#also new English word i learned aghast

[solixfugae]

Viendo Estrellas // Seeing Stars

Una figura rotatoria se desliza por la cuenca de mi ojo, como gusano se arrastra viscosa, avanza a su antojo. Se abre paso al mundo de mi cerebro, escarba tierra hasta hacer un nido de ramas eléctricas, pinta figuras de colores, gira ocilando en su eje como un caleidoscopio.

Esta quemando mi cerebro, siento su fuerza cortando el hilo de mis nervios desde los pies a la cabeza, tiemblo en el calor, mi corazón palpita como un animal despavorido. No siento mis piernas, hay un hoyo que se abre cuando se contrae mi garganta, detrás de mi rostro hay larvas y cuchillos.

Pero no puedo gritar, no puedo llorar, no me puedo lastimar. Soy un maniquí en los brazos de mis Pesadillas, soy una estalactita invertida, soy colmillos sin encías, soy ojos sin pupilas, soy sangre muerta que se reconstruye cada vez que el cuerpo respira. Una serpiente devorando su propia cola, una rotación, un círculo, un ciclo. Cada día es una muerte, cada noche llega vida.

¿Será una mentira existir? ¿Será tan bueno como todo el mundo dice que lo es? Ya no quiero pensar, algún día entregaré al mundo mi piel. Saldré de la cárcel pulsante en mi pecho, una carcasa pudriéndose ante mi ser. Seré inmortal, imparable, seré infinito, ya no sentiré aquella pesadumbre agobiante que se apodera de mis músculos, en olejaes giratorios vendrá el extasis del último respiro, rotare brincando como el patrón de un engranaje, los caballos de un carrusel

Estoy muriendo.

Lo puedo sentir dentro de mi boca, en mis ojeras, lo puedo sentir en mi mente.

Estoy envejeciendo.

Lo puedo sentir en mi pelo, en mis rodillas, en mi cadera, en mi lengua, el dolor y el gusto lo hacen tan aparente.

Pero no lo recuerdo. Pero no lo sé completamente. Dime porfavor, cuanto duran los muertos vivientes.

El ruido es lo único que conecta los hilos, los colores me consumen, las adicciones me abrazan, arruyan de una forma tan dulce mis latidos.

A whirling figure slides through the socket of my eye, like a worm it wriggles viscously, it advances at its whim. It makes its way to the world of my brain, digs up dirt until it makes a nest of electric branches, paints colored figures, rotates oscillating on its axis like a kaleidoscope.

It's burning my brain, I feel its force cutting the thread of my nerves from head to toe, I tremble in the heat, my heart beats like an animal aghast. I can't feel my legs, there is a hole that opens when my throat contracts, behind my face there's maggots and knives.

But I can't scream, I can't cry, I can't hurt myself. I am a mannequin in the arms of my nightmares, I am an inverted stalactite, I am fangs without gums, I am eyes without pupils, I am dead blood that is rebuilt every time the body breathes. A snake devouring its own tail, a rotation, a circle, a cycle. Every day is a death, every night comes life.

Could it be a lie to exist? Is it as good as everyone paints it to be? I no longer want to think, one day I will give my skin to the world. I will leave the prison pulsating in my chest, a carcass rotting before my being. I will be immortal, unstoppable, I will be infinite, I will no longer feel that overwhelming heaviness that takes over my muscles. In whirling waves the ecstasy of the last breath will come, I will swirl trotting like the pattern of a gear, the horses of a carousel

I'm dying.

I can feel it inside my mouth, in my dark circles, I can feel it in my mind.

I'm getting older.

I can feel it in my hair, in my knees, in my hip, in my tongue, the pain and the taste make it so apparent.

But I don't remember it. But I don't know completely. Please tell me how long the living dead last.

The noise is the only thing that connects the threads, the colors consume me, the addictions embrace me, they lull my heartbeats in such a sweet way.

[disasterbijupiter]

G Gundam side story English translation, Ch. 4 part 3

(start from beginning) | (read previous part)

Click to view Ch. 4 content warnings!

The Present

Lone Fox Seeking Defeat: “In the end, I can’t blame you all either………”

Undefeated of the East: “That incident……… I later learned that it was an act of deliberate destruction, even forbidden by the principles of international treaties, and my elder sister disciple’s intervention was overlooked by the committee………”

Lone Fox Seeking Defeat: “Hmph……… So you’re saying if it’s not deliberate it’s excusable?”

Undefeated of the East: “That’s………”

He’s agonized by Lone Fox Seeking Defeat’s words.

Lone Fox Seeking Defeat: “In any case, it’s truly arrogant to do something such as justify destruction with a treaty……… However, at that time I didn’t even care about such things………”

The Past

The elder sister disciple returns to Guyana. The sight of her is filled with despair.

Elder sister disciple: “I, the unworthy, have just returned home………”

Kowtowing to her Master, she gives her return greetings.

Master: “Yes……… Thank you for your hard work.”

Elder sister disciple: “However, I broke the rule of non-intervention, and my duty as King of Hearts………”

Suddenly the elder sister disciple realizes.

Younger brother disciple: “………………”

She notices that her younger brother disciple is positioned close beside the Master, at a seat even higher than hers.

Elder sister disciple: “Little brother……… Why are you there?”

Younger brother disciple: “Well, you see………”

Master: “No, let me tell her.”

The Master stops the faltering younger brother disciple.

Master: “I have awarded him the treasure of our school, the Pearl of the East.”

Elder sister disciple: “Wh-what?! So then—?!”

The elder sister disciple becomes aghast.

Master: “That’s right, a few days ago the succession ceremony was completed, and now he is the Master of the School of the Undefeated of the East.”

The younger brother disciple and Undefeated of the East, the new Master, lowers his gaze apologetically.

Undefeated of the East: “………………”

Elder sister disciple: “Y-… you’re kidding……… You must be kidding, right?? Little brother!”

At his appalled elder sister disciple’s words, the Undefeated of the East shakes his head heartrendingly.

Undefeated of the East: “I……… also said I thought it was strange………”

His words start to become hoarse.

Undefeated of the East: “It’s true, the King of Hearts and the school’s Master ‘Undefeated of the East’ are separate things…… Even until now, it wasn’t uncommon for the King’s crest to be inherited by someone from a different school.”

Elder sister disciple: “But why……… why?!”

The elder sister disciple snaps at the Undefeated of the East.

Former Master: “Come now! What’s all this before the Master? Besides, you still haven’t greeted him yet, have you?”

Elder sister disciple: “Y-you’re telling me……… to kowtow to my younger brother disciple??”

Former Master: “He is no longer your younger brother!”

At the former Master’s words, the elder sister disciple becomes unable to suppress her outrage.

Elder sister disciple: “This is ridiculous, ridiculous!!! My skills are by far superior!! In worldly experience, techniques, in everything I surpass him, everything! Everything!! It’s me who’s the rightful Master!!! No!! It can’t be………”

Suddenly the elder sister disciple suspects.

Elder sister disciple: “Ah……… of course, you intervened with the Gundam Fight?!”

Former Master: “That’s not true.”

Elder sister disciple: “Then why……… Ah, little brother………”

The elder sister disciple looks angrily at the Undefeated of the East.

Elder sister disciple: “Was it you……… Did you trick Master? While I was gone, you…? Was that why you let me go investigate the Gundam Fight???”

Undefeated of the East: “You’re wrong! I would never do a thing like that!!”

Elder sister disciple: “Shut up!! Then what am I here for?!! What have I been here for up until now?!!”

The elder sister disciple is unhinged.

Elder sister disciple: “As Master, I’ll inherit the title of Undefeated of the East!! Give it back!! The title!! The Pearl of the East!!!”

The elder sister disciple draws her sword. With all her strength, she swings it down over the Undefeated of the East’s head.

Former Master: “Stop it!!”

The former Master moves to stop her.

Elder sister disciple: “Ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!”

A shock runs through her sword.

Elder sister disciple: “?!?!?”

The next moment, the elder sister disciple sees something unbelievable. The Undefeated of the East is blocking the sword with his bare hands in prayer position.

Undefeated of the East: “………”

Elder sister disciple: “Th-…… this is……… Sekiha Tenkyoken………”

There’s a small gap between the Undefeated of the East’s hands and her sword, and her sword trembles there.

Elder sister disciple: “Not even in the book of secret techniques, the school’s ultimate technique that’s passed down orally from the Master……… You’ve even come that far………”

The elder sister disciple becomes shocked.

Elder sister disciple: “At this rate……… I……… can’t win………”

While dumbfounded, she takes two or three steps backwards and corrects her grip on the sword.

Elder sister disciple: “In that case!!”

In an instant, with the sword in her left hand, the elder sister disciple cuts off her own arm from the right shoulder.

Elder sister disciple: “I, your disciple, return the King’s crest and abscond from the School of the Undefeated of the East! I’m sorry!!”

With a single bow to the Undefeated of the East and his predecessor, the elder sister disciple leaves.

Undefeated of the East: “Elder sister disciple………”

Sorrowfully watching her go, the Undefeated of the East kowtows.

In front of him is the severed arm, the King of Hearts emblem fading from its fist.

(continue to next part)

[mamabearcatfanfics]

More Than Words - Four

My apologies - I wanted this part out yesterday, and the last part for White Day, but sometimes things don’t always go to plan. But we’ll get there. And for those that are liking this little tumblr fic, there’s a distinct possibility that this AU may end up as a chapter fic. But not for a while - I don’t want to begin it before finishing up some of the other things I’m working on. 

Anyway, enjoy - the last part should be coming soon!

Read Part One | Read Part Two | Read Part Three

Kagome couldn’t help but smile as she reached absentmindedly into the back of her desk drawer to find her stapler, and her fingers encountered the pile of plastic takeaway coffee cup lids instead. Maybe it was childish, but the first time Inuyasha had drawn on her coffee lid, she’d had the sudden urge to keep it, rinsing it off as soon as she’d finished her coffee and placing it in her desk drawer at work.

The next day, on a sudden impulse, she packed two of the raspberry coconut muffins she’d baked the night before for Inuyasha and Sango. She’d gone extra early, arriving as they opened so she wouldn’t hold up the line. Handing them over as she bought her coffee with a slight blush, unsure if what she was doing was weird, she’d held her breath a little, wondering what would happen. Sango had thanked her effusively, but it was Inuyasha’s response that made her heart turn over. He’d immediately pounced on the paper bag, grabbing out a muffin to take a huge bite, and moaned appreciatively at the taste, his eyes closed as he chewed and swallowed the mouthful. When he’d handed over her coffee cup, there was a little muffin drawn on the lid, surrounded by a heart, and she hadn’t been able to help the little giggle she’d let out, especially when he’d arched one dark eyebrow and grinned at her roguishly.

Over the past two weeks, her collection of coffee lid art had grown; flowers, cats, stars, and this morning a little dog with the kanji (which she worked out after a little bit of googling) for inu. Her baking repertoire had also increased, especially when Sango explained for Inuyasha that he didn’t have a kitchen in his little studio apartment above the coffee shop when she’d asked him if he liked to cook. She’d baked cookies, brownies and little apple pastries, but it seemed to be muffins that he liked the best. Last night she’d decided to experiment with Japanese flavours a little, and the matcha and sweet azuki bean muffins she’d handed to Sango this morning had got her best response yet – he’d actually come out from behind his counter and given her a hug, lifting her up off the ground as he squeezed his strong arms around her and spun her around, making her laugh.

She took that lid out of her desk drawer and examined this morning’s drawing with a smile - a little dog with a serious expression and one arched eyebrow, reminding her of the man who drew him. She sighed, replacing the lid and grabbing her stapler, tapping it on the desk in irritation. She’d been trying to get up the courage to ask him out. She’d been going to do it this morning, but every time those amber eyes met hers, she was suddenly lost for words. She was pretty sure he liked her, that hug this morning had been a little longer than strictly necessary for someone who’d given a small gift of baked goods. She closed her eyes, imagining those strong arms around her again. A sudden tap on her shoulder nearly made her fling the stapler into the air in fright.

“A little jumpy today are we? I hope it’s nothing more than a wicked plot to steal extra post it notes from the stationary cupboard.”

Kagome whirled around and slapped her sniggering friend in the side with the back of her hand. “Miroku – don’t sneak up on me like that!” He snorted.

“Believe me, there was no sneaking involved. I’d already called out your name twice.”

“Oh.”

“Daydreaming of burly baristas again? Why don’t you just ask the guy out if you’re so hung up on him?”

Kagome sighed. “It’s not quite that easy. He’s still learning English, and I’ve only just started learning Japanese again.” She’d started an online course, but only had time to study on the weekends at the moment until the end of month budget was done.

Miroku grinned at her. “News just in Kagome – tonsil hockey and the horizontal tango require no words at all.”

“Ugh. Remind me why I’m friends with you again?”

“Because I’m an adorable scoundrel.”

“Says you.” She grinned at him. “Which reminds me – it’s Friday – time to pay up.” Miroku groaned and reached for his back pocket, retrieving his wallet.

“How many coffees this week?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty!” He stared at her, aghast. “My god Kagome, how do you not have a heart murmur or something!” he exclaimed, counting out the notes and plonking them down on the desk in front of her. “Thankfully, my dear Sango is worth it.”

“Wait, she actually went out with you again? I thought you said she slapped you!”

“It was a misunderstanding”, he said smoothly, “all good now.” Kagome raised an eyebrow at him and he chuckled. “I’m meeting her after work tonight – going to one of her classes actually. She teaches akido a couple of times a week.”

Kagome grinned at him. “How do you know this isn’t an excuse for her to take another swing at you?” she teased. But she was glad. Sango was lovely – they’d gradually been increasing their short conversations when she bought coffee when it wasn’t too busy, and she seemed like someone who could be a good friend.  

Miroku leaned against her desk, seemingly ready for a chat. “Apparently it’s where she met Inuyasha – he’d put something on the notice board at the gym about needing someone to work with him at his coffee shop who spoke Japanese. Why don’t you come do the class too? You’ve barely left your desk all day.”

Kagome sighed and shook her head. “Too much to do. This has to be finished before I can leave tonight.”

Miroku stood, giving her a commiserating pat on the shoulder as he left her office. “I’d better let you get back to it then. Don’t let them work you too hard Kagome!”

 ☕💘☕

Kagome panted as she headed back towards her apartment after her run around the park, jogging a little slower now to cool down. It was late, much later than she would usually go for a run, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep well if she went straight to bed after sitting at her desk all day. Maybe it might be time to invest in a treadmill for nights like this? She’d been hyper alert the whole time she’d run around the park, but it had been fine – the park was well lit and she’d had no trouble. Now she was only a block from home. She jogged on the spot as she waited for the lights to change. Nearly there. She couldn’t wait to get in the shower and let the heat penetrate her tired muscles.

She didn’t even have time to shriek when the hard sweaty hand went over her mouth and she was dragged backwards into the alleyway. She kicked out, trying to stomp on her attacker’s feet, but her soft running shoes did little, only making the hand around her mouth tighten. She gasped as she was shoved up against the damp brick, the back of her head connecting with a solid thud. The hand over her mouth shifted downwards so that it was pushing back on her neck, the sharpness of broken fingernails digging into her skin, and her eyes widened as the light glanced off the steak knife suddenly shoved in her face.

“Money! Gimme your money!”. The voice was male and agitated. She couldn’t see a face in the darkness, but she could see the hand that gripped the knife was sweaty and shaking.

“Don’t have money”, she managed to wheeze around the hand constricting her throat. “Only my phone.”

“Stupid bitch!” The hand tightened around her throat again, pulling her head forward and slamming it backwards against the wall behind her again, hard enough for her to see stars. Before she could react the hand was gone, with only the sound of sprinting feet letting her know that her attacker had left. She slumped down the wall, sliding to rest on her behind in a grimy puddle.

She knew she should get up and go home, but she was shaking so much she couldn’t move. Her ears were ringing a little, the back of her head was throbbing, and when she moved her hand to touch her throat, her fingers came away wet with blood. Not much, but enough to make her whimper in dismay. The thought of going back to her apartment and being alone filled her with fear.

Suddenly she had a memory of strong arms holding her, lifting her. Staggering to her feet, she began to walk, then run in the direction of the coffee shop, and the man that was beginning to take up large portion of her heart.

☕💘☕

Read Part Five

[tgai-spock]

Lines of ice from rolling was and subtle villains

A phone call home

Chapter 7

Walking into the common room that evening was like walking into a busy pub, but without the rampant alcoholism, old fat men and feeling of someone in the vicinity leering at him, or about to stab him. Peoples voices were low to medium, and he felt comfortable enough to make himself a strawberry tea. There was still a question he had to answer though, as he waited watching the glass kettle bubble his hot water, where would he sit? His dorm with the others? There was no wi-fi in there and he needed to check in with his Mom. This room was busy and he didn’t want to take a call in front of anyone, besides the seats were almost all filled. The bean bag room? The segments? At least the segments should be quiet.

Spock took his tea in hand and walked to the segments, he didn’t have much hope for it, but he decided it was worth a shot. The second he stepped past the archway he could feel the difference. Voices were quieter some completely muted, the atmosphere in this room was more subtle, there was still the occasional giggle but it was much more to Spock’s taste. It did however seem almost empty in comparison, perhaps because Tyler had said he’d made-out with someone in each room. Spock pushed open a dark curtain by the far end of the wall. It had the added bonus of having it’s own large window, and a fancy windowsill. Half windowsill, half seat with embroidered fat pillows. A gentle blue light flickered on over head as he walked in. Looking up he spotted the lights, one over each segment, three were on. So that’s how he’d find out if someone was in them without walking straight into another person. The segments were fairly large, 3 meters long, and 2 meters wide. Beans bags on the floors rug, a pile of books in the corner, a couple of board games and a small table that was close to the floor, so you could use it while sitting on bean bags.

The window pointed across the field towards greenhouses and farther in the distance was farm land, golden fields reflected the sun towards him. He avoided the bean bags and placed his tea on the large window-sill. He knocked off his shoes and put his feet up, plugging in his headphones he video called his Mother. It rang three times before Amanda picked up almost dropping the phone as she did so.

“Spock! Are you okay? How was your first day?” She asks a cross between worried and excited.

“Awful come pick me up.”

Amanda pauses and sighs “how was it actually.”

“Alright I guess” Spock shrugged.

“What? Really? Thats great.” Amanda said.

“I’ve been wearing this hat all day. I think many of the people I’ve spoken to have had the wrong assumptions about me.”

“What assumption.”

“I don’t think they’ve picked up on my non-human traits.”

“Oh. Well I guess that could really change things.” Amanda said.

“Indeed. If I die, it is of course all your fault.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you have any classes?” Amanda asked.

“Yes, I had an English lesson, it was a very strange experience to have a human talk it all through.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“I learnt a lot about the meanings in a poem. He gave out printed sheets of paper which is very wasteful, it had all the writing he was talking about on it. He also wrote on an old fashioned white board a lot.”

“Aren’t they cute?” Amanda grinned.

“…I do not know if they are cute, but they are hard to read.”

“Awh. I’m sure they must be other dyslexic students at school, he must have arranged something for them.”

“Maybe but I won’t ask.”

“Please it is logical to ask.” Damn! Hit with the logic. Spock sighed.

“Did your teacher go around the room and make you say your name and things you like?”

“Why?” Spock asked

“Thats a basic introduction lesson. It happens at the beginning of every new class.”

“That sounds like a bad dating game” Spock shook his head.

“Oh, well okay. You know they do that in normal human schools.”

“Weird.”

“How do you know what a dating game is anyway?” Amanda asked. Spock raised his eyebrows in fear.

“Adverts” he settled with.

“Uh huh? I see.” Amanda said his gaze not leaving him. 

“I should probably go.” 

“Have you got plans for the rest of the night? Have they got a game night going on?”

“No. I’m doing english homework” Spock said “I don’t see how it’s homework though, because I’m not home.”

“Ohf, Mr Attitude coming through.”

“It’s illogical to call it homework.”

“Well I guess you’ve got a point. Are you doing anything else? Anything fun?”

“I guess I could try and find out where the bathrooms are.” Spock said thoughtfully.

“You don’t know yet?”

“Well, I know where my house’s prefect’s made out, but no, I don’t know where the bathrooms are, so I should probably figure that out before I need to go for my 1am bathroom piss.”

“That’s very specific Spock.”

“Is that a first year looking for the toilets?” Tyler’s voice boomed out from a segment far away from him. Spock jumped and removed one earbud.

“Yes?” Spock said loudly back..

“They’re at the bottom of your dorm hallway.” Tyler yelled.

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

“You're welcome” the voice said and then disappeared.

“Never mind, I’ve figured it out.”

“Shouldn’t you have found that first?” Amanda asked.

“I haven’t needed to use the bathroom.

“How has your day been?” Spock asked.

“Well, after I dropped you off I went to visit your grandmother and we talked about fruit cake for several hours, and ate a lot of it for dinner.”

“I’m just grateful to be in school” Spock shrugged.

“Did you get for dinner?” Amanda asked.

“I had pea pasta with fruit and ice-cream.”

“That sounds healthy, not sure about the ice-cream.”

“I can eat lactose.”

“Yeah” Amanda squinted but I don’t think you should eat a lot of it. I would hate for you to have a medical emergency while I’m away.”

Spock rolled his eyes “fine I’ll lay off the ice-cream.”

“Thank-you. Do you think you’ll be okay sleeping there over night?”

“I think I could wait until morning until deciding, the dorms here are nice. Did you know all beds have rape alarms attached to them?”

“Rape alarms? No! Honey” Amanda said completely aghast “those aren’t rape alarms those are to stop kids dragging sleeping people onto the roof and locking them up there while they’re asleep. It’s happened 8 times apparently. People really like pranks in that school.”

“My tour guide was very thorough in all the other uses of the alarms.”

“You aren’t sharing a dorm with that one are you?” Amanda asked.

“No.”

“Mmm. Anyway I must be going now. Your father says hi-”

“No he doesn’t.”

“He says it in his heart, without words, or emotion, or a physical reaction.”

“So he doesn’t say it.”

“He says I love you.” Amanda said wide eyed as though the whites of her eyes might be able to physically push the words in to Spock’s mind.

“I’d have a heart attack if he did..”

“Yeah” Amanda sighed “me too. I love you.” Spock nodded it was the best way he could say it back.

“Bye” Spock said and as he raised his hand to mean the LLAP.

“Bye” Amanda waved.

[Chapter 1]         [Chapter 2]         [Chapter 3]          [Chapter 4]

[Chapter 5]         [Chapter 6]         [Chapter 8]

[somuchbetterthanthat]

me: i’m going to sleep. also me: but first let me write words about my FeelingsTM on Martin Blackwood. (ft jon sims)

The voice at the other end of the phone is new; it throws Martin off a moment. 

“Oh, uh, hello -” he says, feeling absurdely self-conscious. “This is, um - Mrs Blackwood’s son, Martin? Are Betty and Floretta not here today?”

“We’re a bit short of staff,” says the youthful voice on the phone. She talks very fast. “But they said you’d call, of course! I’m Lisa. How can I help you, Mr Blackwood?”

“Hi Lisa,” Martin says and then rolls his eyes at himself, gripping the phone tighter. “I’m just - I’m just wondering how my mother’s been doing this week?”

Lisa is efficient; she gives less details than Betty does, but she sounds less bothered to talk than Floretta, who always finishes with a sigh, like the whole world rest on her shoulders and she’s got no time to indulge Martin and his pesky requests about his mum. Perhaps she truly doesn’t; It’s a small home, after all, and they’re treating his mum right, he knows that, but it’s not like they’ve got a lot of funding. Plus, Floretta’s got two kids and her husband was laid off a year ago so he understands that his phone calls are bothersome. 

When Lisa’s done, Martin thanks her and then, he braces himself, and takes a deep breath: “D’you think I could talk to her for a bit?” he asks. 

“Oh,” says Lisa. “Oh I’m sorry she’s, um - she... fell asleep, after lunch.” 

“Right,” says Martin. “Of course, sure, yeah.”

Lisa is a very bad liar. Nothing like Betty. Betty’s so good at coming up with excuses for his mum that it had taken Martin two months after she had been admitted and he’d started working at the Institute to realize that Betty was lying at all. He’d called almost every day then, feeling awful about not being here for his mother anymore, no matter the fact she’d insisted on it more and more as he grew older. Two entire months, until Betty had said, one afternoon “Ah, can’t do kiddo, she’s playing bridge with the others.” and he’d realized she was just being kind to him by not saying the truth. His mum hated bridge, and cards games in general. He was pretty sure it was because his dad had liked it. 

Now Martin calls every Tuesday, at 1.30pm and tries to pay a visit the first Sunday of every month - as well as on birthdays. She’d agreed to see him, the first few years, on his birthday. She doesn’t anymore, but a little bit of hope never hurts. Every two weeks, he’s taken to dutifully write her a letter instead. Those are never returned, so maybe she reads them at least, even if she never answers.

He hangs up on Lisa after thanking her again, and pretends he doesn’t hear the pity in her voice. Then, he puts his head between his arms, and he breathes very hard and sternly tells himself he can’t cry at work, even if on Tuesdays afternoons, he’s always alone in the office he shares with Gary (who’s got a class at university), Helena (who goes to write at the library) and Celine (who’s got the day off). It’s silly, getting hang up on stuff like that; he’s 25 for god’s sake, not 13. He should be used to his mum’s silence, now. Still. Still, he wishes - if she could just talk to him, just a bit - when was the last time he even heard her voice?

He’s busy feeling deeply sorry for himself when the office’s door abruptly opens; he startles hard and scrambles up to sit up straighter, sending a few files flying off his desk as he does, and meets the extremely unimpressed (beautiful) eyes of Jonathan Sims, who’s scowling at him. 

“Um, hi?” says Martin, a bit lost as to what the hell Jon is doing here. 

“Do you have absolutely no respect for the profession or your colleagues?” Jon asks. 

Martin gapes. “...What?”

Jon waves some paper in the air; Martin blinks. “M. K. Blackwood,” Jon says slowly, like he’s stupid. “Is that not you?”

“Er, right, yes? I mean - yes, of course that’s me, we - we literally talked yesterday you haven’t forgotten my name did you?” (Contrary to what people think, Martin does have some kind of pride, and a sense of shame; the idea that Jon - who is as handsome as he is awful - may not even remember his name is kind of a blow to his non-existent self-esteem) 

“No,” Jon says in a clipped voice. “I didn’t. Do you know why, Martin?” 

“...Because we’re colleagues?” Martin tries out. 

“Because I pay attention to details,” Jon retorts. “Contrary to you, apparently! That paper is - it’s awful is what it is. The ideas aren’t bad per say, but not only is your conclusion absolutely wrong, I can’t even work to disagree with you because half of your sources are missing.”

“Why - why did you even read my paper?” Martin asks, bewildered.

Jon’s scowl somehow manages to look even more disdainful than before. “You literally rambled about it yesterday.” he says. “When we were talking.” 

“Wait. You were actually listening?”

“I - Of course I was listening Martin -”

“I mean, no - no offense or anything, but you did just - got up in the middle of the discussion and just. Left.” Martin says slowly. “Without a word.”

For the first time since he barged into his office, Jon looks unsettled for a second; Martin is pretty sure he’s not even dreaming the way Jon’s cheeks turn slightly pink. 

“Right,” he says. “Right that... probably... wasn’t very polite of me.” 

“Yeah that really wasn’t.”

“Well, I apologize about that,” Jon says stiffly. “But obviously I had to check - anyway, the point is, your paper is a disaster. And not just this one! I went to check other things you’ve written and good lord what do you have against citing any bloody sources -”

Martin is back to gaping, as Jon continues to prattle on everything that’s wrong with his work; who - who even does that? Martin wasn’t aware researchers actually read papers. Well, not their other colleagues’ papers. Well - not Martin’s papers. To each their own, and all that; Martin had read a lot of them, when he’d first started working here, but it was only so he could exercize himself to write in that fancy university language, and learn the structures and all; English was the class he’d tried to miss the less at school, because he liked words, but that didn’t mean it was easy to pretend he knew how to write about ghosts academically. 

Apparently, according to Jon, he’s still managed to do it wrong for years, too.

“Sorry?” he hazards at last once Jon’s verve dies down. 

Jon looks aghast. “Sorry? That’s all you have to say?”

“I, I mean what - what do you want me to say?” Martin asks a bit helplessly. “It’s not like - Nobody ever told me I was doing it wrong.” he finishes a bit lamely. 

“How?”

“I don’t know! Maybe, maybe they just - didn’t care,” Martin shrugs; his neck is starting to warm up. Jon frowns.

“Well I care,” he says, darting his (absurdely gorgeous, it’s really terrible) eyes on Martin with such piercing intensity that Martin feels a little chill running up his spine. “The Institute is already not taken seriously enough in the academic field, and it’s bound to be treated as even more of a joke if our researchers don’t even bother trying to write anything properly. I don’t know how nobody has ever told you this before, but next time for god’s sake, just write down your sources as you go.”

“...Right,” says Martin. “Right. I’ll - I’ll do that. Yep.”

“Good.” Jon nods curtly.

There’s a beat of silence; they keep staring at each other. “Um,” Martin says after a moment. “Is there, uh - anything else? I can help you with?”

Jon opens his mouth; closes it; then opens it again and says: “You’re wrong about the spiders. They’re nasty things and they certainly don’t deserve any mercy when they find their way in a kitchen.”

And then he turns around and leaves as abruptly as he arrived, and Martin just blinks at the still open door, utterly baffled. His cheeks are flushed, and his heart is beating just a tad too fast in his chest. 

“Nope,” he tells himself. “Nope, you’re not doing that. You’ve got to build self-esteem, remember?”

(I care, said Jonathan Sims.) 

(Martin’s stomach does a weird little thing. He bites down a smile, and goes back to work, trying very hard to keep frowning at himself.) 

[jonathaniketem]

Coming to Terms

I was the last to introduce myself at my table, comprising four desks facing each other. World cultures—my very first class as a middle schooler. I couldn’t have been more excited. Our teacher sat in the front of the room just surveying her surroundings; her pearly, white smile was about as bright as the hot Texas sun. I still remember Ms. Juarez getting up herself, flattening out the creases from her outfit like she usually does once she got up and and introduction herself. Right after she spoke a few words and while the crowd gasped in excitement, I stared at my table, aghast. “You guys will make a presentation about your own culture by the end of the year, it only seems fair as this is a world cultures class,” she smiled as she always did while stating something that felt similar to a death sentence. How was I to complete something I had so much trouble accepting?

Now let’s turn back in time—back to when I was nine years old meeting some of my closest friends for the first time. I came across a group of kids my age range playing soccer right in front of my house on the street. I was too shy to come out and just ask if they would let me play with them; with the knowledge I’ve amassed now I know children are much easier to congregate with peers than adults who may be a bit pretentious to ever allow anyone foreign join their clique. I only walked away from the screen gate concealing my gazing presence for a bottle of water when I heard a thump against the familiar sound of something hitting the plastic exterior of a car. I ran outside yelling at those rowdy individuals who dared to hit my father’s sedan. They did what kids knew best and ran for their lives, and as a kid myself, I ran after them. We ran and ran until the sun went down only for all of us to collapse from exhaustion. We laughed about how stupid this all was while apologizing for hitting my dad’s car. My summer as a nine year old then on was me going out and having fun with the new kids I met. I started to grow bonds with them and create memories hoping nothing would throw a wrench into the fun I was having. Sadly it’s always those who try to escape bad luck who end up chasing its tail. One day all my new friends came to our friend Tobias’s home for a game day. The environment was much different than it was in my house: R&B music playing in the house, friends of Tobias’s dad in the backyard having a barbecue, and a marathon playing of a show I had never heard of before called Martin. I must have been very tense as Tobias noticed and tried to calm my nerves, and if Tobias noticed my other friends did too. They must’ve realized I wasn’t feeling like my regular self, all from being in a different setting. “Hey why do you look like you’re out of place? You’re Black too, aren’t you?” The question I always felt uneasy about. I stood there and stared at everyone unable to say a thing for awhile. To this day my present self could never understand why I agreed that I was such instead of the truth, but the lie was played and it had to be kept up or my image would’ve been ruined.

I am an African American, an American citizen who just so happens to have African roots. This is what I have finally accepted myself to be ethnically. Though it was never easy for me to accept as a youth. I have parents from the Eastern horn of Africa, born and raised in the country Eritrea. They sadly had to leave their homes to escape the war for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia, later meeting each other in Houston. They were proud of their Eritrean ethnicity, yet they gave birth to and raised a son who was ashamed of who he was. I was surrounded by people who identified as what the average person would imagine to be the Black American. I was constantly seeing myself as fitting into this group without also being apart of my own group. I didn’t have the knowledge to be able to be apart of both the African American community while also being proud of my roots as an Eritrean youth. I saw it as wanting to be able to accommodate myself into this community I was around so long that being a bit different would only make me feel segregated deep within, so my only solution was to lie about who I was. I’ve been questioned continuously as I differed visually from the peers I so wanted to be apart of, the loose curly hair, my bulging eyes, and complexion that made it seem I was from the Middle East. Because other people have continuously made assumptions about my race, I have found myself frequently discouraged. Discouraged to the point that lies flowed smoothly out my mouth like water surging from a faucet. Embarrassment followed me no matter who asked the question I dreaded: “Hey what are you? Are you Black?”, and no matter how many times I was asked my lies never failed to put me at ease. 

A thing about lies I’ve come to realize—they may start out as little white lies, but the constant repetition of a lie breathes life into the lie. The lie starts to become its own entity, an entity I despised but kept molding with the eccentric tales I formed that would’ve put a seasoned politician in awe of what the mind of a youth could conjure in fabrication. My lies started with only a few peers; later, newer mouths would ask the same questions with familiar ones standing close by; my lies couldn't change there or I would be a liar. The lies began to form an identity—latching on to my person like the backpack I so proudly carried through the hallways of the school I spread my lies, instead the lies were a burden to my conscience. The typical person would try to fix something weighing heavily on their mind, but the lies were an addiction that sadly started to rope in others that weren’t supposed to be involved. Since my sister, two years my junior, started to attend my school I’d tell her to start lying about our identities. She could never figure out why it was such a big deal to me, but I started at her just as drug addicts stare at their loved ones asking for a bit of cash to get high one last time. Looking back it was quite repulsive doing something so crude to the innocent minded. I was her source of wisdom as her older sibling, yet I tried to bring her into the darkness I created out of disregard for myself trying to fit in with the groups of people I just happened to want to be a part of. Another thing about lies that I often hear and can confirm for myself are that they most likely will always catch up with their creators no matter how hard they try. As children get to meet others outside their family, they start to bringing them into the homes they were raised in and subsequently meet the ones who did the raising. For the liar I had become I could not believe I made the simple mistake of leaving my parents alone with friends to talk—the same parents who love to represent and share their information about their homeland. To hear one of the many customers you’ve sold your lies to ask what an Eritrea is feels probably about as painful as getting shot in the heart. I was truly grateful the attention span of my peers was about as long as a toddler’s who still hadn’t formed object permanence yet. There needed to be a remedy for the troubles I was causing myself, some soul searching before I was completely branded as a liar and someone who couldn’t come to terms with who they were. Surprisingly, all it took was a summer trip and a bit of contemplation about life to get myself on the right track.

Summer before the start of the nerve-wracking middle school experience, a family trip was presented to the June-born siblings as a gift. I didn’t know how to feel about going to Eritrea to see and experience the environments my parents grew up in. The trip was for the entirety of the summer, coming back only two days before the school year was about to start. We would be taking the German airlines Lufthansa stopping in Frankfurt, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey for gas and once again taking off until we landed in the capital of Eritrea: Asmara. Summer is the perfect opportunity for friends to make a few more memories before they went to different schools and possibly losing contact with each other. It hurt my child heart to know that I couldn’t go out and have fun, but instead I had to go to the place I tried my best to hide the existence of. The constant questions of why I wouldn’t be home got my creative process running, my solution being that I told everyone we would be visiting family in Europe. My lie wasn’t completely far-fetched though; my mother and father both had brothers located in Sweden and Norway, so coming up with this I felt proud of what I conjured up. The trip there wasn’t an easy journey: our first flight cancellation due to the 2011 eruption of the Nabro volcano, TSA possibly giving White House security a run for their money, and the long flight hours accompanied by the sounds of my sister heaving up her airline meals every moment of turbulence. I couldn’t have been happier once I had both feet on the motionless earth. Finally stepping out of the airport, I stood by the entrance waiting on my mother to get her bearings. Hand stretched out tugging at my luggage, I watched in awe at the deep lavender masterpiece in the sky the sun had left once it set ready to rise once again from where I came from. “Not bad,” I thought quietly to myself, “I guess I’m home.”

Asmara is the capital of Eritrea as well as my parent’s birth place. There are many ethnic groups living in Eritrea; my family is a part of the largest group in Eritrea called Tigrayan due to the language we speak: Tigrinya. Because of my delayed learning of English and natural tendency for Tigrinya as a child, my father decided to withhold my learning of the letters my parents grew up with called Ge'ez. They decided the 26 letter alphabet worshiped by this new country they settled in was much more important than millennia of history and culture. Though I regret their decision now I never cared much for it back then, especially during our trip when I had two translators by my side. The air there was very cool, which never made much sense to me until my parents explained how we were many feet above sea level, basically living on top of a mountain. Walking to our grandmother’s house from when the taxi dropped us off, we were headed to where would be staying for the entirety of our trip. I saw that everyone was walking, reminding me much of the climate of New York from various videos and photos I have seen. People walked and talked mostly in Tigrinya and to my surprise English as well. Asmara is much more advanced when it came to popular culture and what was big in societal trends as the capital of this country compared to the more rural cities my great grandparents and so on came from. My father thought it would be best to walk the rest of the way while my mother took the taxi back to her childhood home preparing for our arrival. We walked the streets taking detours walking past the many food stalls and shops out in the open, like shopping at a bazaar. The stained homes and buildings from the sun and style to the colorful, but bleached architecture made it feel like I was vacationing in one of the South American countries. I couldn’t believe what beauty Africa had housed. 

Living in Asmara for just less than three months I started to see what it felt like being more than just American. It wasn’t as big of a difference as I thought, especially not from the rumors about Africa that I heard back in America. Of Course as popular as Asmara was, it couldn’t be used as a standard when comparing all of Africa, as if comparing a mansion to low-income housing provided by the government for struggling individuals. Things like famine, poverty, and horrible living conditions existed, but I was living as lavish as I could in my grandmother’s home. I was woken up to this sad reality when we traveled to my great grandparents village of Maiha, which also served as my grandfather’s burial place. My grandfather died before I could ever meet him two years from when we left to come to Asmara—another reason that warranted this trip. The trip there was suffocating; the advent of the air conditioner seemed to not have reached east of Africa just yet as the bus ride there was unpleasant. The whole ride we were leaving the cool mountains and entering sea level, and humidity was coming at full force that summer. At our stop we walked to Maiha, my mother’s family village where she hugged, kissed, and introduced us to our family. Maiha was a desert from what I perceived it as, almost no vegetation anywhere with everyone’s skin clinging tightly to bone where muscle should’ve been missing. I couldn’t fathom how people could be living here, but these were also my roots. We walked to an area that presented itself as a miniature version of a cemetery I remember once seeing as I joked around with my siblings, holding our breaths until my father drove past it. My father pointed out my late grandfather with his image on a tombstone, I quickly noticed the resemblance he had with my cousin that was back in Asmara. My mother and her sisters circled around his final resting place as their sounds of sorrow hit my eardrums, their wails had hints of grief and sorrow I couldn’t help but feel regrettably sad my mother felt this way. Something in that moment made me think life was fleeting, it wasn’t very normal for a child so young to be thinking about such things. Our journey back to Asmara was filled with reminiscent stories of young girls and their time with their father. A grandfather who would spoiled his grandson every minute he spent with him would’ve been joyful to experience, but loved ones are taken before these moments can even be recorded. I learned that my grandfather had an avid love for language, housing the ability for speaking many languages during his life. It was something about that fact that resonated within me even though at the time it seemed to be just one of the many accomplishments he had under his belt. Once we made it back I remember sighing loudly that we were back home, which made me question my word use at the moment. I was finally comfortable enough to call the place my mother grew up in home, and I wasn’t at all ashamed by it. This new found respect I had garnished upon myself seemed to keep me on a high. In the coming weeks of traveling around the country and enjoying the cuisine, to my surprise was a lot of pasta and pizza, only added to my enjoyment for my summer. I later learned there was more Italian influence in Eritrea than I knew back from when Italy used to control this little country. From words such as eyeglasses and car borrowed from Italian to the architecture and food, Eritreans used their suppressors identity and incorporated it into their own. The love for the language and learning more words in Tigrinya took new heights when I decided it was time I learned the alphabet from my uncle who was a school teacher. It was no easy feat, but the dedication I had for this task was marvelous and quite miraculous looking back. By my age at the time, my brain had most likely already made its last connections with neurons in the language department, cutting its ties with neurons that most likely would’ve made learning these symbols a lot faster. Though with my effort, my plastic brain must have given me a chance to redeem myself from my ignorance as before I knew it I could read small segments from the local newspaper like an infant reading the big text from a picture book. The applause I received from family members in the room during my recital was very heartening and exciting as I showed off my new trick unbeknownst to my audience. 

Before I knew it my first year as a middle schooler was only a few days, just under two weeks. The sorrowful goodbyes and hugs hurt my little heart. I made ties and bonds with people I never knew existed until three months ago and I never wanted to leave. The environment there was very free and fun and I couldn’t fathom coming back to America. The smiles I once had plastered on my face now masterfully painted to express an aghast look. If someone said this was the same happy little boy enjoying his life in eastern Africa, they would’ve been taken as a joke. Ms. Juarez’s words still rang in my ears and my trip playing in my head over and over. Before I knew it the bell rang signaling us to our next class before I could over think how I felt my life was over. The whole school day consisted of trying to distract my foreboding thoughts with the workload I was piling up on my first day, yet I still couldn’t get world cultures to stop taking over my thoughts. This kept on up until I finally made it home after a tiring day of school. I had to come up with something soon as I laid in my best going through every decision I could’ve made about a school project possibly changing my outlook on many things. My thoughts raced back and forth when I suddenly remembered all the fun I had during our trip and remembering the times I struggled learning a new alphabet for the sake of trying to please family who passed on before I even got to meet him. Though I broke my promise of continuously practicing my Ge’ez I couldn’t help but smile at myself struggling to get better at something I had put my mind to. This trip couldn’t have been scheduled at a better time, a time when something as important as a cultural showcase was announced just after my return. I was finally more accepting of something I despised for so long even though I wasn’t going to change over night I was taking the necessary steps and that's reason enough. I hopped off my bed and ran downstairs to my father reading his newspaper at the dining table as usual. I remember him looking up waiting for me to tell him whatever it was I had to tell him, but nothing wanted to come out. I couldn’t just close up now after I finally told myself it was time for a change. I started to hate myself even more for making such a topic embarrassing for myself in the first place when I should’ve embraced it like other Eritreans I knew. This was my time to finally leave my cocoon of hate and emerge as not a full fledged Eritrean just yet, but however far baby steps would take me for the meantime. I took a breath in and out and before I knew out came the words “dad I need help with a project at school.”

The lights were off and seats were rearranged so that everyone was facing the front of the room. The student right before me alphabetically decided to make a powerpoint slide about what being Mexican American meant to him. I wasn’t listening closely, only paying attention in little bits before I would stare out the window watching the trees waving hello in the wind. Time kept ticking and I knew soon the 10-minute interval for our presentation would start over again for the next student. My heart ticked in rhythm with the second hand on my watch and I realized my heart seemed to go faster and faster, a heart attack was all I could think of which only sped up my heart beat and didn’t make the situation any better. As I took deep breaths to calm myself I heard the class start to clap, my time was up. I wasn’t going to let 10 minutes ruin my life, this was going to be nothing but a simple speech to a bunch of people I met during my sixth grade year. I got up with the most confidence I had in awhile once I heard my name, tri-fold board in my right hand, a garment worn by women from Eritrea and Ethiopia in my left hand, and a traditional drum given to me by my late grandmother on my father’s side slung across my shoulder. I stood in front of my audience with my presentation set up, like I was at a science fair nervous to explain my booth. I took a deep breath, yet this time it wasn’t going to be used to spew lies any longer. I was standing my ground against all my demons ready to release myself all by giving a presentation. To many it may have looked like a child talking to his school friends about how he grew up, but to me it was a life changing moment. In that moment as if all at once my lies seemed to disappear into thin air relieving the stress I made for myself all those years; I was finally ready. “Hello my name is Jonathan,” I smiled a nervous, toothy grin, “and this is my presentation on what it means to be Eritrean.”

——————————————————————————————

Afterword

My thoughts were built selfishly upon self-love that was never present. I owned information that many peers I share my skin color with would never get to know. I couldn’t accept something that many could try to search for after it was stolen from them centuries ago, but I was ignorant to that fact. I was ignorant to the culture I was blessed to have information about and in my selfishness pretend to have no such knowledge. I am thankful for this gift many of my brothers and sister will never get to know: another language, another culture, another home. I care for my roots ever greater now since I’ve learned the significance of where I came from. I am African American with known roots from Africa. I am able to speak my African tongue. I am proud to say my heritage lies in another continent. I am me. 

[demyrie]

English Homework -- BnB

“Good morning, young Shinsou! No training this morning?” Toshinori asked as brightly as he could despite, or perhaps because of, the boy's dour expression and downturned face. Shinsou kicked the wet grass, but did so away from his mat.

“I've gotta take breaks,” he muttered, crossing his arms. One of them was bandaged rather extensively and two of his fingers were stinted. “Apparently.”

“Aizawa-sensei knows what he's doing, I'm sure,” Toshinori said mildly. Then, as the child continued to stand, staring at his wet sneakers, Toshinori patted the woven mat next to him. “Would you care to sit?”

“Yeah, I'm … Yagi-san, could you help me with my homework?”

The boy looked embarrassed, but mostly tired. There was something about the deep set of his strangely colored eyes that made him look like he was gazing out from the opposite end of a tunnel, distant and disappointed, and Toshinori said it before he even considered if he could actually be of help:

“Of course, my boy! Take a seat.”

Even as Shinsou kicked off his shoes and sat down, the older hero's grin calcified unpleasantly: homework! What did he know about algebra and other high school necessities? The only thing that could make him panic more was a request for romantic advice, which he was incredibly certain would be forthcoming with Midoriya someday soon and he dreaded it every waking moment.

Seated, Shinsou awkwardly slung his bag off his shoulder and dumped it in front of him, half of the contents sloughing out, the other half bent in two and relentlessly dog-eared. Everything was grubby at the edges. Not a very organized soul. Probably what Aizawa would be, Toshinori thought with a sparkle of mirth, if he hadn't trimmed his life of any trinkets or other excess through sheer exhaustion.

It was a worksheet of English, half-filled. Toshinori breathed a sigh of relief. He actually knew a fair amount but he also wasn't about to interfere with the flow of the first year's learning process. The key was asking questions that made him think a little further, addressing or circumventing any weakness in skill, which Toshinori was coming to realize was a grander part of teaching: letting the students know what they didn't know while reminding them of what they did.

So they prodded along, lapsing into periods where Shinsou would scribble intently, deep frown slowly easing. The boy was probably having a hard time keeping up with both Aizawa's expectations and the General Studies course, and Toshinori tried not to consider how much of that was by design, to test his mettle. His want.

Toshinori found himself chuckling as they worked through the assignment. It seemed Yamada-san taught General Studies English as well as Hero Course English and his translation examples were … amusing, to say the least. Toshinori read along with the coursework with a faint smile, but that smile was quick to drop as then the older hero began to put some things together.

“What is all this?” he asked at last, gesturing to the worksheet – particularly, the stiffly inked cartoon animals arranged at the top of the page, which looked like they had been photocopied to death.

“English?” the boy said, blinking.

“No, the little characters. The stories. It seems … very involved.”

“Oh, you mean the animals. That's Grumpy Cat. Tall Bunny. Cool Bird. Smart Wolf,” he listed, pointing to each in turn and pronouncing their english names with only slight hesitation. “Grumpy Cat, Smart Wolf and Cool Bird are best friends even though they're really different. They all go on adventures together. Tall Bunny is new and he's really shy, but he's okay. Other animals come by, too.”

Toshinori swallowed audibly. Grumpy Cat was little more than a pair of narrowed eyes in a black whiskered face, and, to his rising horror, had a crescent-shaped scar under its left eye. Smart wolf had spiky dark fur, a saucy grin and very distinctive red glasses. Cool bird had flashy sunglasses and earphones and looked to be screaming. 

Tall bunny had ... Well, tall bunny was very tall, and was carrying a frilly handkerchief. He didn't look well, even as bunnies went.

“Yamada-sensei draws them all on the board and we have to translate what they're saying to figure out the story. Whoever figures it out first, or does the best impressions in class when its time to read it aloud, gets candy.”

Requesting that he continue to talk about it in English, to test him, Toshinori fairly sank into the ground, aghast, as Shinsou continued to explain, halting every so often to parse verbs and tenses.

“It's a cool way to learn vocabulary without reading textbooks. So, cool bird is a … music star, rockstar, and sometimes things go really wrong on his tours. Like one time a storm blew away all his instruments and he cried for a long time. But then his friends sold cookies and used the money to buy him new stuff. Sometimes they fight over stuff, problems, but they're all friends and help each other out, no matter what happens.”

“And ... Grumpy Cat? In English as well, please,” Toshinori added hurriedly, like he was a normal teacher asking for normal things.

“Grumpy Cat is my favorite. All he wants to do is sleep all the time,” Shinsou said with a cockeyed grin, looking over. “He's mean but nice? I don't know the word in English. [Tsundere, though, you know.] Yamada-sensei always says he's "no fun, no sir." We all say it, like a chant. Like Cool Bird is "too cool, ya dig?"

Shinsou shrugged.

“I dunno. It's a fun class. Better than modern literature.”

Beside him, Toshinori buried his head in his hands and stifled a cough that threatened to rip him in two through sheer disbelief. Eerie and inappropriate similarities of his characters aside, Yamada might be ruining an entire generation of children through his constant need of feedback and call and responses. Not to mention giving them wildly inappropriate expectations of interjections in English speaking countries. Did he dole out candy so indiscriminately to the Hero Studies children as well? It would explain so much ...

“But Grumpy Cat hasn't been around lately. He's sneaking off and all the other animals wonders --

“Are wondering,” Toshinori corrected him stiffly, automatic. “Or wonder. Third person plural, if you're still speaking in the present.”

“Present progressive,” Shinsou muttered after a moment of thought. “All the animals ... are wondering where he has been. Is that right?”

But Toshinori hardly heard him, right or wrong, over the din of panic in his own head, worst fears confirmed. A diary. Yamada-san was basically keeping a diary, and having his students translate it. Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, Yamada-san, no.

[adventures-in-mangaland]

ChatBug!

Hey @judiejodia, here is your full Christmas present for @mlsecretsanta! (I was on tumblr mobile before.). I tried for Beauxbatons, and failed, but I’ll try to finish it for you one day! In the meantime, have silly identity/friendship shenanigans. Also, link to the fic on AO3 here.

It was an act of desperation.

Mme Bustier stood at the head of the class, smiling benignly, completely unaware of the despair she had inspired.

“I’ll be collecting your forms now. I do hope you all found a suitable placement for the next two weeks. Remember, M. Damocles and I will be reviewing all your applications, and depending on their approval, you should all be able to begin your Work Experience on Monday!”

She seemed delighted for them. Marinette just cringed, sinking even lower into her seat.

This is going to be so humiliating.

She had tried everything.

She had asked everyone in the class (except Chloe) if their parents might have work experience placements for students in their work places. She had contacted countless Fashion Houses and Design Studios. She had scoured the newspapers and Yellow Pages. She had asked random customers at the bakery and phoned all of her parents’ friends. She had even advertised her desperation on Craig List.

Finally, she had asked Mme Bustier if she couldn’t just work at the bakery, only to be told her family’s business was not an option.

“It’s a chance to experience a new working environment, Marinette,” she had explained kindly. “To prepare you for your first day of work after you finish school.”

And then she had found it.

Her Salvation and Destruction in one neat bundle.

As her teacher collected the accursed form she groaned and let her head hit the desk with a defeated thunk. Alya patted her back sympathetically, clearly trying not to laugh, before shaking her head sternly at Nino when he turned around with an inquiring look.

But that thrice-damned sign she’d found pasted to the wall of the bakery, like a portent of doom, had been her only lead in her mad scramble of a job search, and the only positive response to boot.

So, as of Monday, she would be sacrificing her dignity in the name of Work Experience.

This was the worst day of her life.

Correction, this was the worst day of her life.

She stared at herself in the mirror through her parted fingers, aghast. The suit was not completely skin tight (it had not been designed for her, after all) and sagged in strange places, despite stretching tight over her bust. Not to mention the material was cheap and luridly bright. And the red of the boots they had given her to wear did not match the rest of the outfit, and had heels to boot.

Heels! I thought I was supposed to be doing a lot of walking! Why would they give me heels! Ladybug doesn’t even wear heels!

It was grossly unfair, especially as she had seen their Chat Noir’s costume, and he had not been subjected to the same indignity.

There was a knock at the door and it opened before she could squeak a reply.

“Ready?” It was Claudine, the co-ordinator of the Tour Company. She gave Marinette a once over and nodded her head in satisfaction.

“Good. Good. You’re a little younger than the real Ladybug, of course, and it shows, but you certainly look the part! Have you memorised your lines?”

Marinette gritted her teeth, but managed to nod with a smile.

She had memorised them. She had memorised every single cringe-worthy one.

Claudine beamed. “Excellent! I’m sure you’ll have a great time! Your Chat’s almost ready, and your first group should be arriving in about ten minutes, so just relax and go over the FAQ in the meantime. I must say, your knowledge is excellent. Just don’t let us down!”

On that passive-aggressive note, she waved and left the room, shutting the door with an unnecessarily loud bang behind her.

Marinette slumped.

This was definitely the worst day of her life.

This was the best day of his life.

Adrien grinned and bounced on his toes as he admired his reflection in the changing room’s mirror.

True, the material of his suit wasn’t real leather, was rather tacky, in fact, and true, his bell didn’t jingle right, and his tail was a limp, inanimate belt. But here he was Adrien Agreste, dressed up as his Crime-Fighting Alter-ego, and his Father couldn’t stop him.

He had tried, of course, insisting that as a celebrity, Adrien’s security could be threatened, that he didn’t even need work experience, since he had plenty with his modelling, and that if he had to waste two weeks of schooling, he might as well spend it doing something useful, like learning the ropes of his own future business.

But to Adrien’s intense gratification, Mme Bustier had stood firm.

No, the point of the placement was to expose Adrien to new experiences. No, he couldn’t spend the time working for his Father. No, he couldn’t work for any of his Father’s business associates at a rival Fashion House either.

She did concede the need for anonymity, for the sake of Adrien’s safety, a concession he was more than willing to embrace.

And then she had brought him the advertisement with a kind, expectant smile.

“I know it might be a little outside your comfort zone, Adrien. But I’ve noticed you’re a little shy sometimes, and this opportunity could really build your confidence! And your experience as a model should help. It’s a little silly, I know, but I think you could have a lot of fun with it.”

Lord knows, you need it.

She hadn’t needed to say it, but the words hung in the air, and Adrien whole-heartedly agreed.

So here he was, brimming with a tingly mixture of nerves and excitement. All the freedom he usually experienced as Chat Noir at his fingertips, and he was still Adrien.

No Gorilla, no schedule, no name.

Even his Father had admitted that, without the name Agreste, and with his face obscured by a mask, he was in no more danger than any other teenage boy. So, with strict instructions to call Nathalie at the beginning and end of every shift, and during his breaks, to prove he was still alive, he was free to explore Paris as himself.

He glanced at the clock. Claudine had said their first tour would be starting soon, so really it was time to go and meet his ‘Lady’. His stomach buzzed with nerves again and his smile faltered.

Would she like him? Could they be friends? What would she be like? It was weird he couldn’t tell her his name, wasn’t it? Would she find it creepy?

Anxiety began to overtake the excitement.

He had never really met people his own age outside of school before. And there he had a schedule, and clear, unwritten boundaries to dictate his behaviour. There he had Nino, not to mention school work to save him from the need to interact with anyone else. Not that he didn’t like socialising with his classmates, of course. But after a mostly solitary childhood, it could be overwhelming. What unspoken social conventions was he stepping on now? It was a mine field, one he was glad to walk, but nerve-wracking anyway.

His own reflection caught his eye again.

I’m Chat Noir. I’m a Superhero! I can do this.

Squaring his shoulders, he threw open the door.

And froze as he heard it make contact with someone’s face. Pushing the door more cautiously, it swung back to reveal a girl in a Ladybug costume, cradling her nose and swearing under her breath.

Shit. Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! What should I do? She’ll hate me!

“A-are you OK?”

She looked up and blue eyes met his, looking so much like his Lady as her face scrunched up into a scowl at the sight of him.

“I’m fine. No thanks to you. Stupid Cat.”

She immediately clasped her hands to her mouth, looking mortified and began to stutter an apology.

But, for whatever reason, her irritation eased the tension from his shoulders and pulled a smile from his lips. Whoever they’d hired to play Ladybug must have been a megafan, because her impersonation so far was excellent.

This was familiar. This was the pattern of so many of his actual encounters with his Lady. True, it wasn’t real, but he could pretend; this whole job was about pretending. And no one could do Chat Noir better than him.

He straightened, stretching as an excuse to flex, while watching her out of the corner of his eye.

“I am so sorry, My Lady. What can I say? I always make an impact!”

She just scowled and rolled her eyes, muttering something before saying more loudly: “Come on, you. The tour group will be here in five minutes. Let’s go over the routine.”

So it wasn’t too terrible.

Marinette loved Paris, and once she put over the indignity of the costume (and the one-liners), she rather enjoyed showing it off to tourists.

True, most of them were interested in hearing about how it had been torn up on numerous occasions – it was a Miraculous themed guided tour, after all – but that didn’t stop her attempting to sneak in some historical and cultural facts alongside epic accounts of explosions and akuma.

Surprisingly, her partner had been some help there. He acted like an irresponsible poser of a flirt, but he knew his history, always ready to back her up with a date or an anecdote, and even quotations.

He’d only mouthed “Home schooled” at her over an English tourist’s shoulder at her raised eyebrow.

He might have posed far too much, and he told terrible jokes, but he was kind of fun to be around.

And today, the biggest recompense of all.

“Jagged Stone!”

Turns out, he was a huge Ladybug fan. Not surprising, really, considering the number of times he had been caught up in akuma attacks, not to mention his own akumatisation. And to Marinette’s unending delight he had requested a private tour. With her.

“You’re that young girl who designed by glasses, right? And the cover of my album.”

Marinette fought to keep her face calm and composed.

“Yes! I am!”

So much for that.

“Great! You’ve got good taste! This tour will be rockin’!”

She wasn’t sure what her artistic taste had to do with her competency as a tour guide, but Marinette beamed until her cheeks ached.

Beside her, ‘Chat’ shuffled awkwardly, glancing surreptitiously at their guest with a slightly annoyed expression before ducking to whisper in her ear.

“You don’t have to make that weird face. He’s just a guy.”

Marinette’s smile froze. Fortunately, Jagged was busy chattering animatedly with his manager and hadn’t heard.

“What are you talking about?” Her lips barely moved as she attempted to keep the smile in place. “He’s Jagged Stone! He’s a rock star!”

And he remembered me.

She chose not to add that last part.

Her partner huffed and crossed his arms petulantly. “He’s still just a guy. He’s nothing special.”

This time, Marinette didn’t even try to cover her annoyance, huffing and fixing him with a look. “Oh, please! I saw how you reacted when you saw the roster for today. You actually screamed.”

“I did not scream!”

“Yes, you did! You were just as excited as me.”

“Well, at least I haven’t been drooling over him since he arrived! It’s not… It’s not professional!” He finished loftily, impressed with his own flash of inspiration.

“Well, I don’t think – ”

“Excuse me? Is there a problem?”

Jagged’s agent, Penny, was watching them with a look of concern. They both flushed at being caught bickering.

“Of-of course not! Everything’s fine. We’re just… preparing.”

“Yeah. Chill, Penny. They’re getting into character! They sound just like Ladybug and Chat Noir!” Jagged patted his manager’s shoulder, grinning at them expectantly. Marinette managed to return the smile weakly.

“Mr. Stone has met Ladybug and Chat Noir,” Mlle. Stone announced ominously as the Walking Tour got under way. The So you better not screw upwent unsaid, though Marinette would probably laugh about it later, when she wasn’t choking on completely irrational performance anxiety. Luckily, her Chat had no such issue.

“Oh yeah!” He said, with his usual cheerfulness. “I remember that one vividly. On the Eiffel Tower, right?”

Jagged preened, looking pleased by the acknowledgement. As if he wasn’t a famous Rock Star and akumatization wasn’t a traumatic event.

Chat laughed. “So, shall we skip that one on the Tour? Been there, done that?”

“No way!” Jagged cried, as oblivious as Chat to Marinette’s glower, because, really, that was just insensitive. “I want to know all about The Mime!”

“It was pawsitively awesome,” Chat agreed. “My Lady was breathtaking. Every swing of her yoyo wrapped itself a little tighter around my heart. And saved a precious landmark,” he added, as an after thought.

“Yes, she and Chat Noir saved the day, protecting the city’s heritage and preventing cat astrophic property damage and loss of life.”

Chat shot her a grin and a fist bump.

“Any other favourites?” Chat asked innocently.

“Oh yeah! I want to see that Plaza were Animan swallowed Ladybug! And the fountain where Ladybug fought Chat Noir! And Hotel de Ville! I have got to hear about Darkblade and Kung Food. I was there, but I don’t remember! It was wild!”

“We could do a re-enactment!” Chat exclaimed, brimming with enthusiasm.

“Would that be safe?” Mlle Rolling cut in, eyeing Chat dubiously.

For some reason, that irked Marinette. Sure, he was some teenager, not an actual super hero, his insistence on anonymity aside, but dammit, he was still her (temporary!) partner. She opened her mouth, and was saved from a breach in professionalism by Jagged cutting in.

“It’ll be totally fine!” he said, brushing away his manager’s concern, like crumbs.

“I’m just not sure if there’ll be time,” she hedged.

“Oh, no worries, Penny. I don’t know if you have noticed, but all these akuma attacks happen in this exact area.”

“Convenient,” she said dryly.

And it certainly was for Chatbug Tours, and for Marinette’s Work-Superhero-Life balance. It was almost as if she, Chat Noir and Hawkmoth all lived in the exact same neighbourhood.

Eh. It was great for tourism in Central Paris, at least.

So they stopped at Trocadéro for Timebreaker stories (Marinette did not tear up) and pictures of the view. And an epic recreation of the Eiffel Tower’s near death experience, complete with Chat whipping his cheap plastic baton around athletically and energetically enough to attract a small crowd.

They agreed not to cross the river, but continued on through the Right Bank, paying tribute to the Pharaoh at the Louvre - “Penny! What rhymes with Egyptian?” - and Stormy Weather’s Ice Dome park.

Jagged even exclaimed over the bakery as they passed the scene of Animan’s defeat.

“Penny! We should buy croissants!”

Marinette cringed. If her parents saw her in this get-up she might be forced to drown herself in the Seine. But Chat was already bouncing forward, like an overexcited kitten chasing a butterfly.

Heh. She’d have to save that one for Chat later - the real Chat, her Chat. It suddenly felt like ages since their last patrol.

“This is where Ladybug and I made our strategic…. retreat during the battle,” Fake Chat announced, interrupting the sudden onslaught of feelings . “But, that’s not all! Ladybug and I would be nothing without the brave citizens of Paris -”

“You wouldn’t have any akuma, for a start,” Mlle Rolling muttered.

“ - And this fact has never been more evident than during that tumultuous struggle! The Dupain-Cheng family, who own this bakery, risked their lives to protect us and sheltered us within these very walls!”

He was hamming it up mightily, clasping his hands to his chest with emotion. Jagged was enthralled and even Mlle Rolling looked reluctantly impressed. Despite herself, Marinette couldn’t help wiping her eyes. Her parents were awesome!

“We have got to go!” Jagged crowed, shaking his manager’s shoulder, like a child begging for a treat.

“Right!” Chat enthused. “Their madeleine are to die for!”

Also, wait. How did he know all this? Was he one of their regulars? She appraised him subtly, but, as usual, got nothing. Just a teenage boy her age, like millions of others in Paris.

He probably lived in the area. Perhaps his school was making him do Work Experience too?

Small world.

Chat started to cross the street, grinning like he could already taste the macaroons.

And that was when the screaming started.

[aeroknot]

here have 1,740 words out of 17,600 words of narusaku headcanon

.............i’m goin’ in deep y’all sry not sry (ok i AM kinda sry to those on mobile who have to scroll past this....... i wish mobile didn’t suck like that so you can avoid watching me be a huge dweeb instead of pro’lly what you decided to follow me for hnnnnggh)

these are 2 separate moments I came up with that I eventually tied together after some editing (/fantasizing about my own ideas) passes:

at a gathering with their friends, they both got insufferably cocky about a game involving pairs against pairs, and the stakes kept rising, eventually hinging on some pretty risky bets. when they lost, they were mortified in having to eat the brightly colored crow their friends (conspirators, the useless lot of them!) came up with. they had to temporarily dye their hair the other’s hair color, and couldn’t wash it out for a whole week (or use a genjutsu?). so sakura had to work around the hospital with blonde hair, and pink-haired naruto was at the mercy of his sharp-tongued genin students. people wonder if sakura meant to and if she wants to look more like her shishou, which is cool and all, but most everyone says they like her pink hair better, which is a relief. The most annoying part is the humiliation she feels since she had to do it as the result of her own hubris. he complains about the relentless teasing savagery of his genin students while they’re walking along the canal on their last evening of this punishment, but admits to sakura he doesn’t mind the hair so much and shares he’s often wondered what it’d be like to have his mother’s hair, and pink is similarly distinctive and beautiful and in the same color family. It’s the first comparison of one of her features to his mother’s he speaks aloud, and his heart starts racing because he momentarily forgets she doesn’t know about his mother’s words to find a girl like her. Completely unaware of his thoughts and sudden nervousness, she serenely replies, “I’m sorry she’s not here to experience how sweet her son can be to her… I wonder if she would have liked me? I think I’d have liked her” she actually doesn’t take his silence personally, sort of because she doesn’t think what she said requires a response, but mostly because she’s distracted. they get around some trees at the edge of the pathway right at that moment, allowing a beautiful view of the brilliantly warm-toned sunset. she makes a noise of appreciation and with a childlike wonder he hasn’t seen on her in a little while, she cheerily says, “this sunset has all our colors, Naruto!” “Yeah” he says, a little breathless. “All our colors.” He watches her until she notices (trrrooopey as fuuuuuuck, i know, shut up) and smiles real big at him but humorously admonishes, “Don’t look at me, weirdo! You see me all the time, but you don’t see the same sunset twice” then she faces it again. So he puts his hands in his pockets to stop their quivering as the scene soaks in and suddenly it’s just really hard to see her green eyes with his blonde hair. he turns to take in the sunset too, and he thinks, “she would have loved you, Sakura… we can bet on it” (originally all i’d written here was the first paragraph, and then I think my subconscious LEAPT OUT AT ME the next time I read it to provide this sunset scene -- they’re my rainbow sherbet fighting dreamers ninja family!!!)

~ & ~

In my headcanon world, Naruto and Sakura have five kids, two of which are adopted and three conceived. * I want to note here that I almost never go the “lots and lots of babies” route w/ my otp’s. 3 out of my top 5 do not go on to have kids in my interpretations of them. But for Naruto and Sakura it makes sense, and this is especially based in my conviction he would want to adopt and he would want a big family to experience the exact opposite of his childhood. So, yeah, 5 makes a lot of sense to me. I tend to think they are resistant to the idea of kids for a while bc of the threats to their lives, but they eventually decide they both really want to have kids after fostering two boys and it’s so hard to eventually let them go on to their adoptive parents. Sooo.. their youngest are twins; they’re named Konohana and Sakuya. And my reasoning for this, as well as for all the other names, is pretty in depth. Here: I first heard about Konohana from @yellowflasher‘s great fanfics. She has a Konohana and Kae (not twins), and I asked her once if she named Konohana after the myth, and she said she actually hadn’t seen or heard it before. It obviously stuck with me tho!! Uzumaki Konohana = from the Konohanasakuya-hime mythology. I just discovered with this name theme of using myths I coulda inadvertently referenced Kushina and Minato as well!! -- Kushina’s name could have been derived from Kushinadahime, a goddess of rice/life, and Susanoo is her husband, the god of STORMS aka Namikaze Minato. (Maybe other peeps in the fandom already knew this but I’m late to the party. Oh well! I was shocked when I learned this yesterday.) And it honors Konohagakure, and honors Sakura: ‘flower’ is part of the name. Konohana was conceived (twin to Sakuya)

Uzumaki Sakuya = from the Konohanasakuya-hime mythology. And see above for the comments about the possible Kushina/Minato connection. And it honors Sakura: it’s literally 2/3rds her name; one different ending syllable. & naruto calls her Momo-chan, and I explain why below.

After deciding all this, I came up with this moment: Naruto and Sakura love the names from the princess myth but also love they are referring to Konoha and Sakura. tho, because Sakuya can sometimes sound too similar to Sakura, confusingly so-- and as Naruto’s the only one who has to say both names in the household (y’know, because it’s either “Sakuya” or “mom” said by everyone else, the kids don’t call her Sakura) -- he often calls her “Momo-chan.” as a kid she’s not sure why but just rolls with it and then one day in her later childhood it dawns on her: orange + pink = peach (note: momo means the fruit and momo-iro means the color but I think naruto would just keep it short and simple as momo-- he’d probably argue an orange plus a cherry equals a peach anyway, somehow……... hahhh! I actually looked it up and peaches are in the same genus as cherries and apricots, and apricots are orange :P not that naruto would know this but sakura would be like me and probs research it lol). Sakura expresses concern that Konohana will feel jealous or excluded if he doesn’t give her a nickname too, and he forlornly / guiltily (at having not even thought of that) approaches Konohana with this. She’s rather young to be considering this so thoughtfully -- maybe 4 or 5 -- but her answer never changes as she grows up (though the vocabulary / phrasing she uses might mature…. But I say might, haha); “don’t change me; I love my name!! it is like our home so it means I will become hokage like daddy!! and it is like flowers like mommy’s flower so it means people are happy and have a party when i show up!!” (she’s talking about hanami) naruto immediately bursts into tears bc holy shit he just loves this kid so!! much!!! ( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ _ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ ) sakura’s doing better at keeping it together, tho not by much, lmao

Some months into the nickname of Momo-chan settling in, there’s a morning where it’s brought into question again. while sakura and naruto are folding laundry, the twins rush in from the backyard to show them something they’re excited about in their grubby cupped hands. “Look! loo~oook! polli-wolly-wogs!!” (tadpoles-- i have great affection for this term for them bc mei in the english dub of totoro calls them that, and totoro is a defining touchstone of my young childhood) naruto intones, “eeehhhh? How cool, konohana-chan!! Momo-chan! Maybe uncle Gamakichi knows ‘em, huh?” and they laugh and stick their tongues out at him, “he’s not our uncle! He’s a toad!” yet they’re making ribbiting sounds as they run off to return the tadpoles. Sakuya trips and just narrowly regains her footing at the last moment to prevent toppling herself and the tadpoles across the floor. “careful, momo-chan!” Naruto offers in a loud voice, but calmly-- he holds back his concern, as he’s learned that a lot of the time kids decide whether they should cry based on their parents’ reactions, namely whether they freak out a lot, and he’s done a lot of freaking out, and is trying something new now, pfft. He watches her right herself, check on the tadpoles in her hands, nod once firmly and give a determined “mm!” in acknowledgement of his caution, and they scamper off. 

So then Sakura asks, with some humor in her voice even tho she’s going for annoyed: “naruto, why’d we even name her sakuya if you’re just gonna keep calling her momo-chan?” “aahh, sakura-chan. She’s just little momo to her daddy. Out in the real world she’ll be called the name inspired by her mind-blowing mom.” the tinge of pink on her cheeks does not get past him and the side of his mouth starts to twitch into a smirk. He roguishly continues with, “I thought about making you the one I address with a nickname instead, but all the ones I could come up with aren’t appropriate in front of the kids” she tries to look aghast but she’s fighting her mutinous mouth starting to veer into a big smile, and to distract his gaze away from this very visible and losing battle across her face, she twists a towel and snaps it at him. They play fight until they fall onto the bed, halfway into the now half-undone laundry. They rest a little bit, soaking in the calm moment, his upper body on top of her lower body-- resting his head on her stomach and holding her around her waist. Her eyes are closed and she’s absent-mindedly running her fingers through his hair. Then he softly voices, “little peach... she’s our colors, Sakura.” and she does vividly remember the sunset he’s recalling. She answers with his words from years ago: “Yeah. our colors.”

(god i’m really driving home this rainbow sherbet ninja family theme aren’t i???? Don’t care!!!! I love it!!! They are my faves they deserve everything I have to offer!!!!)

THE END.

(....except not bc..... there’s...... uh..... 15860 words left...... yeah those figures..... weren’t hyperbolic, i am actually that much of a dork)

[linmeiwei]

Miscarriage

This is going to be a post about miscarriage. Since this is a blog about writing, I want to get this out in the open, for all you writers who want to use miscarriage in your story. But it’s also a personal post, and so if you have had a miscarriage, if someone near you has had one, or if you are a woman likely to get pregnant and might have one in the future, this is for you.

I’ll keep the background brief: 2 years ago I became pregnant. It was unplanned, but as soon as I saw the pregnancy test result I knew I was keeping it. I was unprepared for the roller-coaster that followed, but for five months I was increasingly in love with my baby, I named it (not knowing the sex I gave it two names) and I couldn’t wait to meet it. I finally realised why so many pregnant ladies can’t answer the question of whether they want a boy or a girl. Like, you really couldn’t care less. You just want to meet your baby and find out everything about it, and you have no demands.

During my 20 week scan, I found out that the baby was no longer alive. I won’t go into detail here, sufficed to say that the news was crushing, and that what followed was a level of depression, accompanied by anxiety and PTSD that I had never suspected I was even capable of. I’m normally an energetic, upbeat and optimistic person, and within the span of minutes I was an empty shell. I woke up every day with no idea what the purpose of anything was anymore.

Here’s the thing, though, some of my pain came from the things people said to me after it happened. I know, it’s crazy to think that, but somehow we as a society talk of miscarriage so little, that people (no matter how well-intentioned) simply don’t know what to say, don’t know how to react, and will say some of the most painful and insensitive things you can imagine.

Here’s some things people said to me after I miscarried.

Person 1

Person One has had two kids. She was sympathetic when she found out, and I know she was very sad for me. But at some point she said: “Huh, really makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, I had two kids, one after another, just like that, no problem at all.”

Knowing that other people get to have their 20 week scan and find out the sex of their baby and see its heart beating, while you get to stay in bed all day, staring at the ceiling and contemplating how great it would be if you could just fall asleep and never wake up, is one of the most depressing things that will happen to you. You don’t need anybody rubbing it in.

Person 2

Person Two was aghast when she found out. She was in actual tears. When she visited me after she found out, she demanded, almost indignantly, to know how it was that I didn’t know that the baby was already dead inside me. “What,” she cried, horrified, “didn’t you feel it kicking?” I was still in shock, of course, and numb with pain, so I answered, “I thought I did, I don’t know.” To which Person Two grabbed my hand and, tapping her fingers on the back of my hand, mimicked the feeling of a baby kicking inside of you.

The English language has no words to describe how sick this made me feel. I can still feel her fingers on my hand today.

After the miscarriage, I felt choking waves of guilt. I felt guilty for bringing people’s hopes up about a baby. I felt guilty about making everybody sad. I felt guilty, because maybe this was my fault. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough mother, a good enough pregnant lady. I felt like a fool. I certainly didn’t need someone implying that I was an idiot for not divining the truth sooner.

Person 3

This was actually several people. These people simply didn’t say anything at all. I don’t want to speak for other women who have had this experience, but I think that for people who aren’t close to me, who aren’t good friends or relatives, it’s okay to say nothing, unless directly confronted with the news and the person to whom the news pertains. But if you are close, it’s weird not to say anything.

The people who pretended nothing had happened hurt me, because I already felt like I’d made the whole thing up. Like I didn’t have a right to my grief, because nobody had met the person who died. But for me, the person was real. The baby was part of my everyday life.

Person 4

Again, several people did this. They gave advice. Practical advice like: “just get pregnant again, as soon as you can.” You wouldn’t say, to a grieving widow, days after her husband passed on, to marry again as soon as she could, would you? The truth is, some widows are ready to move on again quickly, and some aren’t, and it’s none of anybody’s business when this will happen. It’s intrusive and rude to make this decision for someone.

But none of these people meant to hurt me.

That was the crazy thing. All of these people were genuinely sad for me, and I strongly believe that they were all trying to be helpful.

Person 1

She told me about her healthy children not because she wanted to brag, but probably she just suddenly felt incredibly privileged to never have had a miscarriage. And she was right to feel that way. She just shouldn’t have said it.

I too feel privileged. I became pregnant without even trying, and how many people out there can’t do that? How many couples try for years and years without avail? How many go through invasive, tiresome, expensive treatments, without any result? I was so lucky to even get as far as I had.

Person 2

I probably made Person 2 sound unforgivably cruel, and she was being that, although again I’m sure she didn’t mean to be. The truth is that when you’re sad, when you’re emotional, you will say dumb things. Everybody does that. Sometimes feelings get the better of us, and we say and do stupid things, which are painful to other people, before we can think the better of it.

Person 3

The people who didn’t say anything – they were mostly men, and mostly younger men. But there was at least one person who is (very) close family, and a woman, who never said a word to me about it. They also didn’t mean to be hurtful. They simply either didn’t understand what happened (and if you’re a young man, how can you? I mean, genuinely, it’s probably so outside your sphere of experience that it must seem like a non-event to you); or they did, but they didn’t know how to approach the subject. And then as day after day passed they probably thought that it would be awkward to say anything, and then the window of opportunity closed and now it’s too late.

Person 4

Again, the people in this category were men. And again, they were really trying to be helpful, by giving practical advice. They thought that if I jumped on the horse again, it would take my mind off my troubles. They thought that if I did what they suggested, exercised and ate well etc. I’d feel better.

The trouble is, of course, that it implies that a) I didn’t know that I should be doing those things already, and b) that I somehow chose to not exercise, to eat shitty foods, and to stay in bed all day without a baby in my arms. Like the infamous “just get over it,” it’s only helpful advice to someone who isn’t genuinely experiencing depression and grief.

In truth, my inability to get out of bed, to exercise, to take care of myself was, even as it was a symptom of my depression, also a source of it. It was depressing to think that I was a human waste of space, a burden on my husband, a barren, lifeless, purpose-less shell of a person.

I didn’t need reminders of that.

So what should these people have done?

It’s all well and good to moan about the terrible decisions people made, when I spoke to them after the miscarriage, but it’s not helpful to anyone right now unless I clarify what did help.

In the first instance, my husband took care of me. He literally nursed me back onto my feet. He fed me, he brought me water, he sat with me, he allowed me to cry and grieve as long as it took, listened to me and, when I was ready, was there to cheer me up.

My brother stayed with us for a while as this was happening, and he did the same. It helped. It got me through the worst of it.

But you might not be close enough to the person this has happened to. You might feel like you’d be intruding, offering that kind of help.

In that case, the people who responded best to the news, in my case, were the ones who, once in a while, sent me messages saying: “I’m thinking about you. How are you doing?” Or: “I’m so sorry about what happened/about your loss. Let me know if you’d like to talk. I’m here for you.”

Don’t get freaked out if you don’t get a response. They might not be ready to talk, but they’ll appreciate the thought all the same.

Don’t get freaked out if they overshare. Emotions might be high, there are hormones coursing through their veins, which can make them react in ways that aren’t normal or natural to them. At one point I wrote a message to my best friend describing the birth (yes, you still have to give birth) in excruciating detail. I have no idea why I did that. You don’t have to read anything like that if you don’t want to, just say, “Wow, that sounds awful, I’m so sorry this happened to you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

Finally, it weirdly helped to hear about other people’s miscarriages. It helped in particular, when the people who have had them then went on to have babies. It just gives you hope.

In the end, things did get better. 

As the Persians used to say, “This too shall pass.” It never goes away entirely, of course. I see girls (it turned out to be a girl) in the street, in prams or learning to walk, or sitting on their parent’s shoulders, and I think that my baby would be roughly that age now. And I get sad.

Sometimes I see parents getting impatient with their children, or I see them get really trashy food for them, and I feel judgemental and angry, because I feel like they don’t appreciate how lucky they are to be able to have kids at all.

But these negative feelings lighten with time, and become less pressing. Less consuming.

I no longer feel like my life has no meaning. I find happiness in other things.

Okay, sorry if this got dark. Here’s the cutest thing on the internet:

[all-about-buckyandsupernatu-blog]

Thank You

Writer: Figgy For: @myfandomimaginesworld A/n: I don’t know if this is the kind of protective you wanted, but once I started writing, this is what came out. So I hope you enjoy it! Warnings: idk poorly written fight scene?

“Heeeey Y/n,” smiled Stiles as he shimmied beside you onto the seat at the lunch table.

“Hi Stiles,” you smiled, vaguely uncomfortable. You didn’t know him very well, but you certainly knew of him. Finstock was never one to keep quiet, despite telling everyone else to “shut it”. Anyone who has had a class with Finstock has heard the story of the “kid who wrote an essay on the history of male circumcision” instead of the actual economics exam.

“So what are you?” Blatancy. Charming. Also, what?

“Stiles, you can’t just ask people what they are,” his partner-in-crime murmured, aghast. “I’m Scott.” Hand extended, you stared it, only because you didn’t know what else to do with his hand extended towards you. You weren’t big on physical contact with strangers.

“Scott says you smell different,” Stiles continues, seemingly unaware of his words.

“I… smell?” You ask, pulling at a strand of hair and pulling it to your face to inhale. Smells normal. This couldn’t be about… could it?

“Excuse him,” says the popular girl with the complicated reputation. You know she throws great parties, but she also apparently runs through the forest naked, and has spent some time in the local “mental health centre”. You couldn’t help but wonder what these people were doing sitting with you? But you were beginning to get an idea. Best to play it cool. No need to out yourself as supernatural if that’s not what they’re here for.

“You’re new here, we get it,” smiles Danny the friend you made in computer science earlier. “But this is Beacon Hills.”

A large crowd of people end up surrounding you at your lunch table. The blonde that was sick and now kicks ass, the strong silent guy that goes everywhere with her, a guy with a flashy smile and scarf, a few kids in the grade below you, your history teacher’s daughter, the girl you heard growling in math class, the other lacrosse team co-captain, and the girl in your English class who leant you a pencil earlier and said “I’m just paying it forward,” when you thanked her. They all seemed friendly enough, but this… this was weird, right? Making friends at a new school is never this easy, right?

Something was definitely off.

Wandering through the preserve was proving to be less productive than you originally thought it would. It had to be here somewhere, the Nemeton. Your faerie ring had sent you out on this mission to earn your wings, and you were definitely going to get them. But first you had to find the Nemeton and-

“I told you she was up to something,” you heard Stiles say, “no one wanders through the preserve like this for fun.”

“I do,” responded a deeper, unfamiliar voice.

“Can you just for once not ruin things, Derek?” he whined back. “I know it’s your thing, I do. But she’s up to something.”

“She can hear you,” responded Derek gruffly.

“Shit,” he said, as you walked onto their path.

~~~~

“She’s here to drain the Nemeton of it’s charge,” announces Stiles tot he group. “No more supernatural junk being drawn to Beacon Hills. No more having to study for exams after a night of fighting off whatever supernatural being is drawn to it. I say we help her.”

“Shouldn’t we check with Deaton? Y’know, make sure there won’t be any supernatural consequences?”

“For once, can’t we just do something without consequences?”

“What even happens when she drains the Nemeton? Where does the power go?” asks Malia, who had spent a solid minute smelling you when you entered Scott’s house for the “pack meeting”. She didn’t look put off, just curious.

“I gain the power,” you said, excitedly, and when everyone turned to look at you skeptically, like they were about to stop helping you, you added, ”and it becomes my wings.”

“I really don’t think we should be helping a stranger get more power,” Derek grumbled, arms crossed, leaning against the wall, staring at you suspiciously.

“I’m harmless, I promise!” you declare. “Check out the kind of magic I do.” You outstretched your hands, wiggling your fingertips for show, and sparkles appeared in the air, the sparkles bursting into rainbows and more sparkles. The illusion lasted maybe ten seconds. It wasn’t the biggest trick you could do, but it was your favourite. “I’m from a peaceful faerie ring not to far from here, and I can assure you that if I don’t drain the Nemeton, someone else will.”

“Can you give us a better reason to help you?” Scott asks.

“Well… maybe I can help you, too. I can make a charm for anyone that wants one. Luck, love, a charm for shifting, glamour charms, the list goes on, really.”  

The room is silent for a moment, before Malia asks “A charm for shifting? I could be a coyote again?”

You smiled softly at her. “I can make a charm for that, yes.” She started to look hopeful for a moment, so you added “I don’t make crutches. It’ll only work a few times, and it’s designed to help you learn how to do it on your own.”

“I’m in.” Malia looks visibly relaxed, like a weight had been lifted off of her shoulders.

Slowly, a few others make charm requests.

~~~~

“Scott, it worked,” Malia tells him. “I ran around all night as a coyote, and shifting wasn’t a problem at all. It felt natural, and I think I’ll be able to get the hang of it.”

“For real? That’s awesome!” His smile soft. “Looks like we have a Nemeton to drain.”

~~~

When the group brought you to the Nemeton, you were all surprised to find a few strangers there. A tall, creepy woman with long, lanky fingers, thin hair hanging to her visible ribs, blue, slimy looking skin and glowing yellow eyes. Beside her was a man, shorter, head resting seemingly permanently on his left shoulder, a blank expression in his dark eyes.

Everyone was silent when your eyes met hers. Everything was silent. The forest around smelled like the musk of wet, fallen leaves.

When the woman spoke, her voice echoed throughout the woods like screaming fox, though she was speaking silently. “Hello faerie,” her eyes bored into you, and it you could have sworn it was the ground shaking below you, if it weren’t for your buckling knees. “I see you brought friends. Friends, hand faerie over.”

“What is she?” Erica asked you, holding one of your elbows.

“A predator,” you say, it barely coming out of your mouth. Derek and Scott moved in front of you immediately, Isaac and Erica on either side, Stiles not far away with his baseball bat.

~~~

The weres fought valiantly against the woman with the glowing yellow eyes and her puppet man while you climbed onto the Nemeton and began a power draining ritual.

You could hear everything going on - it was actually hard to tune out her creepy voice. It sounded like it was everywhere. With your nails grown into the Nemeton, the power slowly coming into you like air you hadn’t noticed you’d been missing, you were prone.

Scott was behind you, watching your back, while Malia fought against the long lady directly. The height difference was staggering, leaving Malia at a minor disadvantage. What she hadn’t accounted for, however, was the team work between Kira and Malia. You smiled seeing them working so well together.

A darkness to your left, you turned your head quickly to see the puppet man practically flying at you. You stopped breathing. Instinct said to block him, but with your hands still ingrained into the Nemeton, you’d have to break the ritual first. The Nemeton wouldn’t respond to another ritual after this one broke, and you would lose all chances of getting your wings. You held your breath as you tried to decide what to do.

You were just about to break the bond when Stiles appeared and struck the guy with his bat.

You could tell that he had just proclaimed some one liner, and he looked proud of it based on how he was smiling, but you honestly couldn’t hear him over the sound of your blood pumping in your ears. You had been so scared, and had almost given up your only chance at getting your wings.

It wouldn’t take much longer. And with Derek now on the puppet man, he couldn’t come after you now. The woman was still distracted by Kira and Malia, and quickly failing. It looked like she would give up soon. And when Malia slit her throat, and the fell to the ground, you figured she did.

~~~

“Do we get to see them?” Asked Kira

“It’ll take a few days for the magic to sink in and for them to grow,” you said, “but when they do, yeah, I’ll be sure to show you.”

A few of them smiled around their takeout as we all ate together for a celebration meal. You smiled, too.

“Thank you for helping me, everyone.” They all nodded, like it wasn’t a big deal. “I mean it,” you say. “If I had found the Nemeton on my own and encountered that lady, alone, she would have eaten me. You literally saved my life just by being there.”

Stiles wrapped his arm around your shoulders. “We’re kind of heroes around here. It’s what we do.” He shoved some food in his mouth as light danced off his eyes. “And just think: it’s going to be a lot calmer around here from now on!”

Everyone here seemed so happy, and if they let you, you might just stay.

[biofunmy]

How Do We Sing Our ABC’s? L-M-N-O-Please Not Like That

This week, the people of the internet rallied to the defense of the elemenopee.

That’s the letters L, M, N, O and P of the English alphabet, which, if you sing them in the alphabet song, tumble together in a brisk legato that makes the letters hard to distinguish from one another.

In musical notation, legato calls for a series of notes to be played or sung smoothly together. That is how a lot of people sing their ABC’s from the 12th letter through the 16th — with one note change, and no pause for air.

But in one version of the song, that legato is eliminated so that each letter has space to breathe. When you hear it for the first time, it can be jarring — the bar that typically ends with P seems to stop short at N, and the timing and rhyming are thrown into disarray after that.

So when a comedian shared that version on Twitter on Friday, calling it “life ruining,” many people were similarly aghast.

The comedian, Noah Garfinkel, has written for shows including “New Girl,” “Abby’s” and “Single Parents.” (You might also know him from “The Good Place.” He didn’t write for the show, but it used a portrait of Mr. Garfinkel to portray the young Doug Forcett, a character who guessed the truth about the afterlife while tripping on mushrooms.)

In an email, Mr. Garfinkel called the L-M-N-O-P sequence “the highlight of the original song.” “In the new version,” he said, “you’re led to the same comforting place you’re used to all the way through the letter K, only to be suddenly thrown into the rhythmic equivalent of a roller rink bathroom.”

Jokes about the altered alphabet song came quickly on social media. There were disappointed GIFs everywhere.

“I will not sit idly by, while the media conveniently pivot to more revisionist history!” Nic Nemeth, a comedian and WWE wrestler, said on Twitter. “What’s next, the twinkle from a star?”

But this version of the alphabet song is not new. The clip shared by Mr. Garfinkel came from a YouTube video posted by the account Dream English Kids in 2012. The protagonist of these videos, a man named Matt, has performed the song the other way, too.

In an email on Wednesday, Matt declined to share his last name but said that he had been making educational songs and videos for more than a decade, and that they had been used in classrooms around the world.

He said the idea for the altered alphabet song came from a book about teaching English to children.

“The book said that if you can find an ABC song with a slow L-M-N-O-P, it is very helpful for young learners to recognize each letter,” he said. “As a musician and teacher, I decided to make my own version. That was about 10 years ago.”

The melody of the alphabet song, at least, has been fairly consistent for centuries. It is often attributed to Mozart, but he didn’t compose the original tune — only variations on it. The song has existed since at least 1761, when it was published without lyrics in a French book of music called “Les Amusements d’une Heure et Demy.”

“Mozart also had nothing to do with words,” said Bob Kosovsky, the curator of rare books and manuscripts for the music division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “His setting is for piano.”

Over the years, the melody has been linked to lyrics about a child who wanted to eat sweets, a woman falling in love, a twinkling star, and a black sheep with three bags’ worth of wool.

Mr. Kosovsky called the Twitter debates over the alphabet song a “tempest in a teapot,” but he also weighed in on the version shared by Mr. Garfinkel.

“It violates the rhyme created by the letter G rhyming with the letter P,” he said. “Without that, it’s much more difficult to remember the words.”

Catherine McBride, a developmental psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an expert in early literacy, agreed that the classic version of the alphabet song benefited from the “e” sound at the end of each line.

“One of the most important aspects of children’s early learning is that children love rhymes,” she said in an email. She added that the fast L-M-N-O-P was well placed, highlighting a middle section of the alphabet that children might otherwise forget.

“It is true that some children memorize L-M-N-O-P as one lump,” Dr. McBride added. “But I don’t think this is a problem. It is a good way for them to pronounce a lot of information (letters) quickly.”

But Matt said the altered version could be a useful alternative.

“I am not trying to change or make the new ABC song,” he said. “I simply made another version that I hope is helpful for children to learn the letters, and be able to pronounce them well. This is particularly helpful for students in countries where the English alphabet is not regularly used.”

Mr. Garfinkel acknowledged that the altered version of the song could be useful for some educators.

“A lot of people have responded saying that the new version is actually way more effective in teaching the alphabet,” he said. “And that’s probably true, so it’s a good thing. But I’m already pretty decent at the alphabet, so it’s not doing a lot for me.”

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[topmixtrends]

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION has been about to ruin the country for a long time.

William F. Buckley first sounded the alarm in his 1951 jeremiad God and Man at Yale, and politicians and pundits have echoed him ever since. Soon and very soon, this chorus cries, in unison and across the years, tenured radicals will indoctrinate a generation. Today’s student protestors will capture the commanding heights of American politics and culture tomorrow. Taught to despise capitalism, religion, even Western civilization itself, they will imperil it all.

But the red brigades never take charge. Canonical authors survived the upheavals of the 1960s, and the political correctness craze of the 1990s. Outside of campus, a free enterprise system based on competition and self-interest survived both, too. Perhaps America has her right-wing Cassandras to thank. If not for the occasional broadside like Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, every collegiate football game might begin with a rousing rendition of “The Internationale.”

Or maybe the Cassandras are wrong, and have always been wrong. As far back as 1963, University of California president Clark Kerr was already calling campus radicalism one of the “great clichés about the university.” No matter how wild Berkeley looked on the nightly news (or online today), “the internal reality is that it is conservative.” He was referring to academia’s internal organization, which was and remains steeply hierarchical. But higher education also plays a conservative role in American life. Consider academia’s history or social function at any length, and the cliché of the radical campus becomes difficult to believe. The real question is why it persists.

¤

With no less vigor than Buckley, Mac Donald charges higher education with corrupting the youth and endangering Western culture. While he decried atheism and collectivism, she singles out race and gender studies, which in her mind “dominate higher education.” Today “the overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people […] to view themselves as existentially oppressed.” True to the old formula, Mac Donald warns that what happens on campus won’t stay on campus. Those who cry #MeToo and chronicle microaggessions will one day “seize levers of power.” The stakes, as always, couldn’t be higher: “[A] soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.”

Trained as a lawyer, Mac Donald offers a one-sided brief, a classic polemic. The book is full of anecdotal evidence and statistical sleight-of-hand, with partial truths and gross distortions on almost every other page. Mac Donald is aghast, for example, when UCLA’s English Department drops its Shakespeare requirement, detecting “a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past — and to civilization itself.” She never mentions the department’s extensive historical requirements, or the fact that it will offer 16 courses on Shakespeare this academic year. Outside of higher education, the National Science Foundation is “consumed by diversity ideology” because it offers a few $1 and $2 million-dollar grants for implicit bias research and promoting women and minorities in STEM fields. For context, the NSF’s 2017 budget was $7.4 billion.

In any case, the real problems with the book go beyond shoddy sourcing. Start with the “dominance” of race and gender theory. Departments like African American and Women’s Studies tend to be relatively small, and although race and gender are popular topics across the humanities, an honest look at top university presses, as opposed to small and specialized journals, would find nothing close to dominance. (Harvard University Press’s winter catalog opens with a biography of Charles de Gaulle.) Nor are these issues omnipresent on campus. Mac Donald describes higher education as something like a one-party state, but aside from the occasional banner celebrating “diversity” or a poster asking students not to don a sombrero this Halloween, the supposed ruling party has a suspiciously light touch. From community colleges to the Ivy League, the vast majority of teaching and research proceeds without any reference to race or gender whatsoever.

But surely the professors are as radical as ever, poisoning young minds? It’s true that the professorate sits to the left of the general population, especially at selective liberal arts colleges. But in the most comprehensive survey of higher education available, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, more of the faculty was “moderate” (46 percent) than liberal (44 percent). And while 17.2 percent of older faculty claimed to be “liberal activists,” the percentage of young faculty members who said the same was minuscule: 1.3 percent. Even if the number of activist professors has grown since 2007, they aren’t necessarily radicalizing their students. A good deal of research suggests otherwise. According to the political scientist Mack Mariani and education specialist Gordon Hewitt, students become slightly more liberal during college, but no more than their non-collegiate peers do during the same time period. Fearsome as they seem to Mac Donald, student radicals are like their mentors: met more often online than on campus.

But wait, Mac Donald might reply, what about those posters and banners you mentioned? Like the ones at Berkeley reading “I will acknowledge how power and privilege intersect our daily lives,” or “I will be a brave and sympathetic ally.” Or what about Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion with its bulging staff and $20 million budget? In Mac Donald’s lone innovation to the campus polemic genre, she pays more attention to administrative press releases and campus decorations than she pays to professors’ books. Yet while diversity initiatives (and bunting) are indeed prevalent around many campuses, she misunderstands them. She believes that they reveal “the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood.” What they really reveal, although indirectly, is the present state of one of American higher education’s oldest and most intractable tensions.

Professors and administrators may consider themselves egalitarians, but especially in the top tiers, their schools create elites. As Paul Mattingly writes in American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education, colleges and universities have long been “highly selective devices for producing not only trained minds but also a social leadership class […] in a society formally committed to democratic equality.” Back in the early 1960s, Berkeley’s Kerr thought he had a way to ease this tension between elitism and democracy. “The great university is of necessity elitist — the elite of merit — but it operates in an environment dedicated to an egalitarian philosophy.” This prompted a question: “How may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to a democracy of all men?”

Yale and Harvard once groomed the sons of the nation’s great families, Bushes and Cabots and so on. In postwar America, Berkeley would justify itself on the grounds that it produced “the elite of merit,” a meritocracy. Kerr’s vision of the university is now a reality. A college degree is all but necessary for entry into managerial, professional, or creative fields, which comprise the heart of the nation’s upper middle classes.

The trouble is that in order for a meritocracy to be fair, the competition has to take place on a level playing field: in order to have true equality of opportunity, one’s background shouldn’t determine where one ends up in life. In the United States, it largely does. According to studies headed by the economist Raj Chetty, America’s social mobility rate lags behind that of Canada, Denmark, and even the United Kingdom, a famously class-bound society. Although college admissions looks like a level playing field (anyone can apply to Harvard), SAT scores follow family income, and the overall admissions process favors those who can pay the sticker price, even after taking affirmative action into account.

Once enrolled in selective institutions, students compete with each other again — for grades, prestigious extra-curricular positions, and internships. They build social networks and learn to work and behave in line with the norms of the upper middle class. After graduation the victors, bedecked with honors, can pursue lucrative careers, or even rise to positions of prominence in American public life. But despite all that competition, a 2015 Pew study still found that “a family’s economic circumstances play an exceptionally large part in determining a child’s economic prospects later in life.” To the extent that its sorting process reflects existing inequalities, higher education can’t help but replicate and thereby reinforce inequalities in society at large. There’s a word for an institution that does that, and it isn’t radical.

In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again. The promise of affirmative action is that it will work against this tendency, at least a little. Affirmative action policies often assist students from poor families, and after college they do about as well as their wealthier peers.

There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, stratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, “a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media.” But will those who attain “the highest reaches of government and media” really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either.

So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich.

Even more, though, precisely because higher education turns out the American elite, small disturbances in academia resonate deeply within the conservative soul. The political theorist Corey Robin has argued that reactionaries draw their energy from “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Whether it’s Burke horrified by the fall of the Bourbons, or Buckley opposing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, conservative movements thrive on imminent threats to existing hierarchies. Imperiled, they sound the alarm, rally the troops, man the battlements, and eventually ride out to conquer. Robin has suggested that, despite its seeming strength, American conservatism is actually in disarray because it lacks a worthy antagonist. Numerically speaking, the socialist left is tiny, while the Democratic Party embraces “market-based” solutions to health care scarcity and global warming. Without a suitable enemy, the whole movement could collapse.

But what’s that sound? A handful of protestors on the quad? They’ve arrived in the nick of time! Never mind that they’ve been showing up since the 1950s. This time, it’s different. This time, the threat to “our culture” is real. If so, then even modest reforms — meant to do nothing more terrible than diversify the upper middle class — must be opposed as if they were threats to civilization itself.

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran University and the University of Southern California. In 2017, he received the National Book Critics Circle’s “emerging critic” award.

The post Why Are Conservatives So Afraid of Higher Education? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SJeHaT

[theprofoundtrashbouquets-blog]

A story

This is a blog.

And you’ve probably already knew that before you even read this line.

My first blog to be precise.

Why did you write this specific blog you might ask? Well, I’m a really chatty person and I cannot handle a few minutes without noise. Maybe that’s why I’m a music enthusiast. I honestly cannot function normally if I don’t have a beat to listen to on repeat. I honestly feel like the silence is going to swallow me if I don’t make a disturbance. Going back, I’m writing this blog today because I feel like I really need to share this specific idea to world. I know I’m not the best one to talk about self-actualization, but like nearly all of you reading this, you haven’t discovered yourself. I’m writing this because I want to share my point of view and personal vices to the world and hopefully inspire someone out there struggling with the same problem set I have, or something synonymous to that.

Let’s start me start by telling you the story of my youth. So far…

Growing up, I could say I had one of the most picturesque ones out there. I grew up with loving parents, a strong sense of family, and an awesome set of neighborhood friends. I grew up without problems (not that I can recall any) and if there was a problem, I would always stay hopeful until the next day. After the day, comes breakfast. And breakfast is the most important of all the meals eaten in a day! I had happiness whenever I looked. That is when I grew up. I learned honesty the hard way.  

It was mid-July and my cousins came for a surprise visit. Now I want you to imagine the Olympics. Games, medals, and all. It was like that, but just at a suburban backyard level. But make no mistake, the element of anxiety caused by an internationally-acclaimed-sporting-event was upon us all. We played simple games like tag, hide-n-seek, cops and robbers, and hopscotch at an Olympian level. After a few hours in the sun, my mom then calls us all in the kitchen for some juice and supermarket apple pie.

As we entered the kitchen, the air still had that sharp, subtle undertone of competitive spirit creeping up on us. It was like a silent battle royal from the moment we entered the kitchen, ate the supermarket apple pie, drank the juice, stood up from our child-sized chairs, raced walked out of the kitchen, took the first steps on the lawn, and resumed playing our child-appropriate Olympics.

After we had reach a mutual understanding that a child should not ever, not in any circumstances, join the Olympics, even if it’s child appropriate. So we did the only appropriate thing in dire times like this. We played Barbie. I know, incredibly appropriate indeed. To spice things up a bit, we added a theatrical element to the roster of characters. It was like a production of Toy Story on Broadway. I can remember these moments vividly until this day. Not because I remember how fun it was, but because I can still remember the trauma. My dad walks in on us playing and looks aghast while doing so.

Dad: “Son, real men don’t play with Barbies! I didn’t raise you to become a sissy.”

Well at least that was what it sounded like. The sentence doesn’t translate well in English. I remember this because up to this day I can’t do anything without reminding myself to act like a “Real Man.”

“A real man can’t show any other emotions except for anger.”

“A real man must be fit, buff, and bulky.”

“A real man must take charge of everything.”

I wished I didn’t care all the time. Because at times I would get bullied and I found the best way to stop it was not giving them my time. The thing is I couldn’t. I still cared. At one point, I thought being pretty would solve all my problems, because let’s face it, having a pretty face is more acceptable than a smart brain. And so began my Anorexia. Sucks to be me doesn’t it?

But fret not! Because there are still second chances out there. Every time I would walk down the hall, I would see my bullies. Being a 6ft guy like me, you’d think, “How in the world does he have bullies?” trust me, I don’t even know why. If it wasn’t for my fast wit and sharp tongue, I would’ve been lower than I am now!

My journey started when I was child. You see, I wasn’t the same as other children. I was fat. And even as a child, I felt the pressure to look and feel normal. In 7th grade I even went to the hospital just to feel pretty. I did this diet (I’m not going to tell you because of safety reasons) and basically, I starved myself for three days straight. My body couldn’t handle being famished for so long so it had to give at one point. And that is why, on February, I came home with 8 stiches on the side of head. Now, it’s just this weird long scar on the side of head. You’d think that this was enough for me, well it was at one point, and then I cared.

I started to go on a fast, but this time I researched it thoroughly, and began removing food gradually on my plate. I was getting thinner and thinner at this point and yet I was still not satisfied and I began to hate myself even more, so I speeded things up a bit by exercising for 3 hours for 5 times a week for 1 month. I came back to school the following semester, and we weighed ourselves after a month. I lost 20 pounds (10kg, give or take a few because of the time of the weighing and the scale used), the largest I have ever lost. I was weighing about 180 pounds at that time, my ribs were already showing, and still, I wanted to be thinner. I adapted a more rigid fasting method, and began to exercise for longer periods of time while keeping my line of straight A’s on my report card.

Then this all started to change one day.

I was getting ready for my next class and I felt my throat drying up so I grabbed a sip of some cold water I brought along to school. It soothed the dryness in my throat, but what I felt afterwards was complete hell. My stomach started to sting. Badly. And I swore I was drawing attention to myself at that point. It got to the point where I felt like I was going to vomit. My friend came to me and asked me, “Are you okay?” then I said, “My stomach hurts.” She asked, “Why?” and I said, “I haven’t eaten in days.” What she said to me after that are words that still haunt me and made me evaluate the meaning in my life.

“Are you trying to kill yourself!?”

And I guess I was.

I guess that, if I could’ve loved and accepted myself, I wouldn’t in this place.

I guess, if I could’ve cared less about their standards, none of this would happen.

And I guess, if I could’ve just accepted the fact that I was gay, things wouldn’t turn out to be this way.

I’m still battling Anorexia at this point, but don’t worry, I’m fine. I can manage. I know I’m not the one to talk about self-discovery, because honestly, I haven’t discovered what truly means to be me. But that is exactly what I’m going to do. I have that, up to this point in life, realized a few things in order to reach my discovery.

One, is that I started to decide what I wanted to become in the future and on New Year’s Day, I decided that I’m going to live my life without apologizing for being me. This time is about self-healing and not people-pleasing.

Two, is that I reexamined my habits that have allowed me to reach the biggest lows and highs in my life. Now I’m taking steps to ensure that I won’t make the mistake of killing myself slowly. I also checked them twice to see if there are any hypocrisies in them.

And lastly, and the most important step I’m doing now, is trying to be learn how to be me. Because I miss being me. Like how do you fall back in love with yourself after you’ve grown up to hate it?

Anyways…

I took this picture after hours at school and it like spiritually connected with me. I like sunsets, and this was a particularly pretty sunset. I feel like my life is a sunset, like once I’ve hit my lowest point, everyone thought my of transformation as a success-story, that is until I revealed I was anorexic. I hit one of the darkest lows I’ve hit in my life and the only thing keeping me alive is the light my friends give me. Time passed on, and now, it is my turn to give off some light to the world.

Thank you for your time, and leave a comment down below and I hope you find money on the street, because honestly, it feels great to find money on the street! Bye-bye.

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Will a U.S. Adaptation Ruin Sebastian Lelio’s <i>Gloria</i>?

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/will-a-u-s-adaptation-ruin-sebastian-lelios-gloria/

Will a U.S. Adaptation Ruin Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria?

When asked about the field research he conducted for his film Gloria, the Chilean director Sebastian Lelio described going out with his mother and her friends. “When I have a drink with them,” Lelio told the magazine Cromos in 2014, “I see things from their side because they’re living something so fierce: a cruel process of disappearance, of becoming invisible in a society in which beauty is understood as an obsession with youth.” Despite his choice of words, the 43-year-old director—who is now working on adapting a version of the 2013 drama for American audiences—didn’t actually make a movie that dismisses women beyond their child-bearing years as “disappearing.”

Gloria doesn’t insist on an essential tragicomic sadness in female aging like so many films do. The story’s eponymous hero is 58 and long divorced, checking in at an office job by day, and working Santiago’s swank club-circuit for mature singles by night. Played by a radiant Paulina García, Gloria doesn’t explicitly reject her modest place in Chile’s free-market, so-called “miracle” economy. Instead, she seeks alternative fates on the dance floor, in the narcotic power of Lite FM nostalgia radio and in the companionship of a retired naval officer named Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez). Mostly, though, even with the specter of abandonment and blindness (she gets a glaucoma diagnosis at one point), Gloria luxuriates in her own selfhood. She’s empathic and open and essentially untethered to the stultifying dramas that confine the lives of those around her, including Rodolfo and her grown children.

Critics in Europe and the United States praised Gloria for, among other things, its “authenticity.” Carlos Boyero of El Pais wrote that the film dares to show “with naturalness the nudity of people who’ve entered winter, it shows the desire of their bodies.” Betsy Sharkey observed for The Los Angeles Times that Lelio depicts sex between older adults in a way that “is neither gratuitous nor gross nor glossy.” But this marveling is ironically a feature of how invisibility is assigned and thrives. With Gloria, the tragedy is not in aging, but in the much-remarked novelty of a 60-ish woman in bed as something undistorted and even natural—as if it’s a surprise that human desire might persist to the end of life.

Gloria launched Lelio into the ranks of Chilean directors on the international radar, notably Pablo Larrain (of No and Jackie fame) and Sebastian Silva (The Maid). Lelio’s latest film, Una Mujer Fantástica, starring the trans actress Daniela Vega, opens in theaters across the U.S. in February. His first English-language feature, Disobedience, with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall to acclaim. And now, Lelio is also writing and directing a U.S. adaptation of Gloria, which will be inspired by the original story rather than a regular remake, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film will star Julianne Moore, who has made a career of playing fascinating women across the spectrum of human experience, from a porn actress who’s lost custody of her son in 1997’s Boogie Nights to a linguistics professor with Alzheimer’s in 2014’s Still Alice. With a film as innovative as Gloria, whose  ethos of self-deliverance translates across cultural boundaries, the prospect of a “reimagining” is bittersweet. But there’s reason to hope that, with Lelio at the helm, the Hollywood version could be the director’s rebuke to the fact that Gloria has few equivalents in American cinema.

* * *

Most stories about women in or nearing middle age form part of the small canon of post-divorce bildungsroman films, including Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978), in which an electrifying Jill Clayburgh ultimately thrives after her marriage unravels. More recent examples of similar reckoning include Mike Nichols’s Heartburn (1986), based on Nora Ephron’s novel and screenplay; Richard LaGravenese’s Living Out Loud (1998); Audrey Wells’s Under the Tuscan Sun; and Diane English’s The Women (2008). Still, these movies are about women considerably younger than Gloria and in the midst or immediate aftermath of ill-fated marriages.

Meanwhile, Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and It’s Complicated (2009) are genial, indulgent films about the desirability of their accomplished, older heroines. But each film winks at viewers with the improbability and counterintuitive humor of its premise; suitors swarm, romantic triangles emerge, and sex is reduced to geriatric antics. Isabel Coixet’s Learning To Drive (2014), based on a Katha Pollitt New Yorker essay, stands out as a quieter study of personal restoration and tackling long-delayed projects in the wake of divorce.

But these are all isolated examples of movies in the vein of Gloria. Since John Cassavetes’s defining films from the ’60s and ’70s, in which the inevitability of aging hangs like a guillotine blade, few directors have taken an interest in the full-dimensional humanity of older women. More typically, an aging woman’s longings are mawkish, or else her besottedness makes for absurdist fun. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), the characters are lithe, contemporary reinventions with the grotesque exception of Nora Dinsmoor (Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham) played by Anne Bancroft. Nora is all thwarted womanhood, a permanently jilted bride aghast at the dispossession accrued by age. Her face weeps mortician-grade makeup, a willful perversion of Charles Baudelaire’s idea that women wear cosmetics “to make divine their fragile beauty.”

Somewhere on this same small spectrum, Sally Field plays a disheveled 60-something woman who dons a Minnie Mouse bow and stalks after a younger colleague in Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris (2016). Like Gloria, Doris spends her days in a cubicle—that overused emblem of stifled promise. It turns out she’s a “holdover” from a corporate takeover so that even her age is an eccentricity in an office filled with insouciant youth. Then, with one innocuous and misinterpreted elevator exchange, Doris is suddenly reminded of her own vitality, perhaps for the first time since her fizzled aspirations as a bride decades earlier. But now, the movie suggests, it’s too late for her to enter any desirable man’s field of vision, much less a young one. The comedy, of course, rides on her increasingly frantic efforts to do just that.

And this is where Gloria’s protagonist departs from most similar American heroines: She’s not essentially in conflict with herself. Her loneliness is not a grasping sort, but a dignified bid for transcendence. García appears in every frame with near unwavering grace, even when high on pisco sour and making out with a stranger against a graffiti-scrawled lamppost in Viña del Mar. Viewers watch the surface turbulence of Gloria’s life from a still, clear depth, as though the events are ultimately incidental: Rodolfo’s inability to leave the collection of broken, dependent adults that make up his family; Gloria’s ex-husband’s drunken regrets at a fraught family reunion; and her own son and daughter’s unpromising relationships. Gloria cries privately at her daughter’s abrupt departure from Chile at one point, not in a bereft sense, but the way parents can feel like helpless onlookers to their adult children’s flawed lives.

Lelio has said Gloria’s script, written with Gonzalo Maza, draws lightly on his mother’s life, and is broadly an exploration of her generation—women raised for marriage and later caught in the unfettered economic and social changes in Chile after its transition to democracy in the late 1980s. Rising inequality, living costs, and divorce rates spurred by rapid modernization echo in the story’s margins, as do darker insinuations of the country’s unresolved military past in the figure of Rodolfo. The audience sees a backdrop of confinement—stairwells, parking lots, tidy apartments. Santiago is reduced to a gray drift of development that registers vaguely in the reflection of Gloria’s car window. But Lelio defies tendencies to turn each new Latin American film into a thinly veiled comment on history and politics. Gloria’s physical surroundings are bleakly dim and unspecific, with the exception of a brilliant beach where she wakes up at one point, hungover and robbed of her purse.

Of the new English-language version, Lelio has said, “It’s going to be like jazz, you’ll feel the spirit of the original story but it’ll be reinvigorated and vital.” It’s hard to imagine how Lelio’s film needs to be reinvigorated. It’d be easy to make another comically disruptive spectacle of a female character’s post-menopausal sexuality. In less adept hands, if the erratic history of American remakes is any guide—from duds like The Vanishing (1993) and Shall We Dance (2004) to the accomplished The Departed (2006)—viewers might be served up an accelerated plot or sentimental pathos. The Hollywood Reporter inauspiciously suggested that, in Lelio’s as-yet untitled U.S. adaptation, Moore’s character will be “vacillating between hope and despair” over a love affair, before ending on a note of personal vindication.

Admirers of Lelio’s work can only hope the director will handle his new film with the same deftness he used in the original. What’s radical in the director’s vision is that Gloria’s body and desire are gracefully unremarkable frames for seeking pleasure and fulfillment. And that she’s startlingly visible in her ordinariness. Gloria is a sobering reminder that it’s not the “invisibility” of older women that’s the problem, but rather their systemic exclusion from cultural relevance. Whatever acts of contortion Lelio might end up performing to cater to American sensibilities, there’s hope that he’ll at least flout Hollywood biases against the aging female body. And if not, there’s always the original, in which Gloria, in a memorable revenge scene, confronts her fatuous lover with the cool of a hired assassin. How does she follow this act? With a night out—dancing alone.

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Ayuda! (Help!) Equifax Has My Data!

Equifax last week disclosed a historic breach involving Social Security numbers and other sensitive data on as many as 143 million Americans. The company said the breach also impacted an undisclosed number of people in Canada and the United Kingdom. But the official list of victim countries may not yet be complete: According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, Equifax can safely add Argentina — if not also other Latin American nations where it does business — to the list as well.

Equifax is one of the world’s three-largest consumer credit reporting bureaus, and a big part of what it does is maintain records on consumers that businesses can use to learn how risky it might be to loan someone money or to extend them new lines of credit. On the flip side, Equifax is somewhat answerable to those consumers, who have a legal right to dispute any information in their credit report which may be inaccurate.

Earlier today, this author was contacted by Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee, Wisc.-based Hold Security LLC. Holden’s team of nearly 30 employees includes two native Argentinians who spent some time examining Equifax’s South American operations online after the company disclosed the breach involving its business units in North America.

It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”

We’ll speak about this Equifax Argentina employee portal — known as Veraz or “truthful” in Spanish — in the past tense because the credit bureau took the whole thing offline shortly after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity this afternoon. The specific Veraz application being described in this post was dubbed Ayuda or “help” in Spanish on internal documentation.

The landing page for the internal administration page of Equifax Veraz’s portal. Click to enlarge.

Once inside the portal, the researchers found they could view the names of more than 100 Equifax employees in Argentina, as well as their employee ID and email address. The “list of users” page also featured a clickable button that anyone authenticated with the “admin/admin” username and password could use to add, modify or delete user accounts on the system. A search on “Equifax Veraz” at Linkedin indicates the unit currently has approximately 111 employees in Argentina.

A partial list of active and inactive Equifax employees in Argentina. This page also let anyone add or remove users at will, or modify existing user accounts.

Each employee record included a company username in plain text, and a corresponding password that was obfuscated by a series of dots.

The “edit users” page obscured the Veraz employee’s password, but the same password was exposed by sloppy coding on the Web page.

However, all one needed to do in order to view said password was to right-click on the employee’s profile page and select “view source,” a function that shows displays the raw HTML code which makes up the Web site. Buried in that HTML code was the employee’s password in plain text.

A review of those accounts shows all employee passwords were the same as each user’s username. Worse still, each employees username appears to be nothing more than their last name, or a combination of their first initial and last name. In other words, if you knew an Equifax Argentina employee’s last name, you also could work out their password for this credit dispute portal quite easily.

But wait, it gets worse. From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person’s DNI — the Argentinian equivalent of the Social Security number — again, in plain text. All told, this section of the employee portal included more than 14,000 such records.

750 pages worth of consumer complaints — more than 14,000 in all — complete with the Argentinian equivalent of the SSN (the DNI) in plain text. This page was auto-translated by Google Chrome into English.

Jorge Speranza, manager of information technology at Hold Security, was born in Argentina and lived there for 40 years before moving to the United States. Speranza said he was aghast at seeing the personal data of so many Argentinians protected by virtually non-existent security.

Speranza explained that — unlike the United States — Argentina is traditionally a cash-based society that only recently saw citizens gaining access to credit.

“People there have put a lot of effort into getting a loan, and for them to have a situation like this would be a disaster,” he said. “In a country that has gone through so much — where there once was no credit, no mortgages or whatever — and now having the ability to get loans and lines of credit, this is potentially very damaging.”

Shortly after receiving details about this epic security weakness from Hold Security, I reached out to Equifax and soon after heard from a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that represents the credit bureau.

I briefly described what I’d been shown by Hold Security, and attorneys for Equifax said they’d get back to me after they validated the claims. They later confirmed that the Veraz portal was disabled and that Equifax is investigating how this may have happened. Here’s hoping it will stay offline until it is fortified with even the most basic of security protections.

According to Equifax’s own literature, the company has operations and consumer “customers” in several other South American nations, including Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. It is unclear whether the complete lack of security at Equifax’s Veraz unit in Argentina was indicative of a larger problem for the company’s online employee portals across the region, but it’s difficult to imagine they could be any worse.

“To me, this is just negligence,” Holden said. “In this case, their approach to security was just abysmal, and it’s hard to believe the rest of their operations are much better.”

I don’t have much advice for Argentinians whose data may have been exposed by sloppy security at Equifax. But I have urged my fellow Americans to assume their SSN and other personal data was compromised in the breach and to act accordingly. On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity published a Q&A about the breach, which includes all the information you need to know about this incident, as well as detailed advice for how to protect your credit file from identity thieves.

[Author’s note: I am listed as an adviser to Hold Security on the company’s Web site. However this is not a role for which I have been compensated in any way now or in the past.]

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/ayuda-help-equifax-has-my-data/