per capita real income for young adults has risen by only 1 percent during that same period. Throw those myriad factors together, and you have some of the explanation for why 20-somethings are renting for longer periods of time than they once did, as well as why marriage and fertility rates have dropped. Appropriately, Freddie Mac’s report was titled, “Why Is Adulting Getting Harder?”

But if you go further back, delaying the markers of adulthood does have historical precedent, says Holly Swyers, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. She recently completed a project examining adulthood in America from the Civil War to the present day. For much of the period Swyers studied, many Americans over 18 followed roughly the same trajectory as modern Millennials do: They spent their 20s figuring out life and establishing themselves financially. The script didn’t flip until the 1950s and 1960s, when the markers that defined crossing over into the world of adulthood came to mean marrying and having children.

“Marrying when you’re 20, having kids by 21, and being established is a little bit freakish in American history,” she says.

So if those Americans of yore managed to (eventually) attain maturity without the aid of online courses, why can’t Millennials?

Maybe we really are uniquely ignorant. That’s the thesis that GOP senator and Gen Xer Ben Sasse presents in his book The Vanishing American Adult. He writes that younger Americans have willfully embraced “perpetual adolescence.” Some of this is our fault, evidently: staring at our smartphones for hours on end has obliterated our attention spans. Yet Sasse also places blame at the feet of his own generation for its “reluctance to expose young people to the demands of real work.”

Weinstein, however, offers another explanation. She attributes the acute modern need for additional grow-up instruction to class and demographics. Her typical adulting student is probably someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid who was repeatedly told to bring home good grades in order to get into a good college. “Whatever folks are really being pressured for college prep, they’re just not getting as much time and exposure at home hanging out with their family, learning how to unclog the kitchen sink, or hang a picture on the wall,” she says.

Lots of those over-scheduled and test-prepped teens of the aughts also missed out on erstwhile educational staples like home economics and shop classes, where high-school kids once learned how to darn a sock or hold a hammer; many schools began mothballing these mandatory courses in the 1990s. As a result, legions of American high-school graduates are being unleashed on the world without any basic skills. Some higher-education institutions, such as New Jersey’s Drew University, have stepped in to offer “Adulting 101” classes in things like beginner car care for their undergraduates.

The Adulting Collective doesn’t rely solely on Weinstein’s expertise for its courses, although it appears that designing an adulting curriculum is just as much of a challenge as growing up. Right now, the website contains some short posts and links to videos explaining a few skills, which is a deviation from the original idea to enlist instructors to offer online lessons. According to Weinstein, the new plan heading into 2019 is to build out a membership program that involves action challenges similar to the nutrition course I took part in. “One of the things I’ve learned as a therapist is a lot of times a little bit of accountability to somebody helps us achieve goals and get tasks done,” she says.

To Swyers, what’s extraordinary in Adulting Ed isn’t the curriculum itself, which is a pretty standard mix of self-improvement and personal finance tips. It’s the notion of branding such lessons under the “adulting” rubric. After all, classes geared toward grown-ups and their skills are all over the place. Visit any big-box hardware store and chances are there’s some sort of hands-on workshop taking place, for example. “If somebody is willing to be taught, for instance, basic kitchen skills--which people pay for all the time--they don’t call it an ‘adulting collective.’ They call it a cooking class,” Swyers says.

The difference, says Weinstein, is that the way younger adults are expected to grow older and assume our place in the world has dramatically changed: “I don’t think it’s a ‘hapless Millennial’ kind of thing at all. I just think there are things that are harder about the world today.”

Case in point: The spiraling costs of higher education. Those emerging adults are entering the workforce with massive student loans to pay off; no wonder some days all they can manage to do is Instagram bewildered-dog memes. “I have clients graduating from school with over $100,000 dollars worth of debt,” she says. “When you’re paying a mortgage’s worth of school debt every month, you’re probably going to need a little help stashing some money away in an emergency fund.”

Indeed, the most useful takeaways from my own brush with the adulting industry involved money management. Last fall’s challenge on budgeting included a chart for itemizing monthly breakdowns of expenses: so many dollars toward utilities, housing, food, clothing, and so on. After six months of following the chart I completed during the challenge, I managed to save up a sizable emergency fund of eight months’ worth of expenses--not bad for a freelance writer who graduated college with $250 to his name, and well worth the $5 I paid for the course itself.

The class was theirs. But the experience was all mine. And with my savings in order, I was freed up to stash excess cash in an additional account my wife and I hold to save for a future home down payment. With a house on the horizon, we’ve recently turned our attention to the prospect of having children sooner rather than later.

[uniquequotesonlife]

rhondastephens To Catch A Falling Cactus

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({});

Parenting: Are We Getting a Raw Deal?

Summer 1974. I’m 9 years old. By 7:30 am, I’m up and out of the house, or if it’s Saturday I’m up and doing exactly what my father, Big Jerry, has told me to do. Might be raking, mowing, digging holes, or washing cars. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Summer 2016. I’m tiptoeing out of the house, on my way to work, in an effort not to wake my children who will undoubtedly sleep until 11 am. They may complete a couple of the chores I’ve left in a list on the kitchen counter for them, or they may eat stale Cheez-its that were left in their rooms 3 days ago, in order to avoid the kitchen at all costs and “not see” the list. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); If you haven’t noticed, we’re getting a raw deal where this parenting gig is concerned. When did adults start caring whether or not their kids were safe, happy, or popular? I can assure you that Ginny and Big Jerry were not whiling away the hours wondering if my brother and I were fulfilled. Big Jerry was stoking the fires of his retirement savings and working, and working some more. Ginny was double bolting the door in order to keep us out of the house, and talking on the phone while she smoked a Kent. Meanwhile, we were three neighborhoods away, playing with some kids we’d never met, and we had crossed 2 major highways on bicycles with semi-flat tires to get there. Odds are, one of us had crashed at some point and was bleeding pretty impressively. No one cared. We were kids and if we weren’t acting as free labor, we were supposed to be out of the house and out of the way. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); My personal belief is that the same “woman with too little to do”, that decided it was necessary to give 4- year old guests a gift for coming to a birthday party, is the same loon who decided we were here to serve our kids and not the other way around. Think about it. As a kid, what was your costume for Halloween? If you were really lucky, your mom jabbed a pair of scissors in an old sheet, cut two eye holes, and you were a ghost. If her friend was coming over to frost her hair and showed up early, you got one eye hole cut and spent the next 45 minutes using a sharp stick to jab a second hole that was about two inches lower than its partner. I watched my cousin run directly into a parked car due to this very costume one year. He was still yelling, “Trick or Treat” as he slid down the rear quarter panel of a Buick, mildly concussed. When my son was 3 years old, we had a clown costume made by a seamstress, complete with pointy clown hat, and grease makeup. His grandmother spent more having that costume made than she did on my prom dress. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); At some point in the last 25 years, the tide shifted and the parents started getting the marginal cars and the cheap clothes while the kids live like rock stars. We spend enormous amounts of money on private instruction, the best sports gear money can buy, and adhere to psycho competition schedules. I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve bought the $300 baseball bats with money that should have been invested in a retirement account, traveled from many an AAU basketball game, or travel baseball game, to a dance competition in the course of one day, and failed to even consider why. Remember Hank Aaron? He didn’t need a $300 bat to be great. Your kid isn’t going pro and neither is mine, but you are going to retire one day and dumpster diving isn’t for the elderly. My brother and I still laugh about how, when he played high school baseball, there was one good bat and the entire team used it. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Remember your clothes in the 70’s? Despite my best efforts to block it out, I can still remember my desperate need to have a pair of authentic Converse shoes. Did I get them? Negative. Oh, was it a punch in the gut when my mother presented me with the Archdale knock-offs she found somewhere between my hometown and Greensboro. Trust me. They weren’t even close. Did I complain? Hell, no. I’m still alive, aren’t I? We’ve got an entire generation of kids spitting up on outfits that cost more than my monthly electric bill. There were no designer baby clothes when we were kids. Why? Because our parents weren’t crazy enough to spend $60 on an outfit for us to have explosive diarrhea in or vomit on. Our parents were focused on saving for their retirement and paying their house off. The real beauty of it is that none of these kids are going to score a job straight out of college that will allow them to pay for the necessities of life, brand new cars, and $150 jeans, so guess who’s going to be getting the phone call when they can’t make rent? Yep, we are. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Think back; way, way back. Who cleaned the house and did the yard work when you were a kid? You did. In fact, that’s why some people had children. We were free labor. My mother served as supervisor for the indoor chores, and the house damn well better be spotless when my father came through the door at 5:35. The battle cry went something like this, “Oh, no! Your father will be home in 15 minutes! Get those toys put away nooooow!” The rest of our evening was spent getting up to turn the television on demand, and only to what Dad wanted to watch. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); On weekends Dad was in charge of outdoor work and if you were thirsty you drank out of the hose, because 2 minutes of air conditioning and a glass of water from the faucet might make you soft. Who does the housework and yardwork now? The cleaning lady that comes on Thursday, and the landscaping crew that comes every other Tuesday. Most teenage boys have never touched a mower, and if you asked my daughter to clean a toilet, she would come back with a four page paper on the various kinds of deadly bacteria present on toilet seats. Everyone is too busy doing stuff to take care of the stuff they already have. But don’t get confused, they aren’t working or anything crazy like that. Juggling school assignments, extracurricular activities, and spending our money could become stressful if they had to work. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); I don’t recall anyone being worried about my workload being stressful, or my mental health in general. Jerry and Ginny had grownup stuff to worry about. As teenagers, we managed our own social lives and school affairs. If Karen, while executing a hair flip, told me my new Rave perm made me look like shit and there was no way Kevin would ever go out with my scrawny ass, my mother wasn’t even going to know about it; much less call Karen’s mother and arrange a meeting where we could iron out our misunderstanding and take a selfie together. Additionally, no phone calls were ever made to any of my teachers or coaches. Ever. If we sat the bench, we sat the bench. Our dads were at work anyway. They only knew what we told them. I can’t even conceive of my dad leaving work to come watch a ballgame. If I made a 92.999 and got a B, I got a B. No thinly veiled threats were made and no money changed hands to get me that A. Ok, full disclosure, in my case we would be looking at an 84.9999. I was the poster child for underachievement. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Back in our day, high school was a testing ground for life. We were learning to be adults under the semi-vigilant supervision of our parents. We had jobs because we wanted cars, and we wanted to be able to put gas in our cars, and wear Jordache jeans and Candies. Without jobs, we had Archdale sneakers and Wranglers, and borrowed our mother’s Chevrolet Caprice, affectionately known as the “land yacht”, on Friday night. No one, I mean, no one, got a new car. I was considered fairly lucky because my parents bought me a car at all. I use the term “car” loosely. If I tell you it was a red convertible and stop right here, you might think me special. I wasn’t. My car was a red MG Midget, possibly a ’74 and certainly a death trap. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Look at your coffee table. Now imagine it having a steering wheel and driving it. I promise you, it’s bigger than my car was. The starter was bad, so after school I had the pleasure of popping the hood and using two screwdrivers to cross the solenoids or waiting for the football players to come out of the dressing room headed to practice. Those guys pushing my car while I popped the clutch, is a memory no 16-year old girl around here will ever have, and it’s a great one. Had I driven that car in high winds, it’s likely I would have ended up airborne, and there were probably some serious safety infractions committed the night I took 6 people in togas to a convenience store, but I wouldn’t go back and trade it out for a new 280Z, even if I had the chance. I was a challenging teenager, and in retrospect the fact that it was pretty impressive every time I made it home alive, may not have been an accident on the part of my parents. Go to the high school now. These kids are driving cars that grown men working 55 hours a week can’t afford, and they aren’t paying for them with their jobs. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); And those new cars don’t do a thing for telling a good story. I tell my kids all the time, the very best stories from my teen and college years involve Ann’s yellow Plymouth Duster with the “swirling dust” graphic, Randy’s Valiant with the broken gas gauge, and Carla’s burgundy Nissan that may or may not have had a complete floorboard. A story that starts, “Remember that time we were heading to the beach in Carla’s Nissan and your wallet fell through the floorboard onto the highway?” is so much more interesting than, “Remember that time we were going to the beach in your brand new SUV, filled up with gas that your parents paid for, and the…well, no, never mind. Nothing happened. We just drove down there.” To top it all off, most of them head off to college without a clue what it’s like to look for a job, apply for it, interview, and show up on time, as scheduled. If they have a job, it’s because someone owed their dad a favor…and then they work when it “fits their schedule”. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); We all love our kids, and we want to see them happy and fulfilled, but I fear we’re robbing them of the experiences that make life memorable and make them capable, responsible, confident adults. For the majority of us, the very nice things we had as teenagers, we purchased with money we earned after saving for some ungodly amount of time. Our children are given most everything, and sometimes I wonder whether it’s for them or to make us feel like good parents. The bottom line is that you never value something you were given, as much as something you worked for. There were lessons in our experiences, even though we didn’t know it at the time. All those high school cat fights, and battles with teachers we clashed with, were an opportunity for us to learn how to negotiate and how to compromise. It also taught us that the world isn’t fair. Sometimes people just don’t like you, and sometimes you’ll work your ass off and still get screwed. We left high school, problem solvers. I’m afraid our kids are leaving high school with mommy and daddy on speed dial. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); We just don’t have the cojones our parents had. We aren’t prepared to tell our kids that they won’t have it if they don’t work for it, because we can’t bear to see them go without and we can’t bear to see them fail. We’ve given them a whole lot of stuff; stuff that will break down, wear out, get lost, go out of style, and lose value. As parents, I suppose some of us feel pretty proud about how we’ve contributed in a material way to our kid’s popularity and paved an easy street for them. I don’t, and I know there are many of you that are just as frustrated by it as I am. I worry about what we’ve robbed them of, which I’ve listed below, in the process of giving them everything. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Delayed gratification is a really good thing. It teaches you perseverance and how to determine the true value of something. Our kids don’t know a damn thing about delayed gratification. To them, delayed gratification is waiting for their phone to charge.Problem-solving skills and the ability to manage emotion are crucial life skills. Kids now have every problem solved for them. Good luck calling their college professor to argue about how they should have another shot at that final because they had two other finals to study for and were stressed. Don’t laugh, parents have tried it.Independence allows you to discover who you really are, instead of being what someone else expects you to be. It was something I craved. These kids have traded independence for new cars and Citizen jeans. They will live under someone’s thumb forever, if it means cool stuff. I would have lived in borderline condemned housing, and survived off of crackers and popsicles to maintain my independence. Oh wait, I actually did that. It pisses me off. You’re supposed to WANT to grow up and forge your way in the world; not live on someone else’s dime, under someone else’s rule, and too often these days, under someone else’s roof.Common sense is that little something extra that allows you to figure out which direction is north, how to put air in your tires, or the best route to take at a certain time of day to avoid traffic. You develop common sense by making mistakes and learning from them. It’s a skill best acquired in a setting where it’s safe to fail, and is only mastered by actually doing things for yourself. By micromanaging our kids all the time, we’re setting them up for a lifetime of cluelessness and ineptitude. At a certain age, that cluelessness becomes dangerous. I’ve seen women marry to avoid thinking for themselves, and for some it was the wisest course of action.Mental toughness is what allows a person to keep going despite everything going wrong. People with mental toughness are the ones who come out on top. They battle through job losses, difficult relationships, illness, and failure. It is a quality born from adversity. Adversity is a GOOD thing. It teaches you what you’re made of. It puts into practice the old saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. It’s life’s teacher. Our bubble-wrapped kids are so sheltered from adversity, I wonder how the mental health professionals will handle them all after the world chews them up and spits them out a few times. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); I know you are calling me names right now, and mentally listing all the reasons this doesn’t apply to you and your kid, but remember I’m including myself in this. My kids aren’t as bad as some, because I’m too poor and too lazy to indulge them beyond a certain point. And I’m certainly not saying that our parents did everything right. God knows all that second hand smoke I was exposed to, and those Sunday afternoon drives where Dad was drinking a Schlitz and I was standing on the front seat like a human projectile, were less than ideal; but I do think parents in the 70’s defined their roles in a way we never have.I worry that our kids are leaving home with more intellectual ability than we did, but without the life skills that will give them the success and independence that we’ve enjoyed. Then again, maybe it’s not parents that are getting the raw end of this deal after all. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk Watch: most watched video on youtube source Read the full article

[daddymenrah]

Rami Malek x Reader: Blackstone’s Ratio

A/N: Hey motherfuckers, the binch is back and better than ever. This is my contribution to vday, basically I think vday is a load of capitalist bullshit and I’m also a very unromantique person so I hope that sets the tone for what you’re about to read. Praise be to the most high (me).

 Also I’m trying something new with the whole reader pov thing. Roast me if its bad.

 Warnings: I hate warnings because it always gives half the fuckin story away so basically don’t read this if you have any issues with unconventional pregnancies, one night stands etc.

 Finding out I was pregnant was a lot of things, but it was also not a lot of things, if that makes any sense? For starters, it wasn’t a joyous moment where close friend and I jumped up and down with glee. There wasn’t any squeals of excitements and phone calls made to family members. There wasn’t any ridiculous announcement on Facebook.

 There wasn’t any hugs or kisses shared between myself and the father of my child. There wasn’t a wedding, well, there wasn’t even an engagement. He wasn’t my boyfriend; he wasn’t a close friend. Neither of our friends or families knew about our relationship, if you could even call it that. Can you call a few fucks in a hotel room a relationship?

 We met in some bar, I was at a friend’s birthday party, well, the pre-drinks of said birthday party. We got to talking over our drinks, he drank gin and tonic and I drank vodka and coke. He told me he was an actor and was delighted that I didn’t really know who he was. I made him an empty promise to watch something he was in sometime.

 It didn’t matter that we didn’t have much in common, we gravitated towards each other. I gravitated towards his hotel room and his dick gravitated towards my pussy. There wasn’t anything romantic about it. I left in the morning with his number and no intention to call it.

 But a few weeks later, on a whim, I did. I was horny, in need of company, and so was he. We fucked again after some drinks in a different hotel. We drunkenly complained about our lives and dissatisfactions, then came all over each other. That time, I managed to escape before he woke up.

 There was a sick kind of humour in the fact that I thought that I’d left without any trace of him, when in fact I had his child inside me. He called me a few times, but since he wasn’t of any use to me unless I wanted sex, I didn’t pick up. We didn’t have any obligations towards each other, at least none we were aware of.

 But when I stared down at that positive result, I began to ponder the real definition of an obligation. That evening I’d actually lain in bed and laughed hysterically at the term “positive result”. How the fuck was this a positive result in any way, shape or form? I guess for some people it is, those people that have fiancés or married couples, people who have been trying for a long time.

 Oh fuck, I’m an ungrateful bitch. I thought back to a friend I’d known since high school, we’d met for coffee and she’d admitted that she and her girlfriend had found out that neither of them could conceive. I guess adoption is on the cards for most gay couples anyway, but it’s still a shame.

 And here I was, vegetating at home and feeling oh so sorry for myself over something some people could only dream of. I’d feel guilty if I wasn’t so busy being resentful and pissed off at my own poor decisions that led to this situation in the first place.

 But I had so many important decisions to make. Was I supposed to tell him? Probably. Was I supposed to ask someone for advice? Probably. Was I supposed to visit a doctor? Probably. Was I supposed to tell my parents? Probably. Was I supposed to keep it? Probably… Not.

 Eventually I settled for calling him. I was a grown woman, even if just barely, and if I could pay my own bills and have unprotected sex, I could deal with the consequences. Possibly. I could just feel it was going to be the most awkward conversation of my life, but I wasn’t about to be one of those idiots on soaps who keep it totally to themselves until it’s far too late and something awful happens.

 But as I laboured through the beeping on the other end of the call, I really struggled to see how it could get much more awful than this. When he finally answered, I mentally tripped and fell over my words.

“Hi, hello, Rami. I needed to call you, well obviously because I fucking did that, anyway I need to talk to you.” I winced at my own painful awkwardness.

The second I heard the smooth chuckle of amusement rumble through the phone, I was reminded of why I liked this guy. He was cool.

“It’s been a while, Y/N. I didn’t really expect to hear from you.” He didn’t sound mad, maybe a little disappointed but he masked it under his calm drawl. I sighed in response.

 “Yeah. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really expect to be calling you but-“ I was interrupted by Rami laughing again.

“You’re too honest. Sorry, continue.” I actually find myself smiling a little, despite the situation, a wry one none the less.

 “Um, I don’t really know whether you’re supposed to tell people these things over the phone, I feel like you’re not but… Yeah I’m just gonna cut to the chase, I’m pregnant.” I bite my lip as I wait in silence for his response. It doesn’t come for what feels like hours. “Rami?”

“This isn’t a prank, right?”

 A spark of rage ignites inside me.

“I don’t know what makes you think we’re anywhere near friendly enough to be joking around about pregnancy.”

“We were friendly enough to sleep together multiple times.” He snaps.

“Twice. Don’t be so fucking optimistic.”

 “Optimistic, right, was it optimistic of me to put my-“ He halts abruptly and sighs. “You know what, this is really juvenile.”  We’re quiet for a few moments before he speaks again, seemingly cooling off. “Get a cab to my place, this really isn’t something we can talk about properly over the phone.” I don’t know what to say to this. I was hoping a five minute conversation would cover it.

 I half hoped he’d yell at me, tell me to get rid of it then hang up. I knew damned well Rami wasn’t going to do that, that just isn’t the type of person he is, and I could deduce that from two sexual encounters alone.

“Y/N?” I realise I’ve been sitting there, lost in my own head for several minutes.

 “Is that really necessary?” I ask timidly.

“Y/N, I thought you were aware but you’re fucking pregnant! Don’t you think a potential life growing inside you deserves a little more discussion than a damn phone call?” Well, when he puts it like that it makes me sound like an asshole. He does that grownup sigh again. “Go get ready or whatever, text me your address and I’ll call you a cab.”

 *

 About half an hour later, I’m sitting outside a pretty nice apartment building in the cab, Rami is waiting for me by the door to the foyer. His hair is all over the place and he looks tired, but I think part of that is just his look in general. He looked like that both times we met, just a little more put together.

 I reach into my purse to pay for the ride, but he’s already leaning in through the window with a handful of bills. The driver takes them, and smiles gratefully when Rami tells him to keep the change. I’d roll my eyes if he didn’t sound so stressed out rather than suave. I get out and follow him towards the building. I feel extremely awkward as we get in the elevator, Rami waves at a passing neighbour.

 I find myself wishing I made more of an effort with my appearance when I catch sight of myself in the mirrored walls of the lift. I remind myself that unfortunately, that’s not why I’m here so it doesn’t matter.

 We reach his floor and he leads the way to his apartment. He left the door on latch, so we go straight in and I shuffle from one foot to another in the hallway. He’s already started walking to another room, but my mind is racing with questions. Am I supposed to take my shoes off? Do I take my coat off? If I do these things where do I leave them? God this is fucking nerve wracking.

 He turns to see me still dithering by the door.

“You can keep your shoes on if you want, I’ll take your coat in a sec.” What the fuck? When did he become a mind reader? Am I just thinking irrelevant things to distract myself from the fact that I’m here to discuss my pregnancy? Highly likely.

 We go into his kitchen and he offers me a drink, frowning when he retracts the offer of anything caffeinated.

“It’s still like, a ball of cells at this point.” I protest, desperately wanting coffee or something alcoholic.

“A ball of cells that will quickly become a baby depending on how this conversation goes. You’re not damaging it before we’ve made any decisions.” That shuts me up pretty fast.

“I guess I’ll just have a glass of water then.” I mutter, feeling like a scolded child.

“Good.” Thankfully, he doesn’t tease me by having coffee himself, he simply pours two glasses of water and indicates for me to sit down at his table for two with him.

 “So, nice place.” I joke. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Distract from the matter at hand. You know exactly what you’re doing, Y/N.” This irritates me greatly.

 “Don’t act like you know me.” “Don’t act like a child.” He retaliates. “We need to talk about this.” He rests his hands on the table top, fingers intertwined. “First of all, the obvious question, do you want to keep it?” He’s looking at me so seriously it makes me want to laugh, but that is absolutely not appropriate.

 “My immediate thought is no?” He cocks an eyebrow. “I don’t know! It’s a fucking baby, Rami! No single woman my age wants a baby! I live in a tiny apartment with a job that nicely covers everything I need. Note my use of the word I? As in there is no room in my budget for a child?!” I can feel myself quickly becoming hysterical. Now that I’m actually talking about it, it suddenly feels very real, like I’ve been yanked back down to earth.

 “I know we’re not together or anything, we barely know each other in fact…-“

“Yes thank you for reminding me of that.”

“But just because we’re not in love or getting married or whatever doesn’t mean I don’t care about what decisions you make, I mean at the end of the day it’s not my body so it doesn’t really matter that much what I want but-“

 “Rami, we’re both rambling like fucking idiots.”

“You’re right.”

 We sit in silence, staring at the table. We’re not making any progress, we haven’t even established whether or not we want to keep it. I don’t even really know his moral stance on abortion, I’m not really sure of my own to be quite honest. And then, a thought pops into my head.

 “You know, it kinda makes me think of a murder trial.” Rami’s head shoots up, a look of shock on his face.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You know, like Blackstone’s ratio.” His expression relaxes a little as he ponders the analogy.

 “I think I see what you’re getting at.” He says, a small smile quirking at the corners of his lips. “Burden of proof.” I nod in agreement.

 *

 It’s funny how we always think we have so much time to do things, but the day of reckoning always comes around far faster than we anticipate. Hence why eight months later Rami is trying to assemble a fucking IKEA crib in his bedroom that only really accommodates a double bed and a closet among other bedroom furniture.

 “We’re idiots.”

“Idiots that’ll be getting dressed in the living room for the next few weeks at this rate.” I snort, handing him a screw.

“How did we remember to buy Babygro’s with puns written on them but forgot to get back to the estate agent.” He sighs.

 “Priorities.” I grin at him, reclining a little on the bed.

“Half of them won’t even fit him for another six months.” He shakes his head.

“Did you just assume our child’s gender?” I gasp sarcastically.

“Make that joke ever again and I will never change a single diaper. At least not until he’s one.” The sight of Rami rolling his eyes makes me crack up.

 We’d decided to piss my mom off by not finding out the sex so she couldn’t bombard us with pink or blue baby paraphernalia, because god forbid the little boy or girl have anything that was the ‘wrong’ colour for its gender. Rami however, is convinced that it’s going to be a boy.  

 “Have you thought of any names yet?” He asks absentmindedly, that’s another kinda crucial task that we put on the backburner.

“Hmm, I was thinking something really meaningful, like an ode to a prominent figure in history.” I explain, feigning pensiveness.

“Oh yeah? Such as?” Rami replies, eyes on the screwdriver he’s using to fasten one of the legs to the crib.

“Harambe. Or maybe Donald.” Rami bursts out laughing.

“Remind me why I’m letting you bring a child into the world?” “Okay fine maybe those were a bit extravagant. Bush?”

“What, and his middle name be ‘Jet-fuel-can’t-melt-steel-beams’?”

 And in that moment, I knew that even though we didn’t have a real house, or a professionally assembled crib, or even a highchair- fuck I meant to remind him to get that in IKEA the other day.

 We’re so fucked.

 But it’s okay I guess, at least I have him.

[axtogymnastics]

True Friends Never Walk Alone: BTS’ Spring Day

     The Bangtan Boys are back! BTS’ goal since debut has been to relate the struggles of youth: the 2Kool4Skool album title tracks chronicle the lack of motivation among Korean youth and the pressure they face from society to study hard, get a job, and succeed in life; Skool Luv Affair and Dark and Wild deal with teenage love, anger, and angst; and songs like “Am I Wrong” and “Silver Spoon” from The Most Beautiful Moment in Life (or HYYH as abbreviated from the Korean title) and Wings albums criticize the passiveness and hypocrisy of their society. These last two albums also explore themes of temptation, pain, and beauty in youth. Their latest music video, “Spring Day,” is all about friendship and keeping each other strong, and stands out to me as their most relatable release.

     The title of the album, Wings: You Never Walk Alone, sums up the MV’s message: even when you feel alone, you aren’t. It contains references to the HYYH era and the other Wings releases, as well as to works from other artists, most notably The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin, in the scene at 1:23 with the motel party. In the short story, Omelas is a seaside town where the inhabitants’ perpetual happiness depends on the isolation and mistreatment of a young child. Most accept the child’s suffering as a necessary evil, only a rare few leave Omelas, and always alone, but “they seem to know where they are going.” The child stands for the suffering of youth that Korean society shuts its eyes to, and BTS are the ones with the motivation and foresight to walk away from Omelas. However, unlike the people in the story who walk away alone, they go together with the youth to support them in their journey towards a better place. 

Top-down, left-right: Suga, Jungkook, Rap Monster, Jimin, Jin, J-Hope and V.

     Youth is a pretty sad time, it seems, for the members. Birthday cakes, friends, and red solo cups occupy the scene at 1:23, but the viewer senses that all is not well in scenes like the one above. In the aftermath of the party, they sit unsmiling and bored in front of the cake, a reminder that they are growing up. They seem jaded and perhaps a little apprehensive as the candle burns down, suggesting  suffering, disillusionment, and loneliness underneath all the fun. The beginning of the video also shows the three youngest boys alone. Jimin sits alone by the beach, appearing pale and lifeless. V lays down against the train tracks, seemingly suicidal as he listens for the oncoming train. On this train is Jungkook, the main character of the MV and a manifestation of loneliness.

     Back in the “I Need U” and “Run” MVs, BTS always had fun together on the beach and on trains. Over the past year, trains in BTS’ work have become a symbol of youth itself, representing its speed and excitement. However, as BTS’ characters grow up, the trains also come to mean the changes that inevitably occur during youth. We see this during Rap Monster’s solo; the train doors are used to trainsition to the next scenes.  Jungkook travels by himself, but the viewer doesn’t know where he is going. Likewise, V continues walking down the tracks, hoping for some form of relief at the other end. Both of them seem to be moving away from the other members. This could represent a multitude of things: depression, growing up, or a friendship that’s fallen apart—all universal struggles that youth face. 

     In addition to loneliness and isolation, Jin portrays the sadness of growing up away from your younger friends. As the oldest member of BTS, he is often shown in their music videos as distanced from the members in some form (not playing with them, disappearing off pictures, sitting at the head of the table etc). In a scene reminiscent of M.C. Escher’s Ascending and Descending and other stairwell studies, Jin stands at the bottom while the others continue walking up, continuing the leaving-Jin-out motif. Jin captures it first with his little finger-camera-rectangle, which V does as well in order to preserve their precious moments together. However, the staircase wraps around itself, suggesting continuity rather than the sudden change V and Jin fear. Even the circular movement of the washing machines could reflect this cycle of life. 

Ever the not-fun-anymore grownup, Jin does BTS’ laundry for them. He might have put Suga through the cycle, too.

     At the climax of the MV, loneliness and depression are relieved by true friendship. A lost and confused Jungkook runs through the train cars, revisiting old memories. We might speculate that he is a manifestation of train-Jungkook’s lonely subconscious. He follows Rap Monster’s path until the rest of BTS joins him. Jungkook’s subconscious crosses paths with train-Jungkook, and his happiness is rekindled, literally, as in he strikes a match and his friends reappear. Finally, the camera zooms out and real-time Jungkook realizes that he is not alone on the train; his friends have been there the whole time. The trip the boys take at the end proves the strength and continuity of their friendship through all its ups and downs.

     Lastly, I want to clarify the connection between this MV and the Sewol Ferry incident. On April 16th, 2014, over 250 high school students on a field trip died following the captain’s grossly irresponsible actions--overloading the ferry, making too sharp a turn, and ordering all passengers to stay put as he abandoned ship. The news media initially said all students had been rescued, an even greater mishap. Later, protesters were also censored by the government. The beached shoes Jimin finds represent the lives lost in the Sewol ferry incident and he hangs them up on the tree as a memorial. Likewise, the mountain of clothing in the sea represents the dead, much like French artist Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land. Flower petals that appear at 5:22 symbolize birth and hope after the hardship of winter, but they also serve to commemorate the victims. Additionally, BTS’ album cover features the slogan “you will never walk alone” and the yellow ribbon used to support the victims.

BTS and their company, BigHit Entertainment, recently donated about 100 million KRW (about $85,000) to the families of the Sewol victims, and I think it is fair to conclude the album was dedicated to them, and part of its message is a show of solidarity with the youth who died so unfairly.

    Jungkook’s character in the MV stands for all of us—the young, the young at heart, and the dead—who have felt incredibly alone at times, and don’t always know where they are going in life. BTS offers a comforting message of support:

The morning will come again

Because no darkness, no season

Can last forever

During the coldest of winters, we must anticipate the return of spring, and BTS, through their music, reminds us that even when you feel completely alone, there is someone or something out there who will help you get through the hard times.

Thanks for reading!

[torixus]

12 Mistakes Parents Make That Might Cause Problems for Their Grownup Children

Parents tend to care about their children’s future, and these worries often push them to look for the most universal upbringing methods that will help their offspring build a successful career and live happily ever after. But the world is changing, and the old rules of success have ceased to be effective. Torixus have it that the Original Publishers of this article, The Bright side also have kids they're worried about, so They dove into this topic and chose the most harmful parenting mistakes, that are likely to cause career problems for children in the future. The author of this article is a psychologist who included examples from her professional practice, after changing the names of her clients and some of the details of their stories. 1. Forcing their child to make a decision about their future career

The idea that a person should have the same occupation their whole life is likely to fail. Some modern occupations didn’t even exist 10 years ago, while others have already disappeared. Since childhood, Max loved delving into computers and learning how different computer programs work. But his parents thought that his hobby was harmful. At one point, he found out about online courses in software testing, and now he’s successfully developing his potential in this area. 37-year-old Laura worked as a sociologist with a large consulting company, but after the birth of her son, she couldn’t devote as much time to her job as she did before. Laura used to love photography, and she reignited her passion during her maternity leave. She started by taking unusual pictures of her child, and then she started doing photoshoots for the kids of her friends and acquaintances. After a couple of years, Laura opened her own photo studio. She earns on par with her husband now and she successfully balances her professional life with taking care of her family. 2. Not letting their child make mistakes

A demanding parent usually tries to be perfect themselves, but as the child grows up, parents may start to demand more and more from them — the kid’s paintings are always not good enough, their bed isn’t made perfectly, or they don’t study too hard. The child gets constantly criticized and scolded, but they have no opportunity to fix their mistakes. Children of the perfect parents either grow up into perfectionists themselves or turn into people with low self-esteem and a lack of confidence. And as we know, both of these outcomes are bad for their future career. Mom always told Anna, “You’re so messy! Look at Mary, she’s always so clean.” All of Anna’s attempts to become more like Mary failed, and her mom ended up criticizing her even more. But Anna’s mom never gave her a chance to adjust her behavior and learn how to deal with simple chores. Anna is 25 years old now, and she still compares herself to other people. It’s needless to say that she never wins in this comparison. 3. Teaching their child to save money

The world doesn’t stand still, and ways to earn or save money from the past are unlikely to work today. No one knows what skills we’ll need to survive in the new economic conditions of the future. That’s why it’s important to teach our kids to be flexible and adjust to change, instead of just saving money. Jessica’s grandfather had been saving money his whole life “just in case.” But when this “case” finally came, all his investments lost their value because of the financial meltdown. This situation happened in front of Jessica while she was growing up, and now, she’s expecting that the economy will collapse at any moment. The best investment for her is an investment in her own skills and knowledge. 4. Not letting their child express their feelings

Sometimes, adults try to persuade a child that their feelings are wrong — bruises don’t hurt, being mad at the kid who hit you with a toy in a sandbox is shameful, and feeling sad even if you have a reason for that is wrong. Of course, parents try to replace their kid’s real feelings with more “acceptable” ones because they mean well and want to bring up their kids properly. But we should understand that one of the main skills of the “modern” person is the ability to recognize and manage their feelings, emotions, and needs. Kate is 37 years old, but she still remembers how her mom made her give her beautiful doll to some girl. She said, “It’s very wrong to be so greedy, and you shouldn’t be mad because of some stupid toy.” Kate never got her doll back. She has also spent a lot of time learning to say “no” to arrogant people, including her boss and coworkers. And every time she refused to do something, Kate felt guilty. 5. Not standing up for their child in front of strangers

Every child needs to know that in every conflict and no matter what happens, their parents will be fair and won’t trust the words of a teacher, a school principal, or a neighbor completely. When parents allow their children to stand up for themselves in front of authoritative people, if a child is ready to be held responsible for their own actions, they help them build healthy self-esteem and grow a sense of responsibility for their own life. Maggy was raised by her grandmother, who had a favorite phrase, “But what will other people think?” Grandma adored Maggy and only wanted the best for her, but she was constantly making her conscious of public opinion. Maggy still hasn’t learned to make her own decisions, and even when she picks a dessert, she asks her friends for their opinion. 6. Using successful people as an example

Every generation has its own heroes that young people try to copy. In recent decades, the stories of the personal success of wealthy and influential people have become very wide-spread. And while it may look like we can just learn about their life path and become happy, things don’t work like that for some reason. Otherwise, all the people who read their books, would’ve already solved all their money problems. Alex has loved computers since childhood. Once, his dad read him the story of Steve Jobs and since then, this young computer genius started to gather all the information about Apple that he could find. When it was time to choose a university, Alex decided that he doesn’t need higher education, because Steve Jobs managed to become successful without it. But he ended up going to college anyway to get a promotion. And now Alex jokes, “What is good for Steve Jobs, is a waste of time for an ordinary guy.” 7. Showing the struggles of adult life

There’s nothing wrong when children see their parents sad from time to time. But it becomes harmful when it happens all the time. In this situation, the roles in the family shift, and the child tries to become the “rock” for their parents, or they see how “horrible” adult life is, so they might start to be afraid of growing up. But to achieve something professionally, we need a mature approach and confidence. Sarah’s parents argued a lot. She had to listen to her mother complaining all the time about how life is difficult and their family isn’t lucky in comparison with others. When Sarah turned 17, she went to college and moved to another city, but she had to work hard to stop shying away from more “successful” people. 8. Not letting the child get into conflicts

The ability to interact with people is probably one of the most important professional skills someone can have. But it’s essential to teach a child to not only make friends, but to argue in a healthy way. People often have different opinions, but there are various ways to express their emotions. And the earlier we understand that, the easier the communication with people will be, including business interactions. Michaela was trying to avoid conflicts for her whole life. It was easier for her to agree with a person, than get involved in a dispute. She’s known since childhood that someone “has to be smarter,” but this approach brought her more harm than good. Once, Michaela read about active listening and decided to try this approach in her professional life. She was good at showing attention to what others were saying, but at the same time, she could express her feelings when someone tried to use her for their own benefit. People found this way of communication weird at first, but then the conflicts with coworkers became more productive and started to lead to mutually beneficial solutions. 9. Not learning outside of school

It’s important to distinguish studying at school and learning something new. School lessons and textbooks may seem boring, while visiting museums, theaters, and art galleries are great ways to spend time with family and broaden your kid’s horizons. The author of this article will always remember how her grandfather took her to the museum of local history for the first time. Since that moment, she has been a big history fan, she loves watching documentaries, traveling, and she’s never bored. As a bonus, all this knowledge often helps her in her professional life. 10. Not allowing the child to use social networks

Social networks are the same platforms for communication now, as our yards and neighborhoods were for us when we were children. Kids can quickly learn different useful skills with the help of computer programs integrated with social networks. Of course, parents should remind their kids about online security rules, but depriving their children of this experience is, actually, cruel. The mother of 10-year-old Aria was surprised to find out that her daughter had learned to film cool videos. But she was even more surprised when she realized that Aria learned to do that with the help of Tik-Tok. Now, the creation of short videos is their family hobby.

11. Trying to build a strong character with the help of sports

Despite the opinion that sports are good for discipline and that they build a strong character, professional sports are dangerous for both the physical and mental health of a child if there’s too much competitiveness, which can come from both the kids and coachs involved. Very few people become champions, and coaches often see the rest of the kids as unimportant. At a young age, it’s pretty difficult to deal with this unfair situation, and a child may develop low self-esteem pretty quickly. Besides, children who have to stop playing sports for some reason often don’t understand what else they can do with their lives. Chrissy’s mom did rhythmic gymnastics when she was a kid. But she injured her leg and had to abandon her dream of becoming an Olympic champion. When Chrissy turned 3, her mom signed her up for gymnastic classes, but she failed to succeed in this field. As a result, Chrissy didn’t pay enough attention at school, felt like a loser, and couldn’t figure out for a long time what she does well. She’s studying to become a child psychologist now and is going to help parents avoid mistakes when raising their kids. 12. Giving the child money for good grades

There are still debates on this topic. But let’s look at the situation another way: think of yourself as a contractor, paying more and more for the product or service, while the child would be the supplier, providing it for money and benefits. It sounds like a bad idea, don’t you think? Alexandra’s parents decided to encourage their daughter to study better by using money as an incentive. The girl was coming home with good grades, and it seemed like the experiment was working. But at one point, her parents found out that she was making up stories about an imaginary illness and telling these stories to her teachers. She even lied to her teachers saying that her parents criticized her for her bad grades all the time. Of course, the teacher felt sorry for the “poor girl” and raised her grades a little bit. Since that incident, her parents have stopped giving Alexandra money for her good grades and have decided to consult with a child psychologist. Kindly Share this Post using the Share Tab below and follow all our Social Media Handles to Keep up with Our Daily News Update.

Click to Follow us on Facebook

Click to follow us on Instagram

Click to follow us on Twitter

Donate to Torixus to help us Grow via Blogger https://ift.tt/2WIvBei

[32flavasshoetique]

Israeli – Jewish girls absolutely are a unusual discover for those men to find an international mail purchase bride for several reasons

Israeli – Jewish girls absolutely are a unusual discover for those men to find an international mail purchase bride for several reasons

However, they are worth thinking about. This brief article defines all the important things about dating a lady this is certainly israeli switches into information in just what you can expect them to finish up like. Aswell as that, you can expect some trustworthy web sites that may match you with gorgeous Israeli brides.

Just Precisely What Is Actually Original About Israeli Brides?

Israel relationship is extremely totally different from dating in virtually any other nation not only when you look at the center East and also in Eastern Europe and elements of asia. The reason for this is that Israel probably the most nations that are developed the earth, both economically and culturally. The living requirements of this country are specially high. Consequently most women do most certainly not aspire to move away up to a worldwide land. That is the key reasons why Israeli mail purchase brides are really a discover that is incredibly uncommon. They simply try not to search for a guy that is international wedding usually as ladies of other nationalities do. However, it truly is a good thing! This implies once you do find Israeli brides online, you’ll be yes their motives are pure.

As all they are after is real love and perhaps not citizenship of one’s country. That is clearly a modification that is refreshing. With girls off their countries, you always wonder set up social and financial hardships of their homeland becomes the driving that is primary in their wish to find a spouse that is international.

Popular options that come with Israeli Women

Independent and Strong

Probably the most important things to begin this little comprehension of that are Israeli females and just what they’re like would be to indicate that they’re in contrast towards the most of the women in our planet. Their figures in many cases are shaped in to the armed forces. Israel is one of the only few countries on our planet that have mandatory army solution requirement of ladies. This implies a hundred % of females in Israel offer whenever you glance at the Israel Defense Forces for a while period of 2 or maybe more years and undergo all of the hardships regarding the lifetime that is full of soldier. Well, we can’t claim the army this is certainly israeli be described as a negative location to be. It is actually recognized for the problems that are superb. Nevertheless, the military is army most likely. And serving in to the military is tough and in actual fact renders an impression on a woman’s character.

For this reason environment that is challenging they change a deal that is great. Jewish females may be a great deal more|lot that is whole powerful and competent in making crucial alternatives quickly as if someone’s life depended upon it. They might be in control and still have exemplary organizational abilities. They don’t have become directed by anyone, that could be an indication this is certainly free from split they’ve been.

Nonetheless, at all, it does not recommend in the event that you begin dating an Israeli girl they will never pay attention to you. Towards the contrary, they shall have found respect within their everyday lives which can be whole. So that they actually notice that mutual admiration is critical when it comes to relationship that is enduring.

Exceptionally Smart

It is simply reasonable to observe that in addition to being hardy, these girls which can be gorgeous additionally brilliant and well-educated. While Jewish people are thought to be being basic exceptionally smart. Therefore it’s in her very own own genes, additionally they invest a lot with their specific development. The machine that is Israel that is educational is the best possible in the world. It guarantees all Israeli brides have really really a familiarity that is highly skilled our world. Moreover, these include very efficient in the application as a result.

This brings us to stating that besides other things, Israeli brides are extremely committed. They set goals and still have all the resources to produce them. These stunning women have both the ability that is psychological the opportunity to be whatever they would like to be.

In Israel, females have plenty of help utilizing their prospecting careers and tend to be often inspired to challenge on their own. The truth is, there was additionally an ongoing company geared towards empowering females and teaching them that girls are total up to dudes. Truly, Israel is simply a highly emancipated country, with Israeli women used in STEM.

It’s obvious by making use of the majority of the training that is brides that are great, they’ve been proficient in English due to the time they leave university. Though it really isn’t their very first language. Consequently, you must certainly not drop trying to find brides which are israeli fear you’d maybe perhaps not have the ability to communicate. Quite contrary, with females from Israel dating becomes an acutely pleasurable experience as they truly are great fans which will hold pretty much ukrainian brides in china any discussion.

Great Housewives

Despite being all strong an entirely separate, and extremely career-oriented, Israeli women can be however great at house making. They could do something all, combining their respectable jobs with completing house chores. Dating a lady that is for you personally israeli you certainly will always be comforted and in the middle of lots of tasty meals your spouse will prepare. Definitely, these women can be perfect chefs, so you are certain to get a way to taste most of the nationwide dishes.

The only thing is lots of Israeli women keep a special diet and simply eat kosher. But, it isn’t issue, simply because they learn how to make any such thing literally be saturated in style!

After that, Israeli girls don’t choose to postpone maternity. The fertility cost in Israel is 3.8, meaning that it is normal for Israeli brides to wish at least two kiddies. Family is related to best value to those females, she’s going to make an amazing mom to your kids in order to be certain. Especially since in Israel kiddies are raised in a extremely way that is strange. They’re treated as grownups, aided by the utmost respect, which shows them responsibility from a tremendously very early age. Kiddies are seldom absentmindedly topped from making use of any actions however they are rather explained the total results associated with. This technique is extremely effective because it types a knowledge for the global globe this is certainly external.

Jewish individuals wouldn’t normally have their really nation that is own an instead several years, with Israel manifesting its danish brides at https://mail-order-bride.net/danish-brides/ independency just in 1948. This indicates that since way back when the land of modern Israel was in fact crossed by numerous nations. Therefore it is supposed to be normal to anticipate the Jewish beauty to be extremely diverse. The bloodstream mixing has affected the way stunning ladies that are israeli. There wasn’t a universal image of a woman that is jewish they are able to look various. However, the faculties that numerous females applying this country share is having stunning dark eyes, brownish or black colored hair and a skin that is reasonable.

Many Web that is advantageous Web web Sites for Dating an Israeli Girl

Lover Whirl

Mathematics Actually

Love Swans

Once we have earlier mentioned, finding A jewish girl for wedding on the web could possibly be a form of a challenge. They’re not as considering making their Promised Land for the guy that is international girls off their countries. Nevertheless, it does not represent they might never be represented on online mail purchase bride solutions at all. It simply shows that you merely have to don’t forget to pick the web sites which may have lot of great review history and so are also the finest. The top could be the option that is sole women accept!

You don’t need certainly to though stress, you were got by us covered. Below is some of web internet sites that function some stunning brides that are israeli could match with:

Lover Whirl

This site that is amazing free credits for brand name name completely new users so you usually takes into the waters before adopting the whole world of online dating with Israeli Math Truly

The authenticity of the motives of Jewish girls who proceed to online mail purchase bride methods to find a man is not possibly the quality this is actually most useful which can be therefore appealing about these ladies. Israeli brides can boast a group this is certainly impressive of traits that may permit you to fall deeply in love with them. Nevertheless, that most folks are unique before we go any more into detailing all of the features that Israeli women are well-known for, you should remind you. Which means your certain date that is israeli possibly perhaps not match the description that is next. It is actually positively normal simply partially to resemble the normal portrait of males and ladies from our country.

from 32flavas https://ift.tt/2xpgsUW via IFTTT

[welcometomyweightlossjourne-blog]

How Fast Will I Eliminate Excess weight on Keto? What to Expect Dieting on Keto

Weight reduction is one of the most well-liked uses of the ketogenic diet program these days.

In case you’re applying keto to fall lbs ., that you are almost certainly wanting to know how fast you could assume to discover outcomes.

Given that everyone is different, it’s not easy to get an actual response, but this article will address the average weightloss fee it is possible to hope, t,tips for properly losing bodyweight on keto, and how to prevent widespread fat loss errors

Weight Loss on Keto: Absolutely everyone differs

Everyone’s physique is different, which suggests the weightloss fee for each person differs also.

Your particular person weightloss amount could vary determined by 4 key variables:

Your health and fitness condition. Are you currently overweight? Do you have thyroid problems? Do you may have insulin resistance? Is your metabolism rapidly or sluggish? Your Over-all wellbeing establishes how fast you reduce weight. For illustration, When you've got any hormonal or metabolic concerns, the method could be slower than envisioned. That’s ok.

The body composition. Just how much Unwanted fat do You should drop? What’s your muscle mass? What’s your BMI? For illustration, For those who have loads of extra excess weight you’ll possible working experience more quickly fat loss at first.

Your everyday habits. Your everyday patterns make or crack your weight loss endeavours. Are you taking in clear keto foods or substantial Fats junk foods? Are you presently viewing out for hidden carbs? Are you presently performing exercises? The Electrical power you commit each day and the caliber of your meals impression how effectively Your entire body burns fat.

Your unique Body fat adaptation period of time. Keep in mind your body desires time to be Unwanted fat-adapted and that point relies on your metabolism. For instance, when you’re coming off a typical American Diet program (Unhappy) as well as your Grownup overall body hasn't run on ketones in advance of, your adaptation period may consider a little bit for a longer period. You’ll only working experience the genuine weight loss results of keto when your body is actually managing on ketones.

For instance, an individual by using a slow metabolism and plenty of Fats tissue to get rid of who doesn’t workout sufficient will acquire for a longer period observing weight loss on keto in comparison with anyone with a normal metabolism, a little bit overweight, who commences performing exercises four-five occasions a week together with doing keto.

The important thing is to remain regular and deal with having wholesome keto-welcoming foods. Treat the keto diet as what it is actually — not simply just a food plan, but a lifestyle and metabolic change as part of your overall health.

With that being mentioned, what we will let you know is the way to start out on the best foot.

Location By yourself UP FOR Weight reduction Accomplishment

Before you decide to embark in your keto weight loss journey, it’s important to get the fundamentals correct.

Some individuals Believe cutting carbs is sufficient to enter ketosis, but this isn’t constantly the case. It’s crucial that you make sure you’re in fact functioning on ketones as opposed to carbs, otherwise you’re not going to melt away Body fat or reduce bodyweight so you’ll get discouraged.

So How will you ensure that your cells are functioning on Excess fat?

Find out your keto macros. Make use of the keto calculator (Positioned at the end of this put up!) to have your own keto macros. Using a nutritional target based upon One's body composition is likely to make it quite a bit easier to enter and keep on being in ketosis (and eliminate fat!)

Give The body the perfect time to get in ketosis. This generally usually takes any place between two-7 times. Just before then, you gained’t be certainly dropping bodyweight on keto.

Take a look at your ketones. Testing your ketone concentrations is solely The obvious way to keep track of in the event you’re in ketosis or not, no less than initially.Essentially the most exact Software can be a blood ketone meter. If the amounts remain higher than 0.5 mol/L, Then you certainly’re in nutritional ketosis.

Eat a clear ketogenic eating plan. The caliber of your foods issues, not only your macros. Guaranteed, you could stay in ketosis by eating processed cheese singles and ham slices, but that’s not going to nourish you. Deal with excellent keto foods like avocado oil, refreshing leafy greens, and grass-fed beef alternatively.

Transfer extra. You’ll drop pounds a lot quicker in the event you enhance your day by day Actual physical activity. Have in mind you don’t must go to the health and fitness center 6 moments every week or jog each and every morning, just shift more with your everyday life. For example, consider a short 2-moment crack from sitting in the chair every hour, take the stairs instead of the elevator, wander to create errands if you can, receive a standing desk, or acquire cell phone calls standing up and pacing all-around. These smaller calorie-burning movements insert up at the conclusion of the working day.

For those who tick these bins when starting up keto, you’ll have the top fat loss outcomes.

Which delivers us to…

Regular Fat reduction Within the KETOGENIC Diet plan

As you are aware of by now, not All people loses weight at the exact same rate, but listed here’s what you can be expecting according to the standard success individuals get when using keto for weight-loss:

Initially 7 days: Speedy Water Fat reduction (2-10 lbs)

Usually, in the very first week from the keto food plan folks see an exceedingly speedy drop in weight — between a couple of lbs . to about ten! That’s since at the outset, keto helps make The body launch a great deal of h2o pounds (not Body fat) owing towards your decreased carb consumption.

That is why that takes place:

Carbs need drinking water to remain in One's body. When Your system doesn’t use glucose promptly, it merchants it as glycogen as part of your muscles and glycogen binds to drinking water. Every single gram of glycogen is saved with two–3 g of h2o. [*]

If you initially swap to keto, Your entire body will melt away each of the glycogen reserves very first just before working with Unwanted fat. At the time it runs from glycogen, the h2o which was required to retail outlet it gets eliminated and that’s why the weight in your scale alterations so substantially.

While this isn’t Fats decline, it’s a sign that the human body is Doing the job its way into ketosis: Fats burning method.

This rapid h2o decline might also produce dehydration and constipation, so consume more water than you Generally do on a daily basis to keep items shifting.

Quick and Medium-Expression: Steadier Weight Loss (one-two kilos weekly)

After a 7 days or two, weight reduction will occur at a slower and even more steady speed. This really is also the stretch of time whenever you’re receiving fat-tailored as your body switches from burning carbs to burning fat, which implies you’ll in fact be shedding Unwanted fat now.

A secure, ordinary reduction from Here's close to 1-2 kilos (0.5-1 kg) per week.

Below’s what study states about weight loss within the ketogenic diet regime:

One particular study identified obese clients dropped thirteen.6 kg (30 kilos) right after 2 months within the keto diet program and over 88% of patients lost more than ten% of their initial bodyweight by the top of your research, although lean mass was nearly unaffected.[*] That’s 3.5 kilos each week.

A review observed that obese clients weighing one zero one kg dropped 10 kg (22 lbs) following eight months. They misplaced an additional 2 kg (four.four kilos) by week sixteen and three more kilograms (6.6 lbs .) by 7 days 24. In here complete, they lost fifteen kg (33 pounds) in 5.5 months.[*] That’s one.3 kilos every week.

how fast will i eliminate fat on keto

One particular analyze on volunteers with being overweight and sort two diabetes who weighed 108 kg dropped 11.1 kg (24.five pounds) in 24 weeks.[*] That’s 1 pound a week.

One analyze identified 120 overweight hyperlipidemic patients misplaced nine.4 kg (20.seven kilos) of Body fat mass in 24 weeks. [*] That’s 0.eight kilos a week.

A person meta Examination that took knowledge from 13 studies observed people regularly dropped far more pounds over the ketogenic than on the very low Fats diet regime.[*]

As you can see, fat loss varies depending on how long you’re around the keto eating plan, how much weight you’ve received to lose, as well as your health problem. Persons seem to drop one of the most Extra fat on the 1st two-3 months on the keto diet plan, although weight reduction is sustained for so long as folks follow the eating plan.

Extensive-expression: Slower Weight-loss

As you get closer on your target fat, weight-loss slows down. It's because as your fat decreases, your whole daily caloric desires lessen too. So, even if you carry on with a deficit of energy to get rid of body weight, it will now create a smaller difference.

You could have some months where It appears you haven’t dropped something, Then you definately’ll weigh per week or two later on and become down three-4 pounds. The real key is usually to keep on with it instead of get discouraged; just make sure you’re still in ketosis and give your body time and energy to do its matter.

One particular study located that immediately after one particular yr on the keto diet regime, Guys and girls between thirty-sixty nine several years who weighed involving ninety-100 kg missing a complete of 14 kg (30.eight pounds).[*]

Having said that, a lot of that weight was dropped during the early levels of keto. They…

Lost 7 kg (15 pounds) after 4 months.

Lost One more 5 kg (eleven lbs) between weeks 4 and 12.

Didn’t experience big adjustments changes from 12 months to 12 months (barely 1-two kg).

This suggests the keto food plan is powerful for speedy and sustained Unwanted fat decline. You will see the greatest modifications for those who keep on with it for your several months, and you received’t attain the load back again.

Prevalent KETO WEIGHT LOSS PITFALLS

If you really feel such as you are going through a fat reduction plateau immediately after sticking With all the keto diet for just a couple months, there could be practices or foods hindering your development. Down below are frequent fat reduction issues and how to proceed about them:

Slip-up #one: Not Becoming In Ketosis

This 1 may possibly seem obvious, however it’s quite popular that individuals come out of ketosis without realizing it whenever they quit monitoring their ketone ranges. So, amongst the most important reasons people don’t see fat reduction outcomes on keto is that they’re not basically on keto.

What to do:

Don’t quit monitoring your ketones whenever you’re wanting to reduce bodyweight. A wonderful strategy to maintain your ketone concentrations up is using exogenous ketones. Just place a scoop in your preferred consume to acquire back again into ketosis — it’s uncomplicated and delightful.

[webart-studio]

Dealing With 7 Frequent Office Stressors

Office stress can affect your psychological and bodily well being. Listed here are some tips about learn how to deal with it.

December 19, 2018 6 min learn

This story initially appeared on Ellevate

We spend roughly one-third of our grownup lives at work. It’s no surprise that office stress elements closely affect each our bodily and psychological well being.

The Nationwide Institute for Occupational Security and Well being has documented the impacts of extended office stressors in areas akin to heart problems, musculoskeletal problems and psychological problems.

Associated: 5 Tricks to Enhance Focus and Get Issues Finished

So, what are you able to do about it? Listed here are seven widespread office stressors and a few tips about how workers can mitigate their results.

Workload

Heavy workload and lengthy hours make for over-tired and pressured workers. You probably have too nice a workload, you’ll need to concentrate on prioritization to start out with.

Take a look at your initiatives and duties, and get them organized by deadline. Ask your self: What can I cease doing, do much less of or do extra effectively?

Talk together with your administration about conflicting deadlines, obligations and overload. Share how you’ll deal with them. Ask for assist once you can not resolve prioritization conflicts.

Unrealistic calls for

Unrealistic calls for create acute frustration and even anger. In case you are caught with calls for you understand you can not meet, take a breath. Ask your self what might make the demand doable.

Maybe it’s essential to reprioritize current initiatives. Maybe you want extra time. Talk your points to your administration, together with proactive strategies for a special approach to meet the tip objective.

Lastly, should you can’t budge the calls for, do your finest. Don’t beat your self up for not assembly unrealistic calls for. If it’s essential to justify your self, concentrate on the info and never your emotions.

Associated: eight Issues You Can Do When You Have a Poisonous Boss

Organizational change

Ongoing organizational change is unavoidable, however shifting folks round and altering their administration construction or job descriptions has the potential to create an unsure atmosphere. The necessity for certainty is considered one of 5 elementary domains which activate robust threats and rewards within the mind, per the SCARF mannequin.

If you end up concerned in an organizational change, search to grasp the change as fully as you possibly can. Concentrate on what the change means on the organizational degree, after which at your degree throughout the group.

In case your administration line has modified, search out time together with your new supervisor. Discover methods to share your abilities and private state of affairs together with your new boss. Ask your new supervisor about their expectations, model and subsequent steps.

Lastly, preserve an open thoughts and look ahead, not behind. Change might be optimistic — search for alternatives as a substitute of specializing in the threats you understand within the new atmosphere. Be taught extra about development versus fastened mindset.

Profession and job ambiguity

Not having a particular course in your profession can create uncertainty. A profession plan could make all of the distinction in how you’re feeling — not solely about your profession, however about your present job.

Take the time to consider what your need to obtain in your profession. Outline a profession imaginative and prescient. Consider your abilities and construct your self a studying plan. Concentrate on constructing and sustaining knowledgeable community.

Uncertainty may also outcome from badly-defined job roles. In the event you really feel like your job function has not been clearly outlined, attain out to your administration. Share your understanding of the function and ask for clarification. Be prepared with proactive suggestions.

Associated: Methods to Deal With Jerks at Work With out Turning into One

Lack of recognition

Workers who don’t really feel valued rapidly grow to be unmotivated. In the event you don’t really feel like your work is valued and appreciated, begin by taking a tough take a look at high quality of your work. Are there actions it’s essential to take to enhance your work?

When you determine it’s as much as snuff, contemplate how others see your work. It’s possible you’ll must work more durable at speaking the work you have got executed and highlighting the worth of your work.

If the issue isn’t high quality or visibility, it could possibly be a query of administration model. Does your administration concentrate on the detrimental versus the optimistic? Discover methods to share finest practices and optimistic outcomes with friends. Congratulate your self when you have got completed one thing you’re happy with.

Poor interpersonal relationships

When relationships are dangerous at work, issues get uncomfortable. There are numerous situations for poor relationships, however the focus right here will probably be on two.

Generally we have now no alternative however to work carefully with somebody we dislike. Energetic dislike can affect us in some ways, not the least of which is a basis for bias. Discovering widespread floor can assist to forge a connection. Take a while to get to know the particular person higher and search out issues you have got in widespread. Abraham Lincoln mentioned it finest: “I don’t like that man. I need to get to know him higher.”

In case you are having problem getting together with multiple particular person, give some thought to how others understand you. Do you present a real curiosity in others? Do you give in typically to detrimental considering patterns? In case your ardour comes off to others as being emotional, learn to higher handle your feelings by figuring out the message they’re making an attempt to let you know and addressing the issue, not the emotion.

Harassment

The detrimental impacts on each the person and the group of bullying and sexual harassment have been extensively documented for many years. However bullying and sexual harassment are nonetheless looming realities within the office.

In the event you really feel like you’re being bullied or harassed, take steps to guard your self. Doc the state of affairs. Share it with the suitable particular person in your group. Name in your social community to give you ethical assist, reminding you of your self-worth.

Attempt to maintain a optimistic outlook. Maintain your self, and above all, plan your exit if the state of affairs doesn’t enhance. This text on coping with a poisonous boss goes into additional element.

Lastly, do not hesitate to contemplate a coach that will help you in your method!

(By Angela Fresne. Fresne is a profession and life coach.)

Supply hyperlink

source https://webart-studio.com/dealing-with-7-frequent-office-stressors/

[uniquequotesonlife]

rhondastephens To Catch A Falling Cactus

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({});

Parenting: Are We Getting a Raw Deal?

Summer 1974. I’m 9 years old. By 7:30 am, I’m up and out of the house, or if it’s Saturday I’m up and doing exactly what my father, Big Jerry, has told me to do. Might be raking, mowing, digging holes, or washing cars. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Summer 2016. I’m tiptoeing out of the house, on my way to work, in an effort not to wake my children who will undoubtedly sleep until 11 am. They may complete a couple of the chores I’ve left in a list on the kitchen counter for them, or they may eat stale Cheez-its that were left in their rooms 3 days ago, in order to avoid the kitchen at all costs and “not see” the list. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); If you haven’t noticed, we’re getting a raw deal where this parenting gig is concerned. When did adults start caring whether or not their kids were safe, happy, or popular? I can assure you that Ginny and Big Jerry were not whiling away the hours wondering if my brother and I were fulfilled. Big Jerry was stoking the fires of his retirement savings and working, and working some more. Ginny was double bolting the door in order to keep us out of the house, and talking on the phone while she smoked a Kent. Meanwhile, we were three neighborhoods away, playing with some kids we’d never met, and we had crossed 2 major highways on bicycles with semi-flat tires to get there. Odds are, one of us had crashed at some point and was bleeding pretty impressively. No one cared. We were kids and if we weren’t acting as free labor, we were supposed to be out of the house and out of the way. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); My personal belief is that the same “woman with too little to do”, that decided it was necessary to give 4- year old guests a gift for coming to a birthday party, is the same loon who decided we were here to serve our kids and not the other way around. Think about it. As a kid, what was your costume for Halloween? If you were really lucky, your mom jabbed a pair of scissors in an old sheet, cut two eye holes, and you were a ghost. If her friend was coming over to frost her hair and showed up early, you got one eye hole cut and spent the next 45 minutes using a sharp stick to jab a second hole that was about two inches lower than its partner. I watched my cousin run directly into a parked car due to this very costume one year. He was still yelling, “Trick or Treat” as he slid down the rear quarter panel of a Buick, mildly concussed. When my son was 3 years old, we had a clown costume made by a seamstress, complete with pointy clown hat, and grease makeup. His grandmother spent more having that costume made than she did on my prom dress. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); At some point in the last 25 years, the tide shifted and the parents started getting the marginal cars and the cheap clothes while the kids live like rock stars. We spend enormous amounts of money on private instruction, the best sports gear money can buy, and adhere to psycho competition schedules. I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve bought the $300 baseball bats with money that should have been invested in a retirement account, traveled from many an AAU basketball game, or travel baseball game, to a dance competition in the course of one day, and failed to even consider why. Remember Hank Aaron? He didn’t need a $300 bat to be great. Your kid isn’t going pro and neither is mine, but you are going to retire one day and dumpster diving isn’t for the elderly. My brother and I still laugh about how, when he played high school baseball, there was one good bat and the entire team used it. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Remember your clothes in the 70’s? Despite my best efforts to block it out, I can still remember my desperate need to have a pair of authentic Converse shoes. Did I get them? Negative. Oh, was it a punch in the gut when my mother presented me with the Archdale knock-offs she found somewhere between my hometown and Greensboro. Trust me. They weren’t even close. Did I complain? Hell, no. I’m still alive, aren’t I? We’ve got an entire generation of kids spitting up on outfits that cost more than my monthly electric bill. There were no designer baby clothes when we were kids. Why? Because our parents weren’t crazy enough to spend $60 on an outfit for us to have explosive diarrhea in or vomit on. Our parents were focused on saving for their retirement and paying their house off. The real beauty of it is that none of these kids are going to score a job straight out of college that will allow them to pay for the necessities of life, brand new cars, and $150 jeans, so guess who’s going to be getting the phone call when they can’t make rent? Yep, we are. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Think back; way, way back. Who cleaned the house and did the yard work when you were a kid? You did. In fact, that’s why some people had children. We were free labor. My mother served as supervisor for the indoor chores, and the house damn well better be spotless when my father came through the door at 5:35. The battle cry went something like this, “Oh, no! Your father will be home in 15 minutes! Get those toys put away nooooow!” The rest of our evening was spent getting up to turn the television on demand, and only to what Dad wanted to watch. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); On weekends Dad was in charge of outdoor work and if you were thirsty you drank out of the hose, because 2 minutes of air conditioning and a glass of water from the faucet might make you soft. Who does the housework and yardwork now? The cleaning lady that comes on Thursday, and the landscaping crew that comes every other Tuesday. Most teenage boys have never touched a mower, and if you asked my daughter to clean a toilet, she would come back with a four page paper on the various kinds of deadly bacteria present on toilet seats. Everyone is too busy doing stuff to take care of the stuff they already have. But don’t get confused, they aren’t working or anything crazy like that. Juggling school assignments, extracurricular activities, and spending our money could become stressful if they had to work. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); I don’t recall anyone being worried about my workload being stressful, or my mental health in general. Jerry and Ginny had grownup stuff to worry about. As teenagers, we managed our own social lives and school affairs. If Karen, while executing a hair flip, told me my new Rave perm made me look like shit and there was no way Kevin would ever go out with my scrawny ass, my mother wasn’t even going to know about it; much less call Karen’s mother and arrange a meeting where we could iron out our misunderstanding and take a selfie together. Additionally, no phone calls were ever made to any of my teachers or coaches. Ever. If we sat the bench, we sat the bench. Our dads were at work anyway. They only knew what we told them. I can’t even conceive of my dad leaving work to come watch a ballgame. If I made a 92.999 and got a B, I got a B. No thinly veiled threats were made and no money changed hands to get me that A. Ok, full disclosure, in my case we would be looking at an 84.9999. I was the poster child for underachievement. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Back in our day, high school was a testing ground for life. We were learning to be adults under the semi-vigilant supervision of our parents. We had jobs because we wanted cars, and we wanted to be able to put gas in our cars, and wear Jordache jeans and Candies. Without jobs, we had Archdale sneakers and Wranglers, and borrowed our mother’s Chevrolet Caprice, affectionately known as the “land yacht”, on Friday night. No one, I mean, no one, got a new car. I was considered fairly lucky because my parents bought me a car at all. I use the term “car” loosely. If I tell you it was a red convertible and stop right here, you might think me special. I wasn’t. My car was a red MG Midget, possibly a ’74 and certainly a death trap. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Look at your coffee table. Now imagine it having a steering wheel and driving it. I promise you, it’s bigger than my car was. The starter was bad, so after school I had the pleasure of popping the hood and using two screwdrivers to cross the solenoids or waiting for the football players to come out of the dressing room headed to practice. Those guys pushing my car while I popped the clutch, is a memory no 16-year old girl around here will ever have, and it’s a great one. Had I driven that car in high winds, it’s likely I would have ended up airborne, and there were probably some serious safety infractions committed the night I took 6 people in togas to a convenience store, but I wouldn’t go back and trade it out for a new 280Z, even if I had the chance. I was a challenging teenager, and in retrospect the fact that it was pretty impressive every time I made it home alive, may not have been an accident on the part of my parents. Go to the high school now. These kids are driving cars that grown men working 55 hours a week can’t afford, and they aren’t paying for them with their jobs. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); And those new cars don’t do a thing for telling a good story. I tell my kids all the time, the very best stories from my teen and college years involve Ann’s yellow Plymouth Duster with the “swirling dust” graphic, Randy’s Valiant with the broken gas gauge, and Carla’s burgundy Nissan that may or may not have had a complete floorboard. A story that starts, “Remember that time we were heading to the beach in Carla’s Nissan and your wallet fell through the floorboard onto the highway?” is so much more interesting than, “Remember that time we were going to the beach in your brand new SUV, filled up with gas that your parents paid for, and the…well, no, never mind. Nothing happened. We just drove down there.” To top it all off, most of them head off to college without a clue what it’s like to look for a job, apply for it, interview, and show up on time, as scheduled. If they have a job, it’s because someone owed their dad a favor…and then they work when it “fits their schedule”. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); We all love our kids, and we want to see them happy and fulfilled, but I fear we’re robbing them of the experiences that make life memorable and make them capable, responsible, confident adults. For the majority of us, the very nice things we had as teenagers, we purchased with money we earned after saving for some ungodly amount of time. Our children are given most everything, and sometimes I wonder whether it’s for them or to make us feel like good parents. The bottom line is that you never value something you were given, as much as something you worked for. There were lessons in our experiences, even though we didn’t know it at the time. All those high school cat fights, and battles with teachers we clashed with, were an opportunity for us to learn how to negotiate and how to compromise. It also taught us that the world isn’t fair. Sometimes people just don’t like you, and sometimes you’ll work your ass off and still get screwed. We left high school, problem solvers. I’m afraid our kids are leaving high school with mommy and daddy on speed dial. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); We just don’t have the cojones our parents had. We aren’t prepared to tell our kids that they won’t have it if they don’t work for it, because we can’t bear to see them go without and we can’t bear to see them fail. We’ve given them a whole lot of stuff; stuff that will break down, wear out, get lost, go out of style, and lose value. As parents, I suppose some of us feel pretty proud about how we’ve contributed in a material way to our kid’s popularity and paved an easy street for them. I don’t, and I know there are many of you that are just as frustrated by it as I am. I worry about what we’ve robbed them of, which I’ve listed below, in the process of giving them everything. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Delayed gratification is a really good thing. It teaches you perseverance and how to determine the true value of something. Our kids don’t know a damn thing about delayed gratification. To them, delayed gratification is waiting for their phone to charge.Problem-solving skills and the ability to manage emotion are crucial life skills. Kids now have every problem solved for them. Good luck calling their college professor to argue about how they should have another shot at that final because they had two other finals to study for and were stressed. Don’t laugh, parents have tried it.Independence allows you to discover who you really are, instead of being what someone else expects you to be. It was something I craved. These kids have traded independence for new cars and Citizen jeans. They will live under someone’s thumb forever, if it means cool stuff. I would have lived in borderline condemned housing, and survived off of crackers and popsicles to maintain my independence. Oh wait, I actually did that. It pisses me off. You’re supposed to WANT to grow up and forge your way in the world; not live on someone else’s dime, under someone else’s rule, and too often these days, under someone else’s roof.Common sense is that little something extra that allows you to figure out which direction is north, how to put air in your tires, or the best route to take at a certain time of day to avoid traffic. You develop common sense by making mistakes and learning from them. It’s a skill best acquired in a setting where it’s safe to fail, and is only mastered by actually doing things for yourself. By micromanaging our kids all the time, we’re setting them up for a lifetime of cluelessness and ineptitude. At a certain age, that cluelessness becomes dangerous. I’ve seen women marry to avoid thinking for themselves, and for some it was the wisest course of action.Mental toughness is what allows a person to keep going despite everything going wrong. People with mental toughness are the ones who come out on top. They battle through job losses, difficult relationships, illness, and failure. It is a quality born from adversity. Adversity is a GOOD thing. It teaches you what you’re made of. It puts into practice the old saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. It’s life’s teacher. Our bubble-wrapped kids are so sheltered from adversity, I wonder how the mental health professionals will handle them all after the world chews them up and spits them out a few times. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); I know you are calling me names right now, and mentally listing all the reasons this doesn’t apply to you and your kid, but remember I’m including myself in this. My kids aren’t as bad as some, because I’m too poor and too lazy to indulge them beyond a certain point. And I’m certainly not saying that our parents did everything right. God knows all that second hand smoke I was exposed to, and those Sunday afternoon drives where Dad was drinking a Schlitz and I was standing on the front seat like a human projectile, were less than ideal; but I do think parents in the 70’s defined their roles in a way we never have.I worry that our kids are leaving home with more intellectual ability than we did, but without the life skills that will give them the success and independence that we’ve enjoyed. Then again, maybe it’s not parents that are getting the raw end of this deal after all. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk Watch: most watched video on youtube source Read the full article