#hes great but its all very professional. with my old advisor i would text her after hours bc she was a workaholic like me and went on long

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[hedwigstalons]

High Expectations

This is a fic that I originally told myself I wouldn’t post any of until it was complete.   Evidently I lied.  It’s not complete but I do have 21k words and eight chapters built up already.  It was meant to be Gordon’s story of how he ended up in WASP but the other brothers have decided to put in an appearance too (I blame the boys and also @willow-salix�� for encouraging them)

I’ve also set myself a secondary challenge with this to produce a piece of art for each chapter.  I’m hoping to try out different styles and hopefully make some progress over time.  This first bit was very much about getting a feel for the tools (a challenge seeing as I first have to wrestle the drawing pad away from the small person who just likes being able to make rainbow glitter pictures)

Anyway....

xoxoxox

Summary: Jeff Tracy has very strong beliefs about what he expects from his sons.  Sometimes his expectations are at odds with what his sons themselves want from life, especially Gordon.  

Chapter One

The office was tiny, barely large enough for the single desk it contained.  It didn’t really matter.  This room no longer had a permanent resident. State wide cuts to the careers service and an investment in online guidance meant that careers advisors were stretched across districts; a few lonely individuals doing the rounds of the high schools to dispense reassurance and wisdom in statutory ten minute blocks.  As a consequence this area of the school hadn’t been refurbished in many years and had a general air of neglect.  The carpet tiles had been worn bald in a clear path to the two chairs in the room, one in front of the desk and one behind.  The painted cinderblock walls were covered in posters, bleached and faded by the California sun, bearing inspirational quotes.  

 You can do anything!

 Be the change you want to see

 Aim for the skies

 The posters mirrored the sentiments he had heard at home too many times.  Although at home they tended to come tinged with disappointment as he handed over yet another report card that didn’t meet the standard set by the siblings who had gone before.  Yale, Harvard and the Denver School of Advanced Technology had already accepted a Tracy.  Gordon just couldn’t match up to their lofty heights of academic success.  He was bright but that just got overshadowed by the glittering trio above him.  Anything he did had always been done better by at least one, but more often all, of his older brothers.  

 The pressure to achieve academic excellence had lessened slightly as his swimming training had ramped up in intensity.  As competitions progressed from local, to state, to national, to international the family had grown to accept that this was no passing hobby.  But Gordon still lived with the constant threat that he would be pulled out the pool if his grades dropped too low.  It was taking all his energy to keep on top of his school work to the required B- average insisted on by his father so that he could keep doing the one thing he felt truly good at.  The one thing that set him apart from his over-achieving brothers.

 At least the teachers didn’t judge him or at least couldn’t judge him against his more intellectual siblings.  As soon as John had graduated high school and started at Harvard, an accomplishment for which he was several years younger than the average after skipping a couple of grades, Jeff had moved himself and the youngest boys away from rural Kansas to Los Angeles.  The old farmhouse was retained but was no longer a permanent base for the family.

 The move to the city was a strategic decision by Jeff and one that was only delayed in order to allow John to complete his high school education without the disruption of an inter-state move.  For Jeff it meant the ability to site himself in the commercial heartlands expected of the business that was flourishing under his direction.  It also meant he was able to get back each night to care for his youngest children, even if he sometimes didn’t make it back to the apartment before midnight.

 It may have been expected that Jeff Tracy, an individual rapidly climbing the lists of America’s richest and most influential individuals, would have used the move as an opportunity to enrol his youngest sons in the finest educational establishment Los Angeles had to offer. But Jeff Tracy was a man raised in Kansas wheat fields.  A man for whom his own success and the successes of his eldest three sons had been built on the foundations of learning delivered in small town rural schools. What was good enough for him was good enough for all his children.  There were no private tutors or exclusive schools.  Gordon and Alan found themselves enrolled in the regular district school with its air of neglect and underfunding.

 A large part of Gordon really wanted to be back in his math class.  Not because he had any great fondness for the subject but because he found it hard in a way the others didn’t.  He was not above digging out Virgil’s old annotated English texts or Scott’s history files if he wanted a bit of extra insight for his essays but math was different. Any notes left by his siblings were generally an incomprehensible scrawl.  Not that any of them had made many math notes; they all seemed to just get it.  

 Gordon still remembered the first time after John had headed off to Harvard that he had called for help with his homework.  John had tried to be patient but there had been an unmistakeable tone of annoyance accompanied by a condescending eye roll clearly visible on the call screen.  Gordon had been left in no doubt that John found the idea of a Tracy struggling with algebra to be frankly insulting.  Virgil had displayed rather more patience and understanding but the pity that came with the help was too much for Gordon to take.  He didn’t want to find out what Scott’s reaction would be.  The golden haloed first-born was becoming increasingly distant and superior as his career in the Air Force progressed.  

 And so Gordon ploughed on alone.  Taking study guides to swim competitions to read between the heats.  Trying to juggle the conflicting demands of Team USA and Team Tracy.  The former striving for physical excellence and peak performance, the latter demanding excellence across the board.

 The careers advisor on the far side of the desk looked up at the young man sat opposite her.  The school records showed he was academically above average.  He had prospects.  

 The students that entered her office tended to fall into three broad categories.  There were the ones that didn’t really need their regulation advice session having already got their chosen career path mapped out, whether that involved furthering their education or just jumping straight into the local jobs market. There were those that were bewildered and clueless about where to turn next.  Then there were those that just didn’t seem to care and who drifted through her office much like they drifted through the rest of their school career. She wondered which she would encounter in this interview.

 “So Gordon” she smiled at the teenager, “have you considered what you want to do after you graduate high school?”

 The teen looked at her with a slightly surprised expression.

 “Swim, ma’am”  

 It was said bluntly and without preamble, accompanied by a mid-western politeness that the move to the city hadn’t shaken off. Stated as fact rather than as some hypothetical idea.  She had encountered plenty of teenagers with dreams of making it big on the sporting circuit but very few made it professional.  Usually the dreams were of football or basketball; swimming was a new one to add to her list.  

 “Swim?”

 “Yes ma’am, swim.  I’ve already got my qualifying time sorted.  Come the summer I’ll be at the Olympics.”

 Cogs clicked into place.  This was her nineteenth interview of the day and the students were beginning to blur together, even with the supplementary notes put together by the tutors that actually got to see these kids each day.  The low attendance scores suddenly made sense. Gordon Tracy, the rising star of the swimming circuit.

 “Of course.”  She flustered slightly over her notes.  It was a new experience to have a member of the Olympic squad sat before her. But she was obliged to be a sounding board for his career choice for the next ten minutes.  She couldn’t just send him back to class off the back of a one word answer.  She decided to stick to familiar territory; if they know the plan, find out the backup plan.

 “Have you considered what you will do after swimming? You have good grades here.  I’d recommend making a college application.”

 The youngster gave a hollow sort of chuckle. “Not good enough for anywhere that matters.  I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at, ma’am.”

 The interview was brought to a close by the final bell of the day and Gordon was glad to be able to scoop up his rucksack and escape the claustrophobic confines of the office.  He was sure the careers advisor meant well but he felt that the session was a pretty pointless experience.  Actually being in class would have been a better use of his time.

 As he reached the front of the school he spied Alan waiting for him in their usual spot.  The younger boy was scuffing his shoes in the dirt while waiting, the bored expression of his face breaking into smile when he saw his older brother.  They set off on the short walk back the apartment.

 “Good day, Al?”

 “Yeah, ok”

 “Much homework?”

 Alan grimaced.  He was about as fond of homework as Gordon was.

 “I’ll take that as a yes.  Well make sure you get on with it as soon as we get in.  No video games until it’s finished.”

 “Yes Sir!”  The response was accompanied by a mocking salute which earned Alan a gentle whack on the back of the head.

 “Hey, less of that.  I’m not Scott.  But seriously Al, just make sure you get it done.  I’ve got an extra training session tonight but only a short one; you’ll have the place to yourself until about 6.  I’ll sort us some dinner once I’m home.”

 “Will you be able to play video games with me once you’re back.”

 “Sorry, I’ll have my own work to get on with.”

 Alan’s shoulders slumped dejectedly and his feet dragged along the sidewalk.

 “Another quiet night then.”

 Gordon hated seeing Alan so flat.  The pair spent a significant amount of time together and, like all his brothers, he had a desire to protect the youngest.  He wrapped an arm around the shoulders of the shorter boy and was rewarded with a shove in the ribs.  Evidently anything even slightly resembling a hug in public was out this close to the school grounds.

 “I’ll see what I can do.”

 They had reached the apartment by this point. Gordon dashed inside to grab his swimming kit and left Alan with strict instructions to make sure he got all his homework done.  He didn’t like leaving Alan home alone but it was a regular occurrence now.  Their father wouldn’t be home for hours and with all the others moved away the youngest two had got used to fending for themselves.  He left Alan with a promise that they would spend some time together later.

 The training session passed in a blur of drills.  There were now more days with both morning and evening training in preparation for the Olympics and the extra workouts were taking their toll.  By the time Gordon reached the apartment his shoulders ached and all he wanted to do was stand under a scalding hot shower before collapsing in to bed.  Unfortunately he knew he had other responsibilities to attend to first.

 Gordon rolled his shoulders, plastered on a smile and scanned the entry system for the apartment.

 xoxoxox

 Normally weekday meals were Gordon’s domain or he was at least there to help out if Alan ventured into the kitchen.  But he had completed his homework quicker than expected and in the boredom of the empty apartment it had seemed like a good idea to start dinner.

 He took the pack of greens from the fridge, prodded the pan of pasta and gave the chicken a quick stir.  As he sliced the greens an acrid smell assaulted his nostrils.  The chicken, which had been cooking nicely until now seemed to have chosen the moment he took his eye off the ball to catch and stick to the bottom of the pan.  Carefully prepared strips of prime breast disintegrated and crumbled as he tried to scrape the dried out offerings from the base of the pan.  He cursed, turned out the stove, and went back to preparing the greens.  

 The clock ticked closer to 6pm.  Steam rose in billows from the pan of greens which had reached a rapid boil.  Perhaps he should have waited until Gordon was actually home before cooking the vegetables, the shredded leaves were starting to disintegrate.  

 At least the pasta should be ok.  

 The pasta which wasn’t boiling.

 More cursing filled the air as Alan realised his error. In his attempt to salvage the chicken he had turned off the heat under the pasta as well.  Perhaps he should have just let Gordon cook the whole thing. This was a mistake.  All he wanted to do was free up some time in the hope of getting a game in with Gordon and instead he had ruined everything.  He wondered if it was too late to dig out the emergency credit card and call for take out.  He would just have to make sure Dad took it out of his allowance rather than Gordon’s.

 The sound of the front door broke through his thoughts.

 “Hi Alan.”  The voice echoed up the hallway.  Footsteps approached, only pausing briefly as a kit bag was launched into a room, landing in a corner with a heavy thud.  Too late to salvage anything now, within moments Gordon was in the doorway.  “Hey, you cooked.  Thanks”

 “No need to sound so surprised.  Don’t thank me til you’ve tried it though.  It’s, um, not really gone to plan.”

 “I’m sure it’s fine.  Want me to drain these pans while you get the plates out?”

 Alan signalled his agreement by delving into the crockery cupboard leaving Gordon to drain and stir together the contents of the various pans.  He wasn’t exactly looking forward to the meal but Gordon seemed grateful to be spared the chore.

 Dinner was everything Alan expected it to be.  They sat opposite sides of the kitchen counter, Gordon shovelling down vast quantities of noodles while he picked at his own much smaller portion.  The meat was as dry as cardboard and stuck in his throat alongside the shards of undercooked pasta. Perhaps he ought to pay more attention in the kitchen, especially as Gordon was likely to be training more and more over the coming months.

 Gordon’s fork clattered onto the empty plate before Alan was even half way through.  He looked up to see eyes the colour of mahogany under the harsh kitchen lights looking at him with concern.

 “You ok?  You’ve hardly eaten.”

 “I’m fine.  Just wishing I’d ordered us a pizza instead.”  He waved a forkful of charred chicken to emphasise his point.

 This earned him a small chuckle and at least dispelled the worry.

 “Hey, no complaints from me over it.  I think my coach would have something so say about that too, we’ll save the pizza for the summer.  I’ll start clearing up while you finish off.  You still want that game?”

 Alan grinned.  Suddenly the pasta was a lot easier to stomach if there was a chance to thrash his brother in the goblin realms at the end of it.  

 xoxoxox

 As the clock ticked past midnight and into the small hours of the morning Gordon lay in the darkness, sleep refusing to come.  His normally comfortable bed felt too lumpy and he turned this way and that.  First facing the blank wall next to the bed, then the ceiling and finally the open room. A shelf of trophies glinted faintly in the light that managed to spill around the edges of the heavy blackout curtains.  Back in Kansas Gordon had rarely bothered closing his curtains; he had always been an early riser and was usually up long before the dawn in order to get to early morning training or fit in a gym session before school.  But the pervading yellow glow of the city from the ever present light pollution wasn’t like the peaceful moon.  On nights like this the city felt oppressive and he yearned for the open fields of home, as he still though of Kansas.  Gordon might now be able to access better training facilities and coaches which had enhanced his Olympic prospects but he had never embraced city life.

 He was exhausted.  The training session after school had been intense and he had thrown himself into the drills with maximum effort.  The gaming session had probably been a mistake but he hadn’t wanted to let Alan down.  The kid had gone to the trouble of trying to make dinner and save him a job.  Ok, the noodles had been still firm to the point of being slightly crunchy and the greens had been on the verge of turning to soup but it’s the thought that counts.  It was calories.  It was from his prescribed meal plan.  It was mostly edible.  He appreciated the level of consideration shown by a teenager who shouldn’t have any more pressing concerns than getting his chemistry paper completed and working out whether Ellen from World Studies class had a crush on him.

 His own homework had been its usual slog.  He wrote until his eyes became sticky and the notes he was reading became a jumbled blur.  Sleep should have enveloped him within minutes of climbing into bed but instead the words from his earlier interview kept churning around his head.  The thoughts drowning out even the gnawing ache in his overworked muscles.  

 What about after?

 He had always managed to stave these thoughts off before.  Whenever his father had made comments about future plans he has always managed to deflect the conversations.  He didn’t have room in his head for anything other than visualising the dream.  Why on earth should the words of a complete stranger, parroted from some state approved script, make life any different.

 He was a Tracy.  A name synonymous success and achievement.  He had found his calling in a way that set him apart from the others.  

 He was going to swim.

 He was going to represent his country.

 He was going to win.

 He ran through the visualisation that had been a constant companion in his head for years.  He could feel the flow of the water over his body as his muscles flexed in perfect synchronicity.  He could hear the roar of the crowd as the results flashed up on the scoreboard.  He rode the wave of emotion as the medal was presented.  This was the moment that would mark him out as more than just the fourth son of an astronaut.  Gordon Cooper Tracy.  A name in his own right.

 With the sound of the national anthem still ringing in his ears Gordon tried to visualise the next steps.  He tried to force the dream beyond its current conclusion but instead found only darkness.  

[cecilspeaks]

147 - The Protester

Hot singles in your area are staring into the forest and grinning absently. 

Welcome to Night Vale.

Astronomers are frantically trying to determine why a chunk of the moon is missing. Ragged and greedy like a slice removed from a pie by hungry hands rather than a civilized serving utensil, the gap in the moon has been baffling professional sky gazers for weeks. Fun fact: did you know a group of astronomers is called a commotion?

Astronomers believe the moon could be eroding, because people have stopped believing in it, like ancient Roman polytheism. Others have theorized that the moon was damaged by enemy ships in the ongoing Blood Space War. But people on the internet have countered that this is part of the mandala effect, and that that piece of the moon has always been missing and we’re collectively misremembering. Like how those beloved picture book bears that we all remember as the Berenstein Bears, have by all physical evidence always actually been spelled “The Dog Pound Boyzzzz”. Boyz with a Z. Because of the 2016 city ordinance that proclaimed that anything can be true if you say it loud enough, astronomers are forced to consider all sides.

I don’t know any astronomers, but I do know a scientist! My husband Carlos has been the leading scientific mind in Night Vale since we started dating, almost six years ago. Carlos says that he has been studying and interesting meteorite he found out in the sand wastes and scrublands beyond Night Vale. He believes this particular rock is a piece of the moon. Standing before a giant wall of blinking lights, flickering screens and intermittent beeps, Carlos determined that this piece of the moon broke off only one month ago. But this is impossible, because no one can remember seeing the moon breaking apart in the sky. Well, maybe we were all asleep when it happened, I told Carlos as I dabbed away a small crumb from a cheese Danish that had gotten stuck in his beard. Oh, fun fact: Carlos grew a beard! And I have never liked beards on men, but now – I do. It’s got two thin silver racing stripes down the chin, and the hair is so soft. We’ve been married over two years and every day, I fall more in love.

Oh right, the moon, OK good God, always with the moon. [mutters] Yeah, yeah… Carlos has been studying an unusual number of empty homes and businesses about town. He noticed that the houses on either side of us are completely empty, but he didn’t remember them being empty before. He remembers us having neighbors, but he couldn’t name a single thing about them. He believes this might be related to the damaged moon. Whatever happened a month ago to the moon immediately caused us all to forget it, because something in our timeline changed. Carlos said: “Perhaps we are not forgetting people and events, perhaps they never existed at all.” His eyes were cloudy with pensive thought, and I touched his furry cheek and said: “You’ll save us, hon. I know you will.” He smiled and asked if I’d be willing to reach out to archeology professor Harrison Kip again. Carlos, uh, had been communicating with Kip about this very issue, but now emails to Harrison keep bouncing back, and his phone number is no longer in the phone company’s database of working numbers. I laughed and said: “Carlos, I don’t know who Harrison Kip is!” Carlos looked worried, and said he wasn’t sure he did either. But he felt like he should.

Protestors have organized a sit in in front of city hall, demanding an end to the Blood Space War. The city council, seeing the crowd of about 150 people gathered around the front entrance of their building, took immediate action. They announced they would be taking a long planned family vacation to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, until this whole protest thing runs its course. “We don’t believe South Dakota actually exists,” the single-bodied, multi-voiced council said. “When you look at a map, it seems like it exists, like it’s just right there when you look at it and it’s between two other identical states, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. Anyway, this feels like a great time to take the kids to see Mount Rushmore.” As the city council said this, several small childlike heads emerged from the city council’s singular body and screamed in happy unison. Or terrified unison. Mm, it’s hard to get an emotional reading on screams.

The organizer of the protest is 20-year-old Night Vale community college student, Basimah Bishara, whose father Lieutenant Fakir Bishara returned home from the Blood Space War three years ago. Basimah greeted her father’s return with joy, but that joy has since been replaced by confusion and pain. Let’s hear Basimah’s story in her own words.

Basimah: Time no longer works correctly for my father. I understand time does not work correctly for many people in Night Vale, but it had always worked correctly for him before the war. In December 2015, he returned home after 11 years of serving our city, our country, our planet in a war that still makes no sense to me. I was six when he volunteered for service, he was 30. 11 years later when he returned home, I was 17. My father was 19. He did not remember joining in the war nor having a daughter nor meeting his wife. He is a teenager, like I was. I no longer am a teenager, but my father still is. He has stayed 19 years old. Time no longer works correctly for him.

My mother Tahira raised me. She expressed reticence about the band I started, the music we played. She grounded me when my grades slipped and shouted at me when I told her I had a girlfriend. But she came to love Marina and more, my mother came to understand as both as people, as women. Not as rivers to be damned or levied.

My father’s return has been especially hard on her, because she is 45 and her husband is a 19-year-old stranger. You probably know what it’s like to have a father, to have a man much older than you who changed your diapers or watched your diapers being changed. Who taught you to speak or ride a bike, who helped you develop as a human from an animal from a larva from the simplest, squirming wad of meat into an adult. That father will always be a father, not a friend, not an equal, a father. You probably do not know what it’s like to see a father at your age, to talk with your father when he is also barely an adult. To have your father lonely and inquisitive think of you as his only friend in the world, while you look to him for guidance and love. But he is incapable of both, at least not in the way you need to be guided and loved.

It took two years for Fakir to open up about the war and it still makes no sense to him nor me. The Blood Space War requires constant shifts through time, through worm holes to change lost battles into won battles, to undo what has already been undone thousands, millions of times over. The future does not look like a blank page, it looks like a tattered sheet of paper, grayed and frayed from countless transcriptions and erasures of history. Battles are won and then undone through time travel. We lose our lives and then regain them by traveling backwards and fighting again. We are winning the war by perpetuating the war. Last month, the Polonians attacked our earth, I am sure of it. The only evidence is our broken moon. I believe the general undid this attack with time travel and this has changed our reality, changed who was born, who ever lived in the first place. People are disappearing because they will have never existed.

People think we’re crazy for protesting. I’m 20 and my father is still 19. I’m not crazy. My mother Tahira is not crazy. We are angry.

Our next protest is scheduled this afternoon at the corner of Earl and Somerset by the Dog Park near the Ralphs.

Cecil: Not sure what Basimah was referring to. That’s an empty lot by the Ralphs. There was word for a dog park to be built there many years ago, but it never materialized.

[clears throat] Let’s have a look now at local news. Earth sciences professor Simone Rigideau announced today that she is scrapping all text books and lesson plans at the community college in favor of organized prayer to a god named Huntokar. Several students and parents argued against such an extreme divergence from core curriculum in favor of French religious practices, but college president Sarah Sultan supported her staff member by saying: “Cut Simone some slack. She doesn’t even teach classes. She’s a transient who lived in a storage closet inside the earth sciences building for 20 years. The only reason she has the title of professor is because of antiquated squatter’s rights laws.” Rigideau donned rabbit furs and an old bicycle frame wraught into the shape of antlers, and began spray paintin the Fibonacci sequence on the cars in the college parking lot, all the while singing a ballad about clocks.

The intergalactic military headquarters released their first quarter earnings statmenet this week. Investors were displeased to see that each of the board members of the privately own space defense contractor had purchased a 125-foot yachts and NFL franchises. But those fears were quickly allayed by the announcement of layoffs of more than 5,000 employees. Stock prices for the intergalactic military soared to an all time high this afternoon, at 490 dollars a share. Senior strategic advisor Jameson Archibald said the intergalactic military has no actual earned income. 100 per cent of their gross is from venture capital. Archibald said: “Some investors keep asking how we plan to monetize our military, which is a stupid question, man! I mean, look at this Patek Philippe watch I bought. It’s encrusted with 10 pounds of diamonds, and the watch face was made using an actual piece of the Sistine Chapel. We are doing fine.” Archibald added that the intergalactic military is developing an app and a subscription service that allows people to engage in celestial war fare any time they want for only 12,99 a month.

Alright, listeners, I heard back from Basimah, and she said I was right. There is no dog park. Of course I was right. If I knew there was a dog park being built in this town, I would have reported it immediately. Carlos and I have a dog. His name is Aubergine because he’s purple and European, and Auby is adorable and we love him dearly. I mean, I wasn’t into the idea of having to care for a dog, but Carlos strongly urged this case one morning over breakfast when he said, “I think we should get a dog”, and 20 minutes later, we were leaving the SPCA with our adopted pet. [clears throat]

Basimah said she was positive there was a dog park next to the Ralphs, but when she arrived at the corner of Earl and Somerset, it was all empty lots. To be honest, I don’t remember her mentioning a Ralphs before, because I would have corrected her. There’s never been a Ralphs affiliate in Night Vale. This is what Basimah had to say. Um, hang on, let me just insert the tape I used to record her. And there we go.

Basimah: If a person never exists, did they disappear? If you never knew them, can you miss them? My father spends most of his days playing basketball with friends he made at the rec center. He is 19 years old and trying to escape a decade of inescapable drama from warfare. Asked him who my mother was. I grew up with only my uncle Omar and did not know my parents until my father returned from war. Fakir did not remember my mother. He did not remember his marriage or my birth, because it has not happened yet in his timeline. Asked what if mother didn’t exist at all. What if the general’s time traveling has altered our lives so much that my mother was never born and you can never meet her. My father, the teenager said: ��If I never met a woman, I do not know I will not miss her. But I’ll meet another woman.” I asked: “What if I was never born?” My dad said: “Basi?” He hid his tears and then he hugged me, but it was not the hug of a father and daughter. It was the hug of a son and mother. He buried his head into my shoulder and sobbed, repeating: “Basi! Basi!” And I comforted his heaving head with my palm. I said: “Father, Fakir. I think I shall no longer exist soon. [voice fades] I think I-

Oh OK, sorry for the dead air, listeners, I was playing a recording of an interview I did. Wait, nope. I just checked, there’s no tape in the player at all. I thought I had been talking with… Ugh. Aah! Who have I been talking to? Maybe it was my husband Carlos reporting on his findings about the damage done to our moon or, mh, or maybe it was nothing at all. [clears throat] Well, let us forget that we forgot, and go now To the weather.

[Shake” by Wednesday’s Wolves https://www.wednesdayswolves.com]

We have an update on the Blood Space War, Night Vale. John Peters says his brother has returned home again. When he left a month ago, James Peters was 22 years old. But he is now in his seventies, which is the age he should be. John held his brother tightly, crying in gratitude and relief that his own family could return to some kind of normalcy. James at first was heartened to see John again, to see his home again, and to learn that he and the general had thwarted the Polonian attack on our planet. But his tearful smile drifted slowly downward, an evening shadow overtaken by night. Upon James’ face now was the sudden knowledge that he had made a grave error. James looked around Night Vale seeing empty lots and homes, abandoned buildings and sparse streets. According to James, thousands of people have gone missing from Night Vale, because they never existed or never moved here in the first place. The general had leapt in time to successfully stop the Polonians from ever reaching Earth, but the change in the timeline caused Night Vale to change too.

Listeners, this may seem strange, but perhaps there are people you once knew, family you once lived with, places you were in, all of which are gone, and without your knowing. I have tried hard to think of any memory of any experience or person I have lost in the last month, but I can think of none. I told James Peters that perhaps the change in timeline did not matter if no one knew what they had lost, if no one noticed any change. James said: “Cecil, I just don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe if we had a scientific perspective on this, we could better understand how this is affecting us as a community.” And I said I didn’t know any scientists, not personally anyway. There’s the strange woman who lives in the storage closet at the community college, I suppose we could ask her.

The important thing is that we are safe, and that another veteran has returned home, and it is another beautiful day in Night Vale.

Stay tuned next for “Conspiring to Love”, our new relationship advice show, which as a lifelong bachelor sounds like something I should check out.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: “Nothing lasts forever” is a phrase with two meanings, and they’re both true.

[tysonrunningfox]

Ripped

Hey so I didn’t finish this last night, but I finished it this morning, this is the weirdest Hiccstrid au I’ve ever written, I will claim that, and I haven’t even gotten into Hiccup’s POV yet, but I am excited and I need people to see this monstrosity so here.  

Seven fifty a month. Average rent for a one-bedroom in downtown Berk runs about eleven hundred a month if you don’t want to live above a club or a subway station or dog kennel, which Astrid doesn’t, so she’s willing to deal with a lot for this seven fifty a month. But a lot, even as a vague concept, still has boundaries. Boundaries that loom ever closer with every kitchen cabinet she opens to find bare and empty space instead of bed bugs or black mold or a secretly cemented in shrine to Tom Brady or Cthulhu.

The closet isn’t a walk-in, but it’s clean, and the landlord will let her set her own rent schedule. Hell, it’s quiet because neighbors both up and downstairs are renting on airbnb from out of state, so she basically has this whole side of the building to herself. Most of her few boxes are almost fully unpacked when she finally starts to come around to the idea that sometimes when things seem too good to be true, it might just be because they are that good.

And that’s when the bright red laser dot appears on the light fixture on the kitchen ceiling.

“…there!” A voice shouts from the courtyard below the kitchen window and Astrid crosses the room just in time to see a silent but flashing police car pull up at the curb and illuminating a small group of people surrounding the person pointing the laser up through the fog. “Aaaand we’ve got to go!”

The shouting person starts to run, patting the hood of the cop car and flailing to catch a hat that falls off of their head as the rest of the group shuffles behind, giggling nervously.

Ok, a few drunks in the courtyard, that’s what’s to be expected for seven fifty a month. It’s a catch, but a manageable one, Astrid will just have to order some blackout curtains when her first paycheck hits, that’s not too big of a deal. She watches the cop car turn off its lights and the cop in the front seat waves in her direction, a welcome to the neighborhood that she really doesn’t want, and she closes the crappy mass produced blinds that only sort of block the view.

The cop car leaves, eventually, and she starts unloading books onto the lone Ikea bookcase that kind of fits between the couch and bedroom door. She has to be at her advisor’s office first thing in the morning, but she won’t be able to focus if she doesn’t have some semblance of a home setup to come home to and books on a shelf are the easiest way to do that. Even so, the apartment is more of a mess than when she started when she gives up for the night and starts brushing her teeth.

The laser pointer appears again, reflecting off of her bathroom mirror and glowing dimly in her dingy kitchen light fixture.

“…there, I think I’ve got it, not a great angle from here, but approximately right under that light, on the second story is where Elizabeth Smith died.”

Astrid whips open the bathroom window, fumbling her toothbrush as she does and dropping it onto what sounds like the same idiot as earlier.

“What the fuck?”

Her toothpaste spatters an arc across a stupid looking top hat, of all things, as a skinny guy looks up and freezes, staring at her out of a pale face for a second before clicking the laser pointer off. The crowd around him laughs, not nearly embarrassed or startled enough for the revelation that apparently Astrid’s apartment is cheap because some woman died in her living room. They shouldn’t be laughing about that.

“Your apartment was empty,” the guy wipes his hat on his long black coat and takes a few halting steps back towards the sidewalk.

“Now it’s not!” Astrid growls, wiping toothpaste off of her mouth with the back of her hand. That was a new electric toothbrush head and those things aren’t cheap except oh, that doesn’t matter, because someone died in her living room and no one told her.

“Noted!” The guy nods, replacing his smudged top hat and ushering the small group of stupid drunks behind him.

A gust of wind and creaking tree branches make Astrid jump and the window slams shut, barely avoiding her fingertips.

“Fuck,” she swears under her breath, hugging her stomach and staring at the light fixture in the next room. “No. I’m not going to get freaked out about this. Just because some drunk idiot has privacy issues doesn’t mean anyone died here.” Her feet drag the first couple of forced steps into the living room where she sits on the couch and picks up her phone, hovering over the landlord’s number for a second.

Gobber said to text anytime. If it were a plumbing emergency or she had found bedbugs or Patriots paraphernalia in the cabinets, she wouldn’t hesitate, but if she says something now, it feels like she’s scared for no reason.

Unless it’s not no reason. It could be a healthcode violation, she might need to argue for a pre-move in professional cleaning in her lease. That should really be in all the lease paperwork. She’s doing Gobber a legal service when she texts him, really, she’s not scared or even that perturbed.

Astrid (10:37pm): Who is Elizabeth Smith?

It’s ambiguous enough that if there’s no truth to this, Gobber should debunk it pretty quickly. He seemed like a stand-up guy, or at least decently direct if the way he shrugged off helping her move in with a laughing wave of his prosthetic arm is any indication.

Landlord Gobber (10:39pm): You heard about that, did you?

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Astrid scrolls through her phone to Ruffnut’s contact and calling her. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.”

“Hello?” Ruffnut is somewhere loud and she sounds about as drunk as Laser Pointer asshole must have been.

“You have to come over to my new apartment, right now.”

“I thought we were getting lunch tomorrow.”

“Someone died here.” Astrid doesn’t need to give any other means of explanation because Ruffnut asks for the address and says she’ll be here in ten. She’s knocking on the front door in eight and Astrid opens to see her holding a small shovel, the kind designed to keep in the trunk of cars for digging out of the snow. “I don’t have a car.”

“I know, that’s why I already over-tipped my Uber driver, they’re waiting downstairs,” Ruffnut stumbles inside, giving Astrid a one-armed hug that would be anti-climactic after so long apart if it weren’t for the other circumstances. “You said something about a body?”

“What?” Astrid looks at the light fixture then Ruffnut’s shovel, eyes widening. “There’s no body here now—“

“You said someone died here, what was I supposed to think?”

“That at some point in time, someone died in my apartment, not that I needed your help hiding a body.” Astrid yanks the door shut and turns on the light, shuddering again. What if it fell on whoever Elizabeth Smith was? What if this apartment is so cheap because the shoddy wiring literally has a death count?

“Do I get any points for not asking if they deserved it?” Ruffnut looks around, adjusting her grip on the short shovel, “because if you had killed someone, they definitely would have deserved it.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Astrid shuts the door, “I didn’t even kill the asshole shining a laser pointer into my apartment, I just threw my toothbrush at him.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story.” She sighs and tugs at her braid, struggling to reconcile the fact that she moved in today. It was just last night she turned in the keys to her old, awful roommate and loaded her last boxes into the van and now, less than twenty four hours later, she’s dealing with a new apartment that might be a crime scene. “And a long day. Have you ever heard of Elizabeth Smith?”

“Should I ask John Doe?” Ruffnut points over her shoulder, “and should I go tell the Uber driver to shut his trunk?”

“I’ll come with you, there’s a liquor store down the block.”

They don’t talk much on the way to get a bottle of wine. Astrid almost worries about her own expression because it’s not like Ruffnut to tread lightly and no one grows up or changes that much in two years. She’s relieved when they get back and Ruffnut bowls through her hesitation, practically snatching her front door keys away and unlocking the door.

“So you never answered, are we looking for a ghost named Jane Johnson or whatever?”

“I have no idea,” Astrid opens the silverware drawer where she threw her mismatched set of cutlery earlier and thankfully finds her corkscrew, “you know what? No, I’m—I shouldn’t have called you, I’m just going to look it up, what’s my problem?”

“I don’t know what your problem is, that’s why I keep asking.”

“Elizabeth Smith, Berk, 324 Harbor Road,” Astrid types into her searchbar as she takes a swig of wine out of the bottle and hands it absently to Ruffnut, who does the same.

“You are awfully close to the harbor, aren’t you?” Ruffnut hauls herself up to sit on the kitchen counter, “I bet it’s going to smell like fish all morning, is that how you can afford it?”

“…and here, right above this courtyard, on a winter’s night in eighteen hundred and eighty three—”

The whisper-yell sends a thrill of anger and a wave of residually embarrassed fear through Astrid’s chest as she throws open the kitchen window to see another small group of drunks huddled in their coats around a toothpaste stained top hat.

“What is your problem?” She shouts and the guy freezes.

“What is going on?” Ruffnut jostles for a view of the window.

“And the apartment on the second story is still very active today,” the guy announces before hurrying off towards the gate, laser pointer bouncing off of a window across the street, “we’ll go to the site of the second murder—“

“Second murder?” Astrid calls after the group of stupid, trespassing drunks as they follow the idiot posing as a fancy Victorian trespasser, but no one answers and she slams the window shut with a scowl.

“Elizabeth Smith?” Ruffnut takes Astrid’s phone from the counter and scrolls through the search, “do you know anything about Viggo Grimborn, the Harbor Street Killer?”

“Is he a moron masquerading around in a top hat at…twelve forty eight in the morning?” Astrid’s knees shake with sudden onset exhaustion, which has a single treatment, which is wine out of the bottle even though it’s past midnight and she has to be at work in seven hours.

“No, the Harbor Street Killer, the one that’s inspired like…ok, more than a couple Johnny Depp characters, I’m not even going to list them. The famous one. Holy shit, Elizabeth Smith was his first victim.”

“Wait,” Astrid sits on the floor, cross-legged clutching the wine, “the one with that documentary?”

“Yeah, the one that filmed a few years ago, there was that cute camera guy,” Ruffnut nods, “my brother got really into it for a while, he had some theory that it was Theodore Roosevelt or something, I can get him to bring over his binder thingy.”

“No that’s—“

“Dossier!” She lays on the floor, head on Astrid’s leg, “that’s what he kept calling it. He’d totally bring it over.”

“No, don’t invite him,” Astrid takes her phone back before Tuffnut can be instructed to bring a compendium of his surely logical theories to the party. “I just have to do some research.” She wrings her hands, “tomorrow, after I sleep in the apartment where Viggo Grimborn killed someone. Apparently.”

Astrid isn’t going to explicitly ask Ruffnut to stay, but she doesn’t kick her out either.  Ruffnut's snoring is kind of a safety blanket, a white noise that Astrid is long accustomed to studying or sleeping through after four long years as college roommates, and Astrid doesn't realize she fell asleep on the floor, underneath the infamous light fixture, until her alarm is going off before sunrise the next morning.  

The same muscle memory that let Ruffnut's snores carry her peacefully to sleep now inspires her to smack Ruffnut awake with a pillow as she stumbles to the bathroom to start getting ready.  The bathroom where there is no toothbrush because it's on the ground outside, fully frosted over next to what Astrid imagines to be a stupid looking top hat shadow.  As always, the anger comes first, riding on a blanket of irritation.  She was ready to find all kinds of ridiculous things after accepting an apartment with such monumentally cheap rent, but some idiot with a laser pointer making a triplicate pilgrimage to annoy her wasn't on the agenda.  

She checks her phone to see if her landlord ever explained his monumentally helpful and not at all ominous text, and when she sees that he hasn't, she pries further.  

Astrid (7:04am): From a lunatic in the courtyard three times last night

She'll regret the sass later.  Or more like after payday when she can afford another electric toothbrush.  

"Did Johnny Depp kill us in our sleep?" Ruffnut hangs around the door, wiping smudged mascara off of her cheek and reaching for Astrid's stopgap mouthwash to swish some around her cheeks.  

"Not that I'm aware of," Astrid stares at her reflection in the dingy mirror for a second.  The slightly dark bags under her eyes are leftover from her last job's hours and the move and they only worsened the night before, but exhaustion only magnifies determination.  She's going to get to the bottom of this.  And by this she means her apartment and the laser pointed wielding, top hat wearing asshole who brought its flaws to her attention.  

It's not a great goal to start a new grad fellowship with, so maybe it's a good thing that her advisor is out through the end of the week.  A blonde guy who introduces himself as Fishlegs hands over her laptop and gives her a brief, but oddly in depth tour of the criminal archives before showing her to her desk.  It takes a couple of hours to check her class and work schedules and then she's stuck sitting.  

Sitting and researching.  

Pertinent things like ongoing studies in her department.  It's not intentional when she clicks a few footnotes and ends up looking at a dissertation on the Harbor Street Killer, where Elizabeth Smith is mentioned on the first page.  Five times in the document, in fact.  

Landlord Gobber (12:10pm): don't call the cops, I'll talk to him

Astrid (12:12pm): The Harbor Street Killer?  

She capitalizes because it feels significant.  Or maybe because she wants it to feel significant.  Being scared of all capital letters is different than being scared of lower case, not that she was scared at all.  Tired and addled, maybe, but not scared.  

Of course her landlord doesn't answer, why would he for seven fifty a month, and it's not like she has anything to do so she starts searching.  She expects the first page to be articles or even adaptations, like Ruffnut had mentioned, but most of the promotional links are for tours.  Walking tours, bus tours, one Segway tour.  

"Find anything interesting?"  Fishlegs interrupts Astrid's thoughts with a tired chuckle, "I wish I had a day here with nothing to do." He gestures to the stacks of books and records around them and Astrid nods.  

"Yeah, it's a great collection."  She hasn't found anything other than fodder for the world's creepiest staycation in her new city, but Fishlegs doesn't have to know that.  

"We have every Berk Times back through seventeen ninety five."  He brags, thumbing along a yellowed stack of pages, "if you need help finding anything--"

"Anything on the Harbor Street Killer?"  It falls out, weighted by lack of sleep and careless curiosity and Astrid bites her lip to keep from saying anything else.  

"The Harbor Street Killer?"  He rolls his eyes, "don't tell me you're one of those."  

"Oh, I'm not," Astrid scoffs, "I just...I think one of these tours I found online intersected my new apartment last night.  A few times, actually."  

"Try going to the Ripped Tavern after work," Fishlegs sits down at his own desk, "after happy hour, prices double for the tourist crowd."

"That sucks," Astrid nods, commiserating even as she looks up the tavern in association with the Harbor Street Killer.  There are about five different tours that meet there between four in the afternoon and one in the morning, like there's an entire industry based on the murder that apparently happened in Astrid's apartment.  

"Just because Johnny Depp--"

"Right," she cuts him off, "shouldn't ruin happy hour.  I get it."  

Fishlegs nods and starts muttering to himself over some file, his social interaction quota for the day evidently met.  Astrid texts Ruffnut to meet her at the Ripped Tavern after work.  

She gets there a little before seven and orders a half pint to have an excuse to sit and watch the crowd.  It transitions quickly from college students and office workers from nearby buildings to people holding maps and giggling over the same hushed name.  Viggo Grimborn.  The first tour guide she sees is obvious, because the woman is wearing an extravagant hat and carrying a sign that says 'Berserker Tours, 7:15pm'.  A small group congregates quickly around her and she checks names off of a list before clearing her throat and starting in on a practiced lecture.  

"Viggo Grimborn, the most famous murderer who was never caught."  She gives the crowd around her a second to giggle, "over the next two hours, we're going to visit important locations relevant to both the six murders most commonly attributed to Grimborn and the case pursuing him, but also one actual murder location."  

The front door of the tavern opens, a gust of cutting wind drawing Astrid's attention as she reflexively looks for Ruffnut, and instead sees a tall guy adjusting a bulging messenger bag over his shoulder.  But his bag isn't what gets her attention, it's his face, or more specifically the way that he looks at the woman in the hat starting her tour and rolls his eyes.  He gives the crowd gathered around her a wide berth, gait uneven from the heavy bag as he makes his way to a table in the back corner and starts flicking through a thick file.  

He's cute, not that Astrid cares.  That's not even why she's looking at him, it's his expressions that are holding her attention.  He seems to be trying very hard to ignore the tour beginning in the opposite corner of the tavern but keeps reacting anyway, mouth twisting into a mocking grimace when the tour guide says something about her theories about Grimborn's true identity.  When the tour group finally makes its way outside he rolls green eyes again, cheeks puffing out as he shakes his head and leans further over his file, tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth in evident concentration.  

"Hey," Ruffnut startles her, plopping down across the table and taking a sip of Astrid's beer without asking.  "Sorry, traffic.  Did I miss anything?"  

"Not really," Astrid resists the urge to look at her fellow reasonable person judging the next tour that's congregating by the bar, because Ruffnut's eagle eyes would catch onto something that's not there and get distracted, "just a Viggo Grimborn murder tour leaving with a different hat wearing weirdo than the one shining laser pointers into my apartment."  

"Really?  Is this like...a thing?  Don't tell Tuff that I owe him an apology for saying he's the only idiot on earth who cares about some hundred year old murder."  She looks around and wrinkles her nose, "oh my god, they're selling merchandise."  

Astrid follows her eyeline to a row of tee shirts displayed above the bar and wrinkles her nose, "murder commemoration clothes.  Great."  

"So what's the plan here?"  Ruffnut rubs her hands together, "are we going on a nerdy tour or..."  

"If I'm going to see that top hat wearing weirdo anywhere, I figure it'll be here."  

"So we're looking for the top hat weirdo," Ruffnut leans her chin on her hand and nods slowly, "what are you going to do when you find him?  Do I need to get that Uber driver back here and find some secluded woods or..."

"I don't know," Astrid shrugs.  She hasn't thought that far ahead, which isn't necessarily something she's used to.  A lot about this move has been spur of the moment and while she can't say it's comfortable, she doesn't really know how to backtrack at this point.  

"Well...you might want to think fast on that."  Ruff points over Astrid's shoulder and before Astrid can call out her overwhelming lack of subtlety, she sees what--or who--she's pointing at.  

There's a toothpaste stained top hat on the table next to the file, and the guy who she'd stupidly thought to be reasonable is pulling a long, antique looking coat out of his bag and shrugging into it.  The sign propped on his table says ‘The Real Viggo Grimborn tour, 7:30pm’.  

[alisonfloresus]

Step Outside Your Usual Way Of Thinking And Make A Breakthrough

Our brains are amazingly elastic … when we choose to stretch them. Here’s an example: Researchers wondered what would happen if college students were given glasses that made the world appear to be upside down. Those given the unusual perspective struggled at first. But in about a month, the students could do everything just fine upside down … including reading their text books and writing their papers.

Most people, by contrast, choose not to stretch their brains … even when they can gain something valuable. When no stretching happens, old ideas turn into tendencies … which become comfortable habits of walking in the same paths … and our footsteps wear the paths into familiar dry moats so deep that we cannot see any other choices.

When we stick with what we’ve been doing without further thought, we likewise often experience stalls, ways of thinking and operating that keep us from making important breakthroughs.

If you are in such a dry moat, making it deeper as you cover the same ground again and again, how can you develop the vision to escape? People have another trait that can help that’s often described as: Monkeys see and other monkeys do. People are fortunately great imitators.

But what should you imitate? It’s obviously easy to pick a bad model when trying to improve. Don’t depend on the advocate’s confidence: Everyone is typically convinced that his or her way is the only way.

How can you correctly judge the value of one alternative practice versus another? Professional experts in making breakthrough know that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: What are the results that are gained from one practice versus another?

By looking carefully at what others do, how much effort and how many resources are involved, and what the results are, breakthrough advisors learn that some practices are much more productive than others. Next, such advisors encourage starting with a small-scale, low-risk test to see what’s possible. From the results, the practice can be confirmed or invalidated.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Most people are convinced that no one outside of their field or area of endeavor could possibly make any contributions to creating a breakthrough. The truth is just the opposite: Breakthroughs are most likely to come from people outside the field.

It’s because they don’t know all of the rules of why this “couldn’t” or that “shouldn’t” work that makes outsiders open to seeing what’s missing and what should be deleted from the current ways of operating.

Rocketry provides one such example. The American military wanted to reduce the weight of one of its high-performance rockets by several hundred pounds. Engineers couldn’t see any way to do it. Make the rocket casing any thinner, and you might have fiery leaks that would result in disaster. Use a different propellant and you might blow up the rocket through unstable ignition.

One day while the engineers worked on the problem, a janitor came in to sweep up and empty the waste baskets. The janitor overheard their conversation and thought about the problem. Before leaving, the janitor interrupted the engineers to suggest that the company simply not paint the rocket.

Voila! That suggestion provided almost all of the needed weight reduction. The opportunity had been in front of the engineers all the time, but they couldn’t see the solution due to their habitual focus on the technical details of rocket science. But as they sometimes say, solving a problem may not be rocket science after all.

Sometimes, the breakthrough solution entails a wider body of knowledge than a non-expert (such as the janitor in the example) can supply through simple inspection of the situation. In those cases, it’s enormously valuable to look beyond the current discipline that’s guiding the thinking to consider the perspective of another problem-solving discipline.

For instance, the food industry learned new ways to improve quality and safety by studying the ingredient mixing methods that engineers in the chemical industry had been using for years to ensure reliable chemical reactions. The insights that led to this solution came from applying physics rather than biology, the science which food technologists are quite expert in and usually focus on.

For major problems of identifying ways to gain vastly better results, a kind of breakthrough most of us would like to have more often, any discipline involving well-developed analytical and decision-making processes can help.

As an example, athletes improved their performances a lot by applying what neuroscientists had learned about breakthrough physical performance: Take half your training time to change psychology and rehearse success mentally, and performance is much better than if you only train to be stronger and faster.

After you learn to apply a number of other disciplines to make breakthroughs in your area of interest, you will also begin to see new ways to create hybrid solutions that combine the best of both worlds.

An example of that thinking can be seen in the ways that physicians have learned about employing the principles of manufacturing quality-improvement processes to delivering high-quality health care to design processes that lead to a lot fewer errors and delight patients.

As an example, several people now have to independently verify what surgical procedure is to be done before anyone makes an incision, beginning with the patient and ending with the surgeon’s staff.

Learn from enough helpful disciplines, and you can gain a more encompassing perspective: Draw breakthrough principles from lots of examples where individuals and groups of people perform difficult, important tasks almost perfectly every time. Then, apply those near-perfect principles to the situation at hand.

When such an application occurs, it’s not unusual to improve results by 20, 30, or even 40 times while still spending the same amount of time, money, and effort.

Let’s look at an example to help you appreciate how such an exciting, important conceptual journey can begin and develop. My colleague, Professor Al Hennon, originally became a teacher because he wanted to help kids.

Due to his educational acumen, he was drafted into various administrative roles, rising eventually to become the superintendent of schools for the city of Massillon, Ohio where he led 750 employees and managed a $ 40 million annual budget.

In that role, he began to wonder if another perspective would make him a more effective educational leader: “Can public schools be run with a business philosophy?” He was intrigued to see if educational leaders could balance nurturing students and accomplishing all tasks in more effective ways.

Having long wanted to earn a doctorate, Professor Hennon decided to go a nontraditional route and study how business leadership principles could be adapted to improving educational administration. He chose Rushmore University for his studies. Here is what he learned:

“I have found in my study that business and education are not dissimilar. The terms we use and the processes we engage in may be different. However, the fundamental way we approach our businesses and the foundation that guides our organizations are very much the same. The principles of management and leadership are the same; only the wrapping is different.

“If I can raise expectations, build capacity to improve, and improve results, I can be a success in private enterprise or public education. I am now able to take the principles of management, leadership, and consulting from the business perspective and articulate them in the language of education.

“I have found how critical it is to be able to take information from a little-known source, to learn it, and then to translate it into useful knowledge in order to help other organizations.”

New opportunities soon presented themselves. After graduating in 2005, Professor Hennon agreed to serve as Rushmore’s professor for educational administration. He also gained a glimpse of many other career opportunities through his doctoral studies.

As a result, he changed careers and now works as an educational consultant for an architectural firm that designs schools. In this new role, he combines three disciplines in new ways to advance education: architectural principles, educational administration, and business efficiency.

In these two new roles, Professor Hennon has been able to help other educators to step outside the four walls of their educational disciplines to draw on other disciplines to serve students and their communities better.

Professor Hennon is very encouraged that such multidisciplinary training will be valuable to current and future generations of educational administrators as greater economic fluctuations and shifting demographics present new challenges that require being more flexible.

The educational discipline will help to pick the right activities to emphasize, and the business discipline will provide tools for adjusting resources in those areas where costs need to be cut back.

Imagine how much better our world will be when each of us learns at least one additional way of improving performance and adds that much more perspective to what we do now.

Where will you gain that knowledge and experience?

from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/05/30/step-outside-your-usual-way-of-thinking-and-make-a-breakthrough/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/161228791720

[d33-alex]

@KingHenry twitter feed is the closest analogy for @realDonaldTrump

Sick of 1930s analogies? Try the 1530s.

After all, it was Steve Bannon, President Trump’s own chief strategist, who compared himself to Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court.

Trump, per the analogy, is King Henry VIII of England — though even Trump has some work to do to catch up with Henrician levels of notoriety. Executing two out of your six wives is only entry-level roguery if you aspire to be The Henry. To meet the required standard, you would need to have an international dispute with the pope about whether your late brother consummated his purported marriage to your present wife to get around Catholic divorce law, and when thwarted, make yourself head of your own church, forcing confessional change on your entire population, and thus happily hook up with Anne Boleyn. Then chop her head off. Those were the days.

But discount a few details and the analogy holds — just not in the way that Bannon would like. Henry’s reign is the story of a mercurial egomaniac who exploits a revolutionary networked movement to get power, only to hit the brakes as it spins out of control. Trump’s seems headed in the same direction.

Here’s a quick summary (with some @KingHenry tweets to give us a flavor of the time):

Early 1520s: Henry the showman enters on the European scene, co-hosting a massive diplomatic party at the Field of Cloth of Gold (which includes a good old homoerotic wrestling match with the young French king, which Henry loses then refuses ever to talk about). Desperate to be part of the establishment, and true to his basic conservatism, he pens a high-profile anti-Lutheran tract (including — ironically, as it would prove — a stern defense of the sanctity of marriage) dedicated to Pope Leo X, who honors the Tudor monarch in turn as “Defender of the Faith.”

@KingHenry: Thanks for the praise @PopeLeo! High energy. Very pious!

Late 1520s: New Pope Clement VII refuses Henry’s divorce.

@KingHenry: I think so called @PontifexMaximus is a very political person! Bad!

1530s: An information revolution, driven by printing, is in full swing across Europe, with Protestant networks spreading their message through large numbers of cheap books in the vernacular language spoken on the street. Conservative Catholics, including Henry’s old-school Chancellor Thomas More try to counter with established forms of polemic texts (long books in scholastic Latin, disputing points of doctrine), and fail badly.

Henry sees an opportunity to hitch himself to this networked Protestant movement, which will make him head of the church, give him control of all church property in England, and the divorce he craves.

@KingHenry: Make England Great Again #MEGA! Time to drain Catholic swamp! #CrookedMonks.

The #NeverLuther holdout More is eventually executed. Others bend the knee.

New Chancellor Thomas Cromwell oversees the dissolution of the monasteries, the biggest transfer of land to the English crown since the Norman Conquest. As part of Cromwell’s public relations campaign, this move is accompanied by widespread cultural iconoclasm to recover the purity of an imagined lost past.

@KingHenry: Bring God back to THE PEOPLE. #Originalism — smash those statutes of saints! They are not in the Bible!

Late 1530s and 1540s: Being at heart a conservative, and seeing the reformation becoming increasingly radical and spinning out of his control, Henry slams on the breaks.

@KingHenry direct message to @TCromwell: WTF! Pont.Max. just excommunicated me. Your alt-Lutheran views make me look bad. YOU’RE FIRED!

Cromwell is executed. Traditional Catholic doctrine on transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and confession are reaffirmed. Henry turns against the Lutheran idea that each person is allowed to read the Bible for themselves, as new interpretations start to undermine his authority.

@KingHenry: DISHONEST Bible readers are leaking FAKE news about me. Sad!

Further crackdown on Protestants. Statute enacted that no one can read the Bible in private except high class people: The ‘lower sorte’ have so abused it that in future no ‘woomen nor artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degrees of yeomen or undre, husbandmen nor laborers shall reade…the Byble’ [SR, 34 Henry 8, 1542].

More executions of courtiers, a succession crisis, all the church money squandered on failed military campaigns in France, coinage debased, severe inflation.

@KingHenry: haters will always hate. I am forever #MEGA. They say my ratings are the highest of all time. Sorry @RLionheart!!

@Chancellor direct message to @Archbishop: Did u see? Rex is at it again. Which nutter reactivated his Twitter account? All had been OK since he went offline.

1547: Henry dies a paranoid, broke, and unloved king. A century of constitutional and confessional angst follows, which paves the way to civil war. But that’s another story.

***

Forgive me for having run roughshod over whole libraries of historical controversies in this compressed summary. But the core of the analogy — a story of how egomania can dress a conservative in the garment of the radical, but only for a time — is not inappropriate to our current, and future, predicament.

The basic story of revolutions — networked movements that upend existing power structures by promising radical change under the guise of restoring long-lost original virtue — is that they either spin out of control and eat their own children, or end in authoritarian rule, or often, both. (France had Robespierre’s terror before it had Napoleon crown himself emperor.)

The American experience is unusual, because its revolution ended in constitutional government under the rule of law, which is why even conservative U.S. politicians use the motif of “revolutionary change!” or “radical change!” as positive slogans — whereas in continental Europe, this has historically defined the rhetoric of the left.

Only much more recently has this language crept into the rhetoric of the British political right. It was above all Margaret Thatcher (agree or disagree with her policies, she was a political genius) who realized that successful modern political revolutions attack the status quo from the right, not the left.

That is the secret sauce: to combine in the same voice the steady confidence of ancient tradition with the risky passion of radical iconoclasm. Indeed, its judicial counterpart, the doctrine of originalism, contains both these elements — and, when taken to extremes, mirrors the liberal juridical activism it despises.

But to do it right you need to be a true believer and actually be prepared to break things in order to rebuild them.

You need to have political conviction that extends further than your own ego.

You need to go against those advisors of yours who are straightforward conservatives, who don’t buy into the whole radical passion thing, and would prefer that career professionals run the country in the way they know how to.

Because permanent revolution is exhausting, and requires permanent conflict against the internal enemy of a bitter sort that is not for mere showmen.

Thatcher could handle it. Henry VIII could not.

Trump’s power has depended on his control over his Make America Great Again movement. And that’s why he needs the Bannons of this world to keep pumping the zeal, in permanent campaign mode. But how long is it before the overthrow-the-world stuff that propelled a political insurgency starts to sound like tired regime propaganda uttered by tedious apparatchiks?

In Trump’s case, not long. We’re already seeing him dial down the ideological nonsense on most fronts — torture; Taiwan; the Mexico wall; trade wars; NATO; taking Iraqi oil; Russian sanctions relief in return for, wait for it, nothing — a trajectory indicated by the replacement of ideologue National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn with no-nonsense and widely respected heavyweight Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

No doubt there will be power struggles on the way, as there are in any court, and the ideological stuff will surface from time to time. Indeed, protracted fights over Muslim bans are exactly what Bannon wants, to keep the flame alive.

But is Trump a true believer? No, for that by necessity requires something to believe in beyond oneself.

He is Henry VIII. And Bannon is indeed his Cromwell.

 By Emile Simpson – research fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He was formerly a British Army officer. An article first published in Foreign Policy, March 1, 2017: https://goo.gl/ndo90j

Photo credit: Workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger/Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration