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promiseiwillwrite · 9 months ago

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Things I like about Christianity

I come from Alabama, by way of Kentucky. I grew up in the South, immersed in Southern Culture, Southern Values, and Southern Ideals.

Hard Work, Self Sacrifice, Putting others before yourself, Kindness, Strength, Devotion, Keeping your word.

These were things that were pressed into the mold of my soul before I even knew the concepts existed.

I remember being told to stand in the hall for hours after I asked about dinosaurs in my vacation bible school class. And then looking up at my favorite tree as our car passed it on my way home from there, and deciding that I believed in dinosaurs even if I couldn't be good enough to be with god in heaven. I was five.

But my Grandparents bought me as Many Dinosaurs as I could want, Because I Loved them.

My Grandparents were absolute saints. Their family meant more to them than money or perception. They loved us, and it was unconditional. Even when my mom, with her notoriously bad taste in men kept bringing them home. They welcomed them with open arms because my mother loved them. My grandfather mentored my dad and got him the engineering job that became the foundation for his 40 year career.

And my Grandmother still chased him down the hall of her retirement community building with a bright red Louisville Slugger after she found out that he had abused me and my sister.

My mother came out of the Broom Closet when she divorced my dad. And her next failed marriage was to a man who emotionally and verbally abused me and my sister as well. But this man was a piece of work. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Substance abuse, Psychotic Episodes, Poor emotional control and other problems. And he was a Hater. He blamed Christians, Christianity and the Establishment for Every problem he saw in his life and his mind.

He considered himself a pagan person. And he thought of himself as strictly countercultural.

He was an Anti-role model for me. I strove not to be like him. I saw his bitter rage and terror, and agoraphobia and I swore to myself I would never be that way.

But despite my best efforts, parts of him rubbed off on me. Like Gomez Addams. My Mother and my Step Father were like Gomez and Morticia, and the Addams's romantic entanglements were like the "relationship Goals" for my parents. I was taught that this was the model for Knowing for sure that it was Love.

For better or for worse.

It is through this lens that I look back at Christianity, and its ideas, and stories, and interpretations. It is from this perspective that I can sit down and try to piece together something worth having.

I always did love the stories of the Folk Devil... Why the Sea is Salt was always my favorite.

I Loved the stories of Saint Martha and the Tarasque, and Saint Francis of Assisi, and Joan of Arc as a kid, but never told anyone because those were Christian things, and I wasn't allowed to like stuff like that. There were some stories of the Knights of Templar protecting folk healers and midwives, instead of crusading and murdering people. There was Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who lived in my lifetime and helped Many people.

I don't know if you've read Madeline L'Engle, but her story called Many Waters is a fantastic read. Lots of Angels, and Nephilim and Unicorns.

I am sure that there are a lot of people who will be upset at the idea of me liking these stories. I was 12. There was no context for me to use to connect these tales to their origins. I could not have known that they had been stolen from Jewish stories and traditions.

The history of my family is very strong in the Holiness Faith. My Great Grandfather received an epiphany and became a traveling minister. He founded many churches in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. He played guitar, and wrote Christian Music. He lived to be over 100 years old.

I like to think that some of what motivated him was love. I never knew him. I have seen a few pictures. My mother has some of the sheet music he wrote.

For such a long time, I did not claim this part of my heritage because All I could see of Christianity was the oppression. The Ugliness portrayed by my Step Father. His burning, righteous indignation at everything it stood for. And my own shame, acknowledging that it was a part of me whether I liked it or not.

But I think this view was limited. As much as Christianity has problematic aspects, so does everyone. So does Every path. And I think that there are good parts, even so.

And like the pieces of fabric that make a quilt, I am going to take some of these good ones, some of these that make up who I am, and I am going to make a blanket to wrap around the shoulders of people I love. I am going to use that blanket to let myself rest, and heal, and learn that safety is a thing I can Make in my life.

And I think I will have done alright by my Great Grandfather, for an old swamp witch.

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fredbsmith · 9 months ago

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The Backyard Trellis

Memoir

It was the summer of my fourth year. My mother, younger sister and I had recently moved from Louisville to Chicago and we were staying with my maternal grandmother in her walk-up apartment on the south side of the city. It was not far from Midway Airport. I used to see the airport searchlights sweeping the night sky from the window by my bed as I drifted off to sleep. My parents had separated during the war and were eventually to divorce, and my father was at that time living in another part of the country.

My mother took me with her to visit a college friend of hers, Gert Silverman, shortly after we moved in with my grandmother. Gert and her husband Nate had bought a house in the south Chicago suburbs. This was the first of many times I was taken to the Silvermans’ over the course of my childhood. Even after my mother moved us to the West, the occasional trip back to Chicago always included a visit to see Gert and Nate. I used to look forward to these visits. Gert and Nate loved being visited by children, and they were among the few grown-ups who wanted my sister and me to call them by their first names. Their house had an expansive back lawn that bordered on a commuter rail line. As an older child, I would interrupt my running about the yard to wave to the engineers of the many passing trains and they would usually wave back.

For this, the first of my visits to the Silvermans, my mother felt it necessary to coach me in advance regarding my behavior. She told me that Gert and Nate had a son named Bobby who was the same age as I. Of course, it was expected that Bobby and I would play together while we were there, but I had to understand something important about Bobby. He was a boy and he was my age but he was very different from me. He could not run or climb on things, which my mother knew were my favorite play activities. Bobby and I could only “play quietly” while we were together.

When we arrived, I was immediately intimidated by Bobby. My mother had told me he was quite different from me, but I had not imagined his appearance would be so strange. He was similar in size and shape to me, but his skin was a bizarre mottled mixture of white and blue that was unlike that of any person I had ever seen.

I dutifully followed my mother, Gert, and Bobby to the back yard and sat down in the shady area Gert pointed out to me. She had Bobby sit a few feet away. Then both mothers retreated indoors, to the living room.

Bobby and I sat together silently for a while. I surveyed the yard, which at first appeared totally lacking in play equipment. Then I spied something at the perimeter that interested me greatly. I initially took it to be a set of climbing bars, a “Jungle Gym” that was a familiar feature in play parks near my home. When I got near it, I realized it was something else, too flimsy to have been constructed for children’s play. It was not securely anchored to the ground nor to the fence against which it rested. It was, in fact, a trellis, although there were no plants growing on it. Nonetheless, it invited climbing, and I could not resist.

The trellis flexed under my weight, but it stayed upright as I neared the top. Then I felt it move below me and I looked down. To my amazement, there was Bobby, who was following me, imitating my movements and climbing the trellis, and he was already past the first rungs. And he had, for the first time that afternoon, a broad smile on his face!

Bobby’s smile warmed my heart. The distance between us had suddenly vanished. And I felt I had just experienced an epiphany. Bobby and I really weren’t that different after all. My mother had been flat-out wrong when she told me that Bobby couldn’t climb. Of course he could climb, I had just seen him do it with my own eyes! So I imagined that I had just made an important discovery, uncovered an ability Bobby had that Gert and my mother hadn’t known about, and that they would thank me for finding it.

My mother, who must have been observing the back yard through a window, came storming out of the back door of the house, shouting my name, and scolding me, “Didn’t I tell you that Bobby couldn’t climb, and you led him to do it anyway!”

We left shortly afterward, amid my mother’s profuse apologies for my behavior, with my own mind in a state of confusion. I don’t know how long it took me to understand that when my mother had said Bobby can’t climb, she had meant he was not permitted to climb, that it might overly burden his poor little heart, not that he lacked the ability to do so.

I was stung by the ferocity of the scolding I had just received, by what seemed to me the injustice of being chastened for doing a seeming good deed, initiating a bond of friendship with another child.

I never saw Bobby again. This was a time before there were heart bypass machines, before cardiac surgery had developed ways to correct the effects of cyanotic congenital heart disease, and there was no hope back then for his survival. Gert and Nate had no more children. When we visited them in later years, their many years of childlessness after Bobby had died, we never spoke of him.

Now, in the autumn of my life, having experienced parenthood myself, and the loss of various loved ones over the years, I can only dimly imagine what it would be like to give birth to a child, and to nurture that child through infancy, knowing all the time that that child’s death is imminent and inevitable. Yet that’s what Gert and Nate were going through back then.

It occurs to me now, that the adults in the story – Gert, Nate, and my mother – were scarcely beyond childhood themselves when these events unfolded. Specifically, they were in their late twenties, much younger than my own children are now, possessed of the youthful energy required for the rigors of toddler care, but barely equipped to deal with the profundities of sorrow, suffering and death that normally are a part of later life.

I can’t help but wonder if my unknowing presence on that visit, rowdy and animated as I was and in stark contrast to Bobby’s frailty, made Gert’s sorrow more acute.

On another occasion, years later, I overheard my mother relate a conversation she had had with Gert when she visited her in the maternity ward shortly after Bobby was born and his terrible anomaly had become apparent. Gert asked my mother if she thought Bobby’s affliction could have been a punishment from God for her having married and conceived a child with a man who was a Jew.

The memory of my afternoon with Bobby never leaves me before I ask myself whether my enticing Bobby to climb the trellis caused him significant injury. Did my burst of infectious, naïve rambunctiousness lead him to overtax his frail body and, as a result, shave hours or days from the short lifetime that had been allotted to him? Even with the benefit of a medical education, I find this impossible to answer.

If there is ever a time or place where I am held to account for this particular impulsive act, I hope that it will be reckoned that the same costly event also brought Bobby a moment of joy, a moment revealed by the broad smile he showed me as he was climbing.

#childhood memories #youthful innocence

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hoursofreading · 1 year ago

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In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton describes an incident he experienced in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 18, 1958, as he stood on the corner of 4th and Walnut Streets.

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun,” he writes. I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

It is striking that Merton’s epiphany occurred not in a monk’s cell or cathedral alcove, but on a busy street in Louisville. Sartre famously said that “hell is other people,” but for Merton, and for Holmes, Bucko, McCrary, Rohr, and so many of the contemplatives I met, other people are not hell; they are portals to paradise.

One paradox of the contemplative life is the way in which it engenders, even demands, participation in a community. “The life of a Christian is not a solo act,” McCrary told me. “Jesus went to the desert alone to pray, but he was always building community. It’s a both-and.” The reverse is also true. Rohr: “How you relate to your spouse, your children, your dog—that’s how you’ll relate to God.”

The gate of heaven opens for us all, but the hinge swings outward as much as inward, leading not into some hermetically sealed chamber, but a spacious meadow where we find every person we’ve ever known, a field of solitaries loved beyond measure, a destination as near as our next breath.

#quote

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philipchircop · 7 years ago

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Today, Sunday 18th March, 2018, marks the 60th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s Louisville Epiphany.

#Thomas Merton #Merton #epiphany #Louisville

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canaryrecords · 4 years ago

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“And then, all music silences itself into duration, measures duration; like duration, it is irreversible succession. Thus the music, whatever else it may be, is concretized time; it is audible time. This precious vehicle permits one to grasp inaccessible time.” Rene Daumal, “On Indian Music,” 1931. Translated by Louise Landes-Levi in Rasa or Knowledge of the Self (New Directions, 1982)

Unlike most of the immigrant musicians we present, many of whose lives can hardly be constructed into the bare frame of a biography even, in the best cases, with the participation of their descendants, there is a wealth of information on Archbishop Samuel David available because of his role for three decades as an eminence of the Orthodox Christian church in the U.S.

He was born John David Husson on August 26, 1893 to David and Gazaly Haddad in a mountain village now called Aita el Foukhar, Lebanon (then Aitha, Greater Syria). The youngest of 6 children, he completed secondary school and was sent to seminary at Balamand Monestary, 5 miles south of Tripoli, Lebanon.

Supplemental to his theological training, he was taught ecclesiastic Byzantine hymnody by the singer and composer Mitri el Murr (b. Tripoli 1880; d. 1969). El Murr taught music to at least a dozen bishops, sang for and was decorated by the Romanov family in Russia, and recorded for the Baidaphon company in Beirut in the 1920s.

Having ascended several levels through the church hierarchy and having survived the destruction and famine that killed about half of the population of Lebanon during the First World War, by the age of 27 John David had been given the name Samuel and was ordained to the Holy Priesthood in 1920. In 1921 he was sent by the church to Toledo, Ohio as a senior celibate priest, an archimandrite. His music teacher visited in 1930, and three of his brothers immigrated to Ohio and Massachusetts. In 1936, Fr. Samuel David ascended to the role of bishop of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdioceses of Toledo and Dependencies, a territory that extended from Canada to Mexico, but under controversial circumstances riddled with problems inside the patriarchy of the church as a result of the Russian Revolution and the death of the former U.S. archbishop.

Suffice it to say that there was a split in the leaders of the church patriarchy regarding who would be in charge of North America. One faction, those closest aligned with the Russian Orthodox church and New York City sided with Antony (Bashir). The other, closest aligned with Zahle, Lebanon and Antioch went with Samuel (David). Samuel David, meanwhile, traveled and gave communion through Boston, Ottawa, Cedar Rapids, and Lexington in 1936, but in August 1938, was excommunicated in a manifesto by Alexander III, who instructed the laity not to celebrate communion with him. Samuel David immediately responded that the excommunication had no standing, not having been issued by the Holy Synod (the church’s governing body) and without hearings. Two years later the decision was reversed, so that by November 1940 Samuel David was given full and official recognition of his status as Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Antiochian Church of the Toledo Diocese and its Dependencies by decree of Patriarch Alexander of Damascus, Syria, spiritual head of the church after action taken by the Holy Synod of Antioch. The schism between the New York City and Toledo factions remained unresolved until the mid-1970s, when they were finally united. A much more detailed account given by Prof. Richard Breaux, a historian specializing in the Syrian / Lebanese diaspora of the midwestern U.S., can be read at syrianlebanesediasporasound.blogspot.com/2018/11/metropolitan-samuel-david-metropolitan.html .

1940-41, Archbishop Samuel David began once again to visit various parishes: Ironwood, Michigan; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Ottawa, Ontario; Austin, Texas; Mexico City; Cedar Rapids, Iowa, etc. Between 1945 and 1953, he published at least seven prayer books, made available for free to any Arabic-speaking congregation in North America, and it was likely during that period that he privately published two albums of a total of eight 78rpm discs of his singing, made available to church members with proceeds in benefit of the church.

It’s clear that the sixteen sides he recorded were made at at least two separate sessions. Harvard’s archivists have made a data point of the recordings having been cut at Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana. While this may be true (although their dating of the recordings to the 1930s certainly is not), I cannot say for sure. The red vinyl discs themselves have, to me, the feel of a post-WWII RCA production, but this is admittedly reckless speculation on my part. Among the repertoire he performed are hymns and doxologies on the subjects of the Day of Judgement (track 1), the angel Gabriel (track 2), the crucifixion (track 3), Epiphany (track 8), and Christ’s miracle at the wedding at Cana (tracks 9-10). I would be grateful to learn the composers; Mitri el Murr would appear to be among them. Similarly, the accompanists are unclear. The quanun throughout has been speculated to have been by played by Samuel David himself. We do not at present know who the drone-singing accompanists on the first session (tracks 1-8) or the violinist on the second session, recorded through a spring reverb (a novel invention in the 40s) in emulation of a large space, (tracks 9-18) are.

In 1955 Samuel David was elevated to the status of one of the Orthodox Church’s fifteen metropolitans. He was found dead at his home on 523 Bush St. in Toledo from an apparent heart attack on August 12, 1958 at the age of 63. Newspapers reported that he was discovered “slumped in a chair, holding an open Bible.” His open casket funeral was attended by high-ranking church officials from Ottawa, Brooklyn, Cambridge MA, Charleston WV, Wichita, Omaha, Grand Rapids, Glens Falls, Louisville, Phoenix, Buffalo, Lowell, and Chicago as well a full house and as many as five hundred others who were forced to listen outside on loudspeakers to the rites performed in Arabic, Albanian, and English.

#Syrian #Lebanese #Byzantine #orthodox #Antiochian #78rpm #78 rpm

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nicklloydnow · 4 years ago

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"“My definition for mysticism,” Rohr said, “is experiential knowledge of the Holy, the transcendent, the divine, God—if you want to use that word, but I’m not tied to it.” Experiential knowledge, which differs from textbook knowledge, “will always be spoken humbly, because true spiritual knowledge is always partial. You know you don’t know the whole mystery. But even one little peek into one little corner of the mystery is more than enough.”

(...)

As Rohr tells it, the contemplative mind went underground during the Protestant Reformation. It was still being taught in some monasteries as late as the fifteenth century, and in isolated places such as Spain there was “an explosion of contemplation” through the mystical writings of Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross. But then came Luther’s sola scriptura and Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, both of which placed the dualistic, egoistic mind at the center. Guigo the Carthusian, a twelfth-century monk, spoke of three levels of prayer: oratio, or spoken prayer; meditatio, using the mind to reflect on a piece of scripture; and contemplatio, the wordless prayer of the heart. This is the moment, Rohr explains, when “you shed the mind as the primary receiver station. You stop reflecting. You stop critiquing or analyzing. You let the moment be what it is, as it is, all that it is. That takes a lot of surrender.” After the Enlightenment and its Cartesian dualisms, the contemplative mind—“our unique access point to God,” as Rohr describes it—“was pretty well lost.”

(...)

So many of the mistakes in American Christianity, Rohr told me, are a result of dualistic thinking, which is “inherently antagonistic, inherently competitive. You’re forced within the first nanosecond to take sides. Republican-Democrat, black-white, gay-straight . . . go down the whole list of what’s tearing us apart—the dualistic mind always chooses sides.” He is sympathetic to those who disaffiliate from religion. But he still believes in faith’s power to instill awe, to bind and heal, to return us to ourselves, to God, and to one another. At the center of that return lies the contemplative mind.

(...)

I was also reading Cassian’s Conferences and considering the author’s role as chronicler of the early Christian monastic movement in Egypt, a kind of fifth-century immersion journalist of the soul. Cassian describes Christian life as a journey toward puritas cordis: purity of heart. If that is the destination, the vehicle is silent prayer.

Ontological wonder, tenderness, puritas cordis, pondering scales of mercy: these seemed like activities worthy of my meager efforts, and I felt a similar hunger for those things among other contemplatives, those who were also leaving the barnacled, empty supertanker of Christendom and boarding smaller, more nimble vessels.

“Does mysticism need a church?” In his introduction to the Conferences, the Cambridge historian Owen Chadwick poses this as a central conundrum in early monastic thought, a question that was very much alive among the modern contemplatives. “The individual experience of the divine is overwhelming,” Chadwick writes. “It passes beyond the memory of biblical texts and every other thought. . . . Might it be that holy anarchy is nearer to God than ordered ecclesiasticism?”

Like Cassian, I was more drawn to holy anarchy. And yet, in the process of fleeing broken ecclesial institutions, didn’t the new contemplatives also constitute a body politic? What was the Universal Christ conference if not a new form of church? It’s possible to see organized religion as a necessary evil, something that could be dispensed with once individuals reach some higher plane of awareness, but that seems facile. Humans depend on patterns and structures. Forms change, but we still need them to provide some kind of continuity of thought and praxis, just as we depend on forms to build community, which is the other piece missing in the laissez-faire approach. In an essay titled “The Mystical Core of Organized Religion,” the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast readily acknowledges that “mysticism clashes with the institution.” And yet, he admits, “We need religious institutions. If they weren’t there, we would create them. Life creates structures.”

(...)

In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton describes an incident he experienced in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 18, 1958, as he stood on the corner of 4th and Walnut Streets.

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun,” he writes.

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

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jaydemayo · 4 years ago

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(Central Virginia Sport Performance The Podcast)

Outside The Rack #76- Kaiti Jones

“Human beings would be a whole lot better off if we all had something we were so obsessed about that we would be willing to do whatever it took to do it.”

What’s up everybody and welcome the 76th episode of Outside The Rack brought to you by Kinetic Performance the makers of Gymaware. In this show we are going to try to dive a little deeper into the minds of the top practitioners in the world of sport performance to learn a bit more about who they actually are and how they got to where they are at today. Today we are joined by the Senior Sports Performance Coach at the University of Louisville, Kaiti Jones. Kaiti, thanks for being with us today.

Before we start, who is Kaiti Jones?

Former ATC turned strength coach who’s an amateur dog trainer on the weekends

1) Describe a learning situation that brought about an epiphany in your career?

Going to the Philadelphia Union Academy to work for Bill Knowles taught me that I wanted to be a strength coach, and learning the force velocity curve.

2) If you could ask one question and you know you would get the answer what would that be and why?

What drives the relentlessness of the highest achievers?

3) What’s your escape?

Home improvement projects, Rex (her awesome dog).

Enjoy the content? Then you should check out The Strength Coach Network!

We built The Strength Coach Network to provide you three ways become the best practitioner possible. First, each month we add a new lecture from one of the best practitioners in the world to help keep you and your staff up to date with what the best of the best are doing with their athletes RIGHT NOW! Secondly, the forum provides you a new avenue to connect with practitioners around the world to find a unique point of view from coaches all over the world when it comes to career advice, training ideas, or any aspect of our lives in coaching. Finally, you get exclusive discounts on all products CVASPS related, INCLUDING your seat at The Seminar! When you add those three in with our library of over 100 sensational lectures, including all of those from The Central Virginia Sport Performance Seminar, you have found your one stop shop for continuing education for you and your staff. Make sure you hop over today and get your first 48 hours for only $1 by using the link here: https://strengthcoachnetwork.com/cvasps/

#StrengthCoach, #StrengthAndConditioningCoach, #Podcast, #LearningAtLunch, #TheSeminar, #SportsTraining, #PhysicalPreparation, #TheManual, #SportTraining, #SportPerformance, #HumanPerformance, #StrengthTraining, #SpeedTraining, #Training, #Coach, #Performance, #Sport, #HighPerformance, #VBT, #VelocityBasedTraining, #TriphasicTraining, #Plyometrics

#SoundCloud #music #Central Virginia Sport Performance The Podcast

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divine17 · 5 years ago

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↳ DOMESTIC!STEVE HARRINGTON | MASTERLIST

Fandom: Stranger Things

Word Count: 3,475

A/N: I needed something fluffy after watching ST3, so uh.... Here ya go. Inspired by this post by @xstrangerwritings !!

You and Steve had been talking about leaving Hawkins for what felt like forever, planning down to the smallest details and saving every penny

Just wanting to move away from all the terrible shit that happened there, all of the bad memories and associations

So after a year or so of saving up money, the two of you decided to jump the gun and just do it

You’d end up somewhere considerably bigger than your hometown

Either Louisville, which was just south of Hawkins, or a little north into Indianapolis

You’d end up in a little brick house with ugly black shutters (that you’d later get drunk and paint lime green, which the Landlord was surprisingly cool with) and a good sized backyard, all in a quiet suburb

The house wasn’t very big, or very impressive like the ones you used to live in back home, but it was just enough for the two of you

Two bedrooms and one bathroom, a small kitchen and a slightly bigger living room

It was so small, but your options were limited because of your age and how little money you had

Determined to not have to ask either of your parents for money, wanting to prove that the two of you could do this and be truly independent, so you made it work

The two of you did everything by yourselves

Painting the walls, packing and unpacking boxes, moving furniture...

You wanted to strangle Steve with your bare hands a couple times throughout the first couple days, and he was right there with you

Both of you were exhausted and annoyed and sweating like crazy in the sweltering summertime heat, it just wasn’t a good mix at all

By the end of the third day, the two of you had almost finished the living room, and it truly had started to feel like a home

Your home, together

The Harrington’s on Highland Street

And as you stood in the kitchen doorway, looking into the living room, you felt so proud of yourselves

The two of you were tired and sweaty and covered from head to toe in colorful housepaint, but he’d still pull you in for a long kiss

Soon enough, both of you had landed good enough jobs in your new town

But then, you had started to realize that it was a little bit lonely, something was missing...

And then Steve brought home this fat, scruffy little puppy one day and everything fell into place

You didn’t even question where the hell he’d gotten the dog, even though you probably should’ve

It wouldn’t take long for both of you to fall in love with the little monster

It’s literally your new best friend, but it definitely prefers Steve

Really only because he feeds it a little too much and will take it in the (fenced in) back yard and literally run in circles so it can chase him

“This is my workout now! Baby, look!”

After a while, you decide to take up babysitting neighborhood kids for some extra money

Steve grimaces when you mention it because he figured the babysitting days were over since the two of you moved, but ultimately he warms up to it

it doesn’t take long for you to get a gig babysitting a 2yo and a 12wk old twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays

Their mom works night shift those nights and is paying a sizable sum for you to keep them overnight, which you’re happy to do

The first night that she’s supposed to drop them off, you’re a nervous wreck, rethinking the entire thing

But suddenly Steve is really confident

Back in Hawkins, he used to babysit the kids all the time and they made it out in one piece

So this should be a piece of cake, because babies can’t be that different than whole children

... Right???

Neither of you are a hundred percent where to start as you sift through the overnight bag she’d given you

The toddler is sitting on the couch with a tiny little kid book, quiet as can be, while the baby is practically clinging to your chest

So eventually, Steve just goes and sits down beside her and starts making conversation

Well, as much as she can, she’s little

The two start getting along very well and then he’s digging through the bag to find all of her toys and flipping the TV onto a kid’s channel for noise

Meanwhile, you’ve moved into a quieter room, now sitting up in your big cozy bed with the baby feeding her

Once it gets a little late, Steve makes a little bed for her on the couch and tucks her in, and she falls right asleep

He quietly enters the bedroom to see that you’ve dozed off, the now-cold half-empty bottle of formula between your legs with the baby resting across your chest, her head resting atop your breasts

And he just melts, immediately, and his it creeps into his mind that that’s what you’d look like holding his baby

It’s the sweetest thing he’s ever seen, honestly

The next day, you’d be poking fun at how good he was with the older kid and he’d be joking about you being so good with the baby and all of a sudden that’s when he realizes it

He wants to have a baby with you

A tiny little thing that was the perfect combination of you and him

Your bright (Y/E/C) eyes, his untameable brown hair, your intelligence and his wit

He’d never really thought about children before, at least having any of his own

He just always assumed that one day his wife would get pregnant and that was that, that he’d just wait for that or whatever

But now, it was sinking in that he wants to have a kid with you

The same epiphany comes for you, just a couple weeks later than his

You had left him alone with the kids for a few minutes while you went to take a quick shower, and had come back to see the older girl rested across his torso, arm loosely thrown over his stomach, and the baby pulled close into his side, just above her

It really did something to you, because oh fuck, now you’re realizing that you want to have a baby with him

You just swooned at the sight of them, so cozy and happy, and couldn’t help but wonder what your own children would be like

Both of you are silent, both thinking of the best way to broach the subject

But then one night as you’re laying in bed cuddling, nearly fallen to sleep, he just blurts it out

“Y/N? I think we should have a baby.”

After some discussion, you decided to put that on the backburner and start particularly saving up money for a baby, just for when the time was right

The next eight months just breeze right by

And then, it all comes to a screeching halt

You realized that you’d been nauseous for a few days, throwing up first thing in the morning on most days

And your aversion to your favorite food, your weird cravings lately...

And now a late period...

It’s only when Steve makes a halfhearted little “maybe you’re just pregnant” joke that you even thought about it

It sinks in for both of you at literally the exact same time, and without saying anything, he just leaves and beelines for the store to buy a pregnancy test

So after you go through the process of taking it, the two of you just sit on the cold tile floor in the bathroom beside each other staring at the little stick

He’s absolutely terrified, he’s way more anxious than he thought he would be when this happened, but at the same time, he wasn’t sure he would ever actually be in this situation

Sure, the two of you had talked about it, and decided that it could wait, but he really didn’t see it happening for a looong time then but now it’s suddenly his reality

You’re just kind of chilling, torn between joining him in being absolutely fucking terrified or overjoyed, or just kind of numb

Your hand creeps over to his, and he takes it, holding it tightly, running his thumb over the soft back of your hand reassuringly

And then, slowly but surely, two bold pink lines show up

Pregnant

You’re both stunned for a moment before happy tears start flowing, and soon enough you’re in his lap hugging all over him and he’s holding you so tight that you can barely breathe

The very next day, you call a clinic and make an appointment to confirm the pregnancy and see how far along you are

Steve takes the day off, citing a family emergency as the cause, because he refuses to miss this

And he’s so fascinated with everything in the room, all of the shiny silver tools and the computer and the spinning stool

Such a child, truly

You have to quietly scold him every so often when he gets a little too curious and starts opening cabinets

The doctor finally comes in with results...

Positive, again

You’re having Steve’s baby

The thought was absolutely earth-shattering for the both of you, but you were 100% sure that you’d get through it together, it’ll be okay

And it was, it really was

You were about eight weeks along, just far enough to see a big grey blob inside a big black blob on the ultrasound photo (which would later be framed and hung up on the wall in your house)

From the very day you found out that you really were pregnant, Steve was the absolute best partner you could’ve asked for

Always making sure that you’re comfortable and taken care of

Anything you want, he’ll do his best to get it for you

And he’s so supportive, more than usual

Like, he’d comfort you for an hour after you cry because or something sad on TV and have no complaints

He’d want to laugh a little at how sweet it was, but would catch himself and just keep you in his arms until your emotions evened out again

When you start to have a lil bump, he’s obsessed

And so, so incredibly protective of you both

When it gets big enough to kick, he loves playing with it

Tapping little rhythms against your belly, talking to the baby

The two of you would be laying in bed at night and his hand would just creep over and start tapping, causing it to kick into you

He couldn’t stop himself, he just had to feel it before either of you fell asleep

And he’s always on about names, constantly

Some are kinda bad, but most are pretty good

Constantly jokes about naming it after you, or him

He’s very picky though, will immediately shoot down a name if he knew someone who knew someone who had that name and was an assclown

Which might actually be a good thing, although annoying

At night before bed is when he gets into that sort of stuff, and it just becomes a habit

You’ll stay up for ages talking about it all

What the baby will look like, if it’ll inherit his wild hair, your eyes

What kind of music it’ll like when it’s older and what it’s favorite food will be, what it’s favorite toys will be

Ultimately, he’s incredibly anxious, but that sort of helps him get through it

He’s so hung up and worried about whether he’ll be a good dad or not

He and his parents don’t have the best relationship, and the last thing he wants is for his kid to go through that

It’s all he seems to think about when you’re not with him

He doesn’t tell you about any of this until a bit later, though

It finally comes out when you’re about five and a half months along and you see him sitting on the floor in the nursery late at night, tears in his eyes

It all comes pouring out when you sit down with him and start talking

It ends with you taking him into a big hug and letting him cry for a bit, and then going back to bed and for the first time in your relationship, you big spoon him instead

Running your fingers through his hair, whispering sweet little things into his ear and kissing his neck, making sure he knows you’re here for him

He loves the feeling of your bump against him, the two of you don’t fit together quite right but that’s okay

When you actually give birth, it’s total chaos from the start

As soon as your water breaks, he’s running around like a headless chicken in pure panic

Absolute. Panic.

You’ve just decided to sit down for a few minutes while he literally runs around in panic, giving him a second

“Steve, sweetheart, it’s fine. We have at least a few hours. So can you please go get the hospital bag while I get ready to go? It’s not an emergency.”

“Baby!! You’re having the baby!! This is totally an emergency!!”

He literally doesn’t leave your side the entire time you’re in labor

Like, he pulls a chair up to the bedside and just chills

And when it gets serious, like the baby is actually being delivered, he is so nervous

Like, he’s probably squeezing your hand tighter than you are his

Just out of anticipation

And when the baby is finally born and he gets to cut the umbilical cord, he literally just breaks down in tears

So many tears

(Let’s say the baby is a girl, but feel free to change pronouns if you want)

She’s so freaking perfect

So tiny and so sweet, so delicate and fragile

Just the best little thing he’s ever seen in his entire life

He loved her so much when she was in your belly, and now that she’s really here, he loves her so much more and he just doesn’t understand how

And as he holds her for the first time, he can’t believe that he helped make her

Like, she’s just so beautiful and perfect

They take her away for a little while and the two of you take that time to just relax

But he can’t stop thinking about the fact that you’re parents now, that he’s a dad

By the way, the two of you would settle on a name that’s cute, a little weird, not entirely common

Or just straight up named after one of you, just like he joked about during the pregnancy

(Little Stevie Harrington? Stella, maybe? How about the more common Stephanie? He’s down for it if you are)

When the name is officially decided, the first thing he does is call the kids back home

Who had eagerly been awaiting news of baby’s arrival since he told them you were pregnant

They freak out and he freaks out and everyone just freaks out for a few minutes

When you finally get to bring her home, Steve simply refuses to put her down

Like, it might actually be unhealthy

He’s just so in love and obsessed with her

He willingly takes night shift just so he can have more quiet time with her

And every time she cries, his heart skips a beat

He hates it, he hates to hear his girl cry, even though he knows that she just needs something and it’s simple

Sometimes, you’ll wake up with the bed empty and go in the nursery to find him asleep with her on his chest, sitting in the rocker

She is SUCH a daddy’s girl, even from the start

You can’t help but take so many pictures

And he’s the same way, he’s constantly taking pictures of you and her together

When he first starts taking a bunch of pictures, you’re annoyed as hell that he won’t put the camera down, but somehow he manages to convince you they’ll be worth it in 20 years

And he is completely right

(By the way, her friends all 100% have such a crush on young!Steve when they see the pictures, but also probably old!Steve too because... I’m not going to assume that he WOULDN’T be an absolute dilf, that’s just facts)

The kids finally come to visit when she’s a couple months old

You can’t help but lecture all of them for a second or two on how to hold a baby, how to keep her up, etc, but they don’t mind

Dustin is the first to hold her and he’s so excited that he can hardly hold still

When he finally passes her off to Max and El, who are both just amazed

Will literally looks at her with such heart eyes

They’re all just absolutely amazed that freaking STEVE had a baby

Like, they did not expect that one at all but it works

They’re so proud of the two of you and just in love with their little neice

Joyce is so excited to be an “auntie” tbh, like no old told her she was, she just assumed, and she’s right

Mike and Lucas totally make a joke about him being a permanent babysitter now or something

Robin’s smiling and cracking jokes like “hmm... still a dingus. Your baby isn’t though” and he’s like “oh, bite me, you know we’re both perfect”

And Steve definitely cries later that night, when everyone’s gone

He’s just so happy, his heart has never been more full in his entire life

By the way, the little puppy isn’t so little anymore and they definitely love the baby

When she’s a little older, they play together so much

Like, you can put her down on her little play mat in the living room and pup won’t let her crawl around too much where you can’t see her from the kitchen or something

Such a good lil doggie

And as soon as she’s old enough, she realizes that if she acts sad, Steve will do literally anything for her

A n y t h i n g

She also learns that he makes funny faces from the pain when she pulls on his hair and clothes and she just loves that

He is also constantly playing with her and keeping her entertained

Steve is definitely a “cool dad”, more like a friend than an actual parent, but it’s the best

Let me repeat... She is SUCH a daddy’s girl

At about ten months old, she takes her first steps

Steve was busy doing something and she was playing with some toys in the other room

And he just hears a little ‘thump’ so he rushes in there

And she’s standing up, holding onto the couch arm for support

He absolutely loses his shit, completely not ready for this at all

He quietly cheers his baby on, mumbling for her to come to daddy, just a couple little steps, she can do it

Slowly, she raises her foot, and takes a tiny little step, and then another,and another, and then she falls down

His brain literally exploded because of how proud he was of her

He describes it to you later in such vivid detail that you truly ought to have been there

Her first word is also probably daddy, which makes him just melt

You’re not even mad, just so happy and proud and relieved that they have such a bond like that

He was so worried over whether he’d be a good dad or not, and now that she’s here, he’s not only a good dad, but an AMAZING dad, literally the best father ever, probably

She’s always so sweet and soft and happy and she’s literally on both of your minds so much

Steve literally probably carries a picture of her everywhere

One in his car, one in his wallet, one in his pocket

Just so he can show her off whenever he can

He’s such a dork

And he definitely wants to have another, he starts bringing it up just after her first birthday

You laugh him off thinking it’s a joke, but he’s dead serious

“We’ll talk about it when she’s older” isn’t good enough for him, the baby fever is really hitting hard again as he looks at her newborn pictures

And eventually, you tell him to wait until she’s at least two to start trying again

Two is a good number, you thought

Just old enough to be a little independent, a little bit less attention needed, but still a baby & plus, they’ll be close in age, meaning they’ll probably be permanent best friends

From that point on, Steve is practically counting down the days until her second birthday, and absolutely will not forget what you said

#steve harrington #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington one shot #steve harrington fanfiction #joe keery #joe keery imagine #joe keery fanfiction #joe keery one shot #stranger things #stranger things imagine #stranger things one shot #stranger things fanfiction #st1 #st2 #st3

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everly-kindred · 5 years ago

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Eve’s Diary - Entry #44

Synopsis: A very snowy week of January passes, and Eve collects her thoughts on the happenings.

Words: 1,501

Date: 17th of January, 2027

Dear Diary,

Well. It has been quite a week. I feel like my mind is too full of things, and I’m definitely looking forward to the weekend to process some of it. I’m gonna at least write down what I remember, to sort of… unload and unpack.

First of all, I finally approached that Persephone Vitrac girl. I didn’t mean to, but I stumbled upon her and kind of just… started asking all those questions about werewolves that have been bouncing around my brain. I had been reading those old Owl Post articles, after all, so I was really curious.

What I learned was:

Dittany and silver are used to heal werewolf injuries - silver does not hurt werewolves. And this is the only thing that can heal those wounds, thus why almost all, if not ALL werewolves are also magical folk.

Werewolves face so much discrimination because of their violent nature, that it drove them to the Dark Lord’s army, as they believed they would finally be safe and in a community of their own.

The discrimination stems from the fact werewolves do not retain their human mind when changed and have a weird and strong desire to attack other humans…

UNLESS they take wolfsbane, which was only invented around 50 years ago, and magical folk live really, really long so many remember life before wolfsbane.

Werewolf related injuries are considered curse damage and will never heal properly.

No one really knows where the curse of lycanthropy started.

The Lovelace woman I read about in the papers is the one who turned Persephone, several years ago, and was the one doing the Hogsmeade attacks that I read about, dreamed about, even had a vision about.

I think that’s everything she told me. Anyways, it gave me a lot to think about. Especially because we had our full moon just last week - and ironically enough, January’s full moon is called the ‘Wolf Moon.’ Or at least, that’s one of a few nicknames for it. It’s also called the Old, Winter, or After-Yule moon.

For this moon, I asked my tarot deck to present me with a card that would show me what to expect between this moon and the next. I know that I should do a larger reading for esbats, but I honestly don’t have the energy to.

Anyways, I pulled judgment, which tells me imminent change is coming, and I will have to make a very important decision of some kind. I’m unsure of what this could be, so for now, I will sit tight, continue my studies and practices, and wait to see how life unfolds.

Most of my dreams have been nonsense, like, the other night I dreamt that Talula owned a shop inside the school, and she made and sold really pretty velvet dresses, and then this boy who was really mean came and lit the shop and the school on fire. But, like, Talula thought it was funny? And it just didn’t feel like how any of my serious dreams felt, so I sort of brushed it off.

Though I did have a dream about Aures, too. She was really sad and was sitting in the snow alone, when three roses grew from seedlings to buds, to fully blossoming in a circle around her. And then these roses began to glow and turned into three foxes curled around her, and the foxes seemed to make her happy. So I took some of the wood from artificer club, and a knife and paint, and carved Aures her own little wooden fox that I put in a terrarium for her.

Speaking of, Bonnie has been showing us how to carve our own wands in Artificer club. I tried to make mine look like a berry branch… Maybe Holly or Blackberry, I’m not sure. We’re going to paint and polish our wands next week. I want mine to be colourful rather than just polished wood. I feel like there are so many creative opportunities with wands that don’t get explored!

Also in Artificer club, I talked to Bobby and this older boy who had approached us to talk to Tal, about making a jellyfish lantern. If I get a floaty fabric and a jar, I could probably make it.. I’d have to learn how to cast bluebell flames and a few floating spells like wingardium leviosa, and I feel like there’d have to be some level of enchantment involved, but maybe Bonnie could help me! I think it sounds so nice to have a glowy jellyfish floating above you as a nightlight.

We had Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Vikander had something really noisy in some sort of cage covered in cloth that looked stained with either blood or jam. I hope whatever it was is closer to the latter, and not the former. Anyways, Vikander asked us about dark creatures, what makes a creature dark, and that sort of thing. And Aures said something that sort of echoed and reminded me of a thought I’d had when we were talking about dragons. And I’ve come to the conclusion that humans, both magic and muggle, really are the most deadly creatures on the planet.

History is really… bloodstained, and we’ve caused so much damage to all living creatures, ourselves, and our own planet. So we must be the darkest creatures of all, even if we have the capability of being the opposite. We can choose to be different, we can choose to be light. So that’s what I’m going to do. I will be one of the lights in the darkness. I have to be. If no one did it, we’d all drown and cease to exist.

Speaking of dark things like this, I need to remember to write Aisling a letter and ask how she’s doing. The attacks have continued to be addressed, and they’re apparently still looking for the guy who has been going after animagi. I hope they catch him.

On lighter notes, some fun things have happened this week, too! Like, Professor Banks was substituting for Transfigurations this week, and we were talking about the basic functions of Transfigurations and whatnot… And I think… Well, I asked her if it’d be possible to use magic to turn oneself into a faerie, and she wouldn’t answer, which tells me it is! If I can just make myself really small, and give myself wings and maybe pointy ears… It’d be wonderful! And dangerous too, of course, but you know…

I went to Arithmancy and learned that even though numbers and my brain don’t really get along, it’s an interesting class! Professor Rask made all these pretty shapes in the air with the wand-writing spell, and we were meant to copy those shapes and sort of do something to comprehend them, but I couldn’t get my wand to work with me. I also met a few new people - a boy named Colin Mackenzie (who called me Lady Kindred, thank you very much! Makes me sound like a knight or a princess or something!) and a girl named Maddy Hemlock, who tried to help me cast the spells.

There was this girl in that class who was really mean to one of the older Hufflepuffs. She called her a loser and told her to get out of ‘her seat’ and it was just… really odd, but no fights were started or anything. She was just kinda loud about it, but the Hufflepuff moved and didn’t kick up a fuss. I didn’t like it though.

In Herbology, Ruby’s friend Octavia sat next to me. It was her birthday, so I gave her a chocolate chip biscuit with some icing. I guess she really liked it, because she got really energetic afterward! I also gave one to this other girl who was sitting next to me, another Slytherin, because her stomach rumbled and it was close to dinnertime anyhow.

And then tonight, I had divinations with Bonnie. We were continuing our eye study, and so Bonnie told me to look in her eyes and tell her what I saw. Basically, to no one’s surprise, Bonnie is a brilliant mind and will have many opportunities before her. But I warned her not to burn herself out by putting too much on her plate.

I think I want to paint her eyes, as well. So maybe I’ll do that this weekend… paint some eyeballs and write Aisling a letter.

It’s been snowing like crazy. I feel trapped in this castle, in a way, and comforted in another. Like the snow is a clean, sparkling blanket against the stone walls, keeping us safe to be cosy by our warm fires. I’m certainly much sleepier this time of year. I love all of the seasons, honestly, and I especially love when things shift and change, so I’m really getting ready for spring. I know that’s a long way away, though.

Anyways, it’s super late and I need to go to sleep.

Much love, Everly

About the Character: Everlina Rosemary Kindred is an imaginative Hufflepuff attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She keeps up with her magical journey through a series of diary entries, dream journals, and tarot readings, all documented for future reflection. Her diary is a small glimpse into her enchanted life, and her adventure into the wizarding world and all its splendors. If you’d like more information about Eve, visit her wiki page.

About the Author: My name is Katherine! I am a 21-year-old Hufflepuff & Pukwudgie from Louisville, Kentucky. This page is my creative journey into the magical world, through the lenses of Second Life. Here I post diary entries, dream journals, and tarot readings all from my character’s perspective. If you’d like more information about me, visit my Flickr!

Outfit Credits:

Hair - Magika - Hair - Faye

Eyes - Gloom. - Walkers Collection - Undying ((Now at Epiphany!))

Skin - DeeTaleZ *Appliers* for Genus Heads *Sienna* Nordic

Head - GENUS Project - Genus Head - Baby Face

Headband - Mossu - Fleur.Wreath

Sweater - neve top - sharp

Book & Pose - *!R.O!* Knowledge BENTO Pose

Choker - Whisper ~ Teeny Choker

Ring - ^^Swallow^^ Lock of Love Ring

#harry potter #diary #witch #hufflepuff #magic #magical #witchy #hogwarts #journal #secondlife #mischief managed

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revmeg · 3 years ago

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...Writer Lori Erickson called Merton's moment 'one of the most famous revelations in the history of spirituality'; she says the historical marker is 'the only one that I know of in the United States that marks a mystical experience.' Fast-forward one year. Merton was again in Louisville. He doesn't say where...This time he had a very different experience. 'Was in Louisville yesterday,' he writes. 'Hated the town. It was hot and stupid. Hated all the advertisements...Everywhere the world oppresses me with a sense of infinite clutter and confusion...' One year after his Fourth-and-Walnut epiphany, the town has become 'hot and stupid.' Part of me wants to say, 'What the heck, Thomas?' But I also understand. HOW LONG DOES AN EPIPHANY LAST? The spiritual road is ever changing. Epiphanies remain, but the shock of them wears off. The year 1959 would find Merton complaining and impatient. I'm not saying this was wrong of him. In fact, it teaches me how to learn and learn again--that I forever have to seek compassion and miracles, transcendence and revelation. That compassion or transcendence or revelation will not be automatically in my heart because it was there a year, a month, or a week ago. And I have to think about--and trust--the process.

The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton by Sophfronia Scott, p. 67

#The Seeker and the Monk #Thomas Merton #Sophfronia Scott #spirituality #epiphany

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shitloadsofwrestling · 7 years ago

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Scarlett Bordeaux [October 30th, 2012]

Only a few months after first stepping into the ring, Women Of Honor’s Scarlett Bordeaux traveled to Louisville, KY to further her training at Ohio Valley Wrestling. It was there that she had some of her first matches against the likes of Taeler Hendrix, former OVW Women's Champion Epiphany, NXT star Heidi Lovelace, WWE and TNA star Taryn Terrell, and former TNA star Josette Bynum (Sojourner Bolt). On the photos above, Scarlett was dressed for Halloween on a night where she participated in an 8-woman battle royal.

You can catch OVW every Wednesday night at the Davis Arena in Louisville, Kentucky. Full episodes of their weekly programming are available at OVWrestling.com.

#scarlett bordeaux #ovw #ohio valley wrestling #pro wrestling #2010s #2012

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theadmiringbog · 5 years ago

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*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device

–@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

—

Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online.

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”

Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”

Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

... he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

My most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.

Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.

Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.

A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.

We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.

“In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all.

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large.

In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes: We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them. But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century.

Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.”

Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.

“knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,”

Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.

(“bland enough to offend no one”)

The professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time.

Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.

Our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising.

Mastodon... They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public.

... forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public!

A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global mesh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.

In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.”

Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.

Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.

“I would prefer not to.”

#How to Do Nothing #books

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