#i did veer a bit off course by focusing on one environment

[yurisorcerer]

This took a while to win me over, but it did, and I'm glad it did, although it leaves me in an odd position going forward.

Some context: some friends and I are doing a monthly anime groupwatch starting in November, and since it's almost November I figured I'd get a head start on Tamayura, since the tentative plan is to do both this OVA and both seasons of the TV show and maybe the presumably direct-to-bluray movies as well. That's a fair amount of stuff, so I wanted to get an early start.

As for Tamayura itself, it follows the shy schoolgirl Potte and explores her love of photography. Potte, in particular, is interested in the phenomenon of what are often called ghost orbs over here in the states. She associates them with photos of her late father, thus giving her a personal connection to the phenomenon (which is, evidently, called tamayura in Japanese and is thus also the namesake of this series), and thus giving the show some emotional stakes. (The fact that backscatter artifacts as they're more properly known are a well-explained phenomenon doesn't seem to enter into the equation here. I could be a dick and nitpick this, but that seems like not taking the show on its own terms, and I don't like being that person.)

More generally, she is fascinated with the mysterious nature of photography itself, and this is what propels our plot, such as it is, forward. She spends most of these OVA episodes at least tangentially attempting to find the location where she took a picture of her dad several years back. The ephemerality of the tamayura orbs, and thus the ephemerality of things in general, is a factor here as well. The cycle the series focuses on is thus; experiences become memories, memories can be preserved by pictures, and pictures can in turn drive new experiences, such as our main character group venturing to a particularly scenic hill in the last episode of this OVA. It's a simple thesis, and hardly one unique to this series, but it works well enough, and Tamayura plays it pretty effectively.

On a craft level, it's fitting that a show about photography was able to win me over mostly off the strength of its environments. We have a setting on the border of the suburban and rural here, and the townscape and nature alike are rendered with a grounded timbre that nonetheless imparts them with a little bit of sparkle. If you're the kind of person who gets easily bored by shows like this in which "nothing happens" and much of the focus is on the environment, Tamayura is unlikely to win you over and I can imagine such people finding the show dull. Still, for what it's going for, I think it scores high in these areas.

The character art is pretty nice as well. Done in a very straightforward moe` style, with big eyes and round faces, the show often wobbles its characters around in lightly amusing ways when something funny is happening. It's worth mentioning though that the humor is probably Tamayura's weakest point, most of it is not so much bad as it is simply kind of basic, but there are a couple of moments that *really* don't work and veer close enough to ecchi humor to feel wildly out of place with the rest of the work. Characters are a mixed bag too. Thankfully, Potte herself is great, but some of her friends have very one-note personalities (at least here in the OVA), and one in particular, Norie, is just kind of annoying in a way that actively clashes with the rest of the series. (Of course, I also like some characters a lot, including Potte herself as mentioned, Potte's grandma, and Maon, who mostly communicates by whistling. Give me some context for why the heck she does *that.* There's an interesting story there, I'm sure.)

In any case, these criticisms aside, my biggest question about Tamayura on the whole is what exactly they're going to do for stories as I move into watching the TV series. Potte's quest to find the place she took her father's photograph ends with the end of this OVA, and it's a nice enough ending, a real full-circle moment, that I struggle to think of how we're going to wring 24 episodes out of this. I suppose I'll find out in the coming days.

[aenaxes]

Hey! I was wondering if you could write Crosshair going to the reader for random cuddles no matter where they are, late at night or out on the beach with the batch. BTW, I love the way you write and it never fails to get me inspired to draw our favorite clone boys. Good luck with Uni!

warnings: none

w/c: 1.6k

a/n: ahh tysm for this request! i got a little carried away lol but it's just because i had a lot of fun writing it! :-) hope this helps stoke the artistic imagination! (and thankfully uni is out for the summer so i have more time for our favorite clone boys)

It’s one of the better known facts that Crosshair doesn’t like to be touched, even if warranted, even if he’s asked. There are too many variables in another’s hands: accidents happen, sabotage is never unlikely, and sometimes youthful fear rears its cruel head, and he is flooded with the knee-jerk reflex of memories in the alabaster halls of Tipoca.

So the first time you cuddle with Crosshair, it’s just as much of a disaster as you expect it to be.

Crosshair lies like a corpse over the centre of your bunk, back rigid and ramrod straight, his deathly look complete with the ridiculous bandage criss-crossed over his hairline (courtesy of the simple joys of a ten metre human javelin toss and Wrecker’s miscalculated aim).

Where painkillers weren’t quite enough to keep the concussion headaches at bay, he’d somehow come to the conclusion that you would be. And who were you to turn down a sullen Crosshair mumbling awkwardly for cuddles at your door?

With careful hands and just enough of a firm touch to coax him onto his side without spooking him out of his moping, you maneuver him with his back towards the wall and gently push him further in before you climb onto the space beside him. He flashes you an uncertain look, and you offer him a wry smile in return.

“Relax a little,” you say, lifting his limp arm and slotting yourself against his side until your chests are flush. It’s less cuddling than it is you trying to mold yourself around the hard, firm lines of the tension etched into Crosshair’s muscle and poise. But if he was willing to put aside his standoffish pride to ask you for cuddles, you won’t deny him. Finally content with your arrangement, you lift your chin and fix him with a wry smile. “I can’t spoon a board.”

“Was that an insult?” he offers, a weak attempt at his usual wit that comes out as more of a whimper than bite. But to his credit, he’s listening to you, and you feel him shifting slightly in an attempt to make himself comfortable despite his somewhat unsettled expression.

“Maybe,” you counter. “Loosen your shoulders. Stop tensing. Cuddle, Crosshair.”

“I’m trying,” he mutters, and when you close your eyes to laugh, you barely miss the small upward turn of his lips.

When you wake up the next morning, you feel reborn, all loose-limbed, sated joy as you stretch your arms to your side, expecting Crosshair’s lean form curled close. Instead, you find yourself alone in your bunk, your covers pulled neatly up to your chin with no sign of your surly sniper in sight. You pull yourself together, albeit with a frown, throwing on a fresh set of clothes and readying yourself for a day of snarking (a bit spitefully) at Crosshair for leaving without so much as a thank you.

But then you see it. A small mug sitting on your desk: caf.

As you peer over the rim, you’re hard-pressed to mistake it as anything other than your preference made to perfection, and judging by the steam curling fragrant and wispy over its surface, it’s fresh.

Crosshair says nothing when you pass him in the helm, but when you flash him a grin, he huffs and offers you a lopsided smile back.

It takes the lesser part of one week for the headaches to abate. In between then and Crosshair’s begrudgingly clean bill of health, he comes knocking at your door four more times, each time gently loosening the deep roots of tension coiled through his bones more and more.

“You’re getting better at this,” you murmur into his shoulder on the fourth night, your leg thrown over his hip and your arms tucked securely under his. His first night in your quarters had ended in little beyond simply lying shoulder-to-shoulder. The next two had been (failed) attempts to spoon the entirety of Crosshair’s lanky form. And the night penultimate had been a slightly more successful endeavor in throwing all experimental caution to the wind and waking up chest-to-chest in an oddly comfortable tangle of limbs.

That night worked, and so you do it again.

“I had a good teacher,” Crosshair snorts, and he wheezes, his arms curling snug around your middle, when you gently jab him in the side.

You mutter something into his shoulder, but your own words do not reach your ears when you feel his chin settle atop your head. He shifts carefully until he’s curled entirely around you, the anchor in a still sea, a promise that you, together in shared space and breath, simply are. It’s funny how these things work, you think, breathing shallow and slow as Crosshair brushes his nose over the crown of your head and stays.

And then the concussion heals, and he’s gone.

It’s a bit startling how quickly you had grown accustomed to Crosshair’s presence in your bunk within the brief span of a week. You don’t expect to miss it, the easy nighttime habit as Crosshair quietly slinks to your room: a well-rehearsed ritual of playful snark before the gentler art of accommodation, pushing and pulling in tandem to find the sweet stability of your cheek laid over Crosshair’s collar and his palm warm over the small of your back.

You don’t expect to miss it so much that you find yourself lying in bed well past lights out, simply bracing to sling meaningless jokes thrown in the helm the next morning about how Crosshair’s gone soft, little baby brother Crosshair, like the week prior meant little but a favor to a friend.

The telltale knock sets him apart; four rapid, light raps on the durasteel that you’ve come to know so well, and you’re hauling yourself out of bed and slapping the door lock open as fast as you can.

“Cuddles,” Crosshair says as soon as he catches sight of you in the doorway.

He should be fine; he is fine, if Tech is to be believed. So there’s no reason for him to be waking you and requesting entry. But he is here. You stuff down the dizzying stutter in your chest and meet the mirth in his eyes with the best frown you can manage.

For all the stubborn fronting and the cold refusal you could offer him, there’s something you cannot bring yourself to resent when Crosshair—sour, cynical Crosshair—lets the word “cuddle” find home, curled soft over his tongue (lets himself find home in you).

“Will you make me caf in the morning?”

“Depends on how well you cuddle,” he replies, his tone a deadly calm, only betrayed by the knowing gleam in his eye.

“Says the man who didn’t know how to cuddle a few days ago,” you shoot back.

“The apprentice outdoes the master,” Crosshair shakes his head with a wistful sigh, and you laugh, reaching forward to twine your fingers with his, letting him take his rightful place as the doors close behind you.

—

He comes back home.

Wrecker tells you to give him space, Echo shakes his head when you idle in front of his closed door, and even Omega offers you a sad, apologetic look when Crosshair makes the rare, silent appearance outside of his quarters, a spectre and his bacta patch haunting the ship’s hull before he disappears again.

You listen to them for a few days, but it chews at you from inside—the gnawing thought that Crosshair had been alone for so long, that he’s still alone now. Even if his basest instinct had always been to withdraw and cope in isolation, you can’t stand the idea of leaving him by himself any longer. So when the others have long since fallen asleep, you creep to Crosshair’s room and knock four times in rapid succession.

Like you had expected, he’s awake. But when he opens the door, he keeps his unfocused eyes cast aside.

“Cuddles,” you whisper, testing, hopeful, and you open your arms to him as you stand on the threshold. “Just like we used to?”

Only then does Crosshair flick his weary eyes up, rimmed red with exhaustion, grief overdue. And after four long days, he finally meets your gaze.

You watch as his eyes linger under furrowed brows, peering at you as if he isn’t entirely sure if you’re real, if you’re really there. Watching him waver between your face and your open palms and back again, you imagine Crosshair thinking that it’s always been the other way around: him seeking you out at odd hours to wrap his lean arms around your shoulders, breathe deep, and simply bask in how close you were to his beating heart.

And now it’s you.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, stepping forward between your outstretched arms to gingerly place his chin over your shoulder and settle his lean arms at your waist.

All those times you spent curled, molded around him in the quiet darkness of your bunk—it’s honed you to know him like you know yourself, committing to indelible memory the way he breathes, shifts, fits with you.

And he’s different. A year’s worth of separation would do that, change. But where you feel some new muscle and sinew against your skin, there is undeniable familiarity in how he seeks you out despite the tremble in his hands and unsteadiness of his breath.

There is familiarity in finding home.

You reach up, looping your arms around his neck. And when you pull snug, you feel him squeeze your waist in return, holding tight and holding close.

“Just like we used to.”

[kiwi-cake]

Mated Part 3

Werewolf!Luke

A/N: Halloween is over but werewolf Luke can hang around a bit longer since he’s so dear to our hearts -megan

Masterlist

Michael walks in to Y/N hanging upside down from her bed. They were supposed to have a movie night, but she had forgotten. There was a lot on her mind lately, which seemed to push out things like movie night, or really anything that didn’t have anything to do with Luke. It was weird how much she popped into her head lately. It started about a week after she went to his house a second time. Of course, she had been thinking about him beforehand, but more in a ‘woah this dude and his friends are werewolves’ sense. Now it was just stupid stuff like how it felt when he was holding waist her to keep her calm. It was manageable at first, but once another week had gone by, she was miserable. It felt like she constantly had an itch, but like in one of those places you can’t reach yourself, like the middle of your back.

“What are you doing?” Michael says, dropping a grocery bag undoubtedly filled with junk food for their movie.

“I’m trying to get the blood to rush to my brain,” she said, sitting up.

“Uh….. why?”

“No reason,” she shrugged. She couldn’t tell Michael, he was infamous for being incapable of keeping a secret.

“Alright, who’s this mystery guy that you’ve been seeing?” he plopped down on the bed next to her.

“Um, what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she was infamous for being a terrible liar.

“Likely story. You came back from your ‘run’ wearing clothes twice your size and smelling like some bloke’s cologne. I was going to let it go, let you have your one night stand and be done with it, but you’re clearly not over it.”

“I told you, it was laundry day and Rebecca’s boyfriend left his clothes at our flat, so I wore that rather than my dirty clothes.”

“That’s bullshit. We both know Rebecca’s boyfriend reeks of axe. You didn’t smell like axe, it was something nicer.”

“Fine! I had a one night stand. Happy?” she surrendered, hoping he would leave it at that.

“Who was it? Must have been something special to have you this worked up over him. I’ve never seen you act like this over a guy. Always staring off into space dreamily and shit.”

“I don’t stare off into space dreamily!” she screeched, “whatever, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Let’s watch a movie.”

Seasonal allergies are the worst. It’s like, you’re just trying to enjoy the pretty leaves and pumpkin flavoured things, then BAM you wake up feeling like a scarecrow shoved it’s hay fingers down your nose and throat. And it’s not like it’s a real illness, so there’s no excuse to not go about your day. That was how Y/N woke up. She had been feeling a little queasy earlier in the week, but now she definitely had a fever and a scratchy throat. But she told herself that she just had to get through her lecture at noon then she could mope around at home. So she bundled up in her warmest pajamas, stocked her backpack with tissues, and headed out the door. It’s ironic to be sitting in a lecture about human consciousness when you’re feeling like someone let a tank of hot air out in her head. Her professor was very strict about attendance, so even when the kid next to her offered to take notes for her if she went home, she refused and waited for roll to be called. She would probably have to get notes from him anyway because for some reason she was seeing double anytime she focused on the board.

“Y/N, you don’t look so good,” said the other kid next to her. She had absolutely no idea what his name was. Y/N had only passed out twice in her life, once during the dissection of a fetal pig (she’s not squeamish, formaldehyde just smells terrible) and again when she forgot to take advil on the first day of her period. It’s hard to miss the signs of fainting. The first sign of dizziness can escalate quickly into blurred vision, ringing ears, and dissociation. It was good that Y/N knew these things because she was able to ball up her blanket as a barrier so her head didn’t hit the hard desk. She didn’t need a concussion on top of all this.

“Young lady in the front, this is not nap time,” said her teacher. It was the last thing she heard before it all went dark and she inevitably conked out on the table. She supposed the teacher felt like shit saying that right before she passed out. She couldn’t remember what happened in the next few minutes, but she was glad her university had a nurses office so they had somewhere to dump her. The nurse was an older lady wearing a fluffy cardigan. She stuck a thermometer in Y/N’s mouth and made a disapproving ‘tsk’ noise when she read the temperature.

“Your fever is much too high for you to be out and about today dear,” she said as she helped Y/N up from her chair, “A good rest and some fluids will fix you right up though. On your way.” The nurse helped her walk to the exit with shaking legs and promptly shut the door as soon as she passed the threshold.  

She hobbled down the steps of the main building. The news must have travelled fast since every student she passed veered a good five feet from her. It seemed nice and all that the school insisted she go home to rest, but since they didn’t offer her any other transportation except for walking back herself, she assumed that they just didn’t want a lawsuit on their hands if she passed out in another class. She cupped her hands above her eyes, trying to see where she was going in the bright afternoon sun. To her surprise, there was a familiar jeep parked in front of the school with an even more familiar man leaning up against it.

“Luke?” she approached the car, “what are you doing here?”

“I’m picking you up, god you look terrible,” he stepped closer and put a hand on her forehead, “you have a fever! Why did you even get out of bed today?” He didn’t look so good himself. His usually glowing skin was now rather pallor, accompanied by dark circles around his eyes. He even ditched his typical attire of skinny jeans and expensive boots for joggers and trainers.

“I can’t afford to miss class,” she rasped. He seemed very concerned over the state she was in, and maybe it was her weird sick-brain, but the worried crease in between his eyebrows made tears well up in her eyes.

“Hey, none of that,” his large hands moved to cup her flushed cheeks and wipe at the tears now pouring down her face, “I’m going to take you home and get you feeling better.” This somehow makes her crying even worse, the overwhelming emotions were buzzing through her veins. She sobbed and pressed her face into his chest to hide her crying. Y/N didn’t need a mirror to know that she looked dreadful. This wasn’t the cute sniffling cries you see in the movies. No, she had somehow landed herself in a full on meltdown. Her sinuses that had been congested for days decided this was the perfect moment to let her nose be snotty. She was hiccuping and the lack of oxygen was definitely causing her face to become blotchy. Luke didn’t seem to care though. He pressed his hand against her head and softly stroked her hair. They stood in front of her university for a few minutes, definitely getting weird looks from any passing students. His cologne smelled very nice to her, almost seeming to have a calming effect. She would have to ask him if it had lavender or some other aromatherapy in it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. She almost detected guilt in his voice, although she didn’t know why. It’s not like he gave her seasonal allergies.

“Let’s get you home,” he pulled her away from him to wipe at her damp cheeks once more, then opened the passenger door for her.

“How did you know what happened?” she asked once she was buckled and the engine was on.

“Wolves have kind of a sixth sense of their surroundings, we can hear anything happening within a 20 mile radius if we concentrate. It’s like positioning an antenna on one of those old fashioned TV’s to focus on a certain channel.”

“So you just happened to be listening to my channel?” she asked. It sounded unlikely, but then again so do humans that can turn into wolves whenever they please.

“No, uh, I’ve been especially sensitive to your ‘channel’ so to speak lately. I think it’s because of your sudden proximity to our pack,” he didn’t turn his eyes from the road, but even if he were looking at her his probably face wouldn’t give away anything. He was very good at keeping a blank face, which frustrated her because she liked to be able to read people. They swiftly passed the entrance to where her dorm was, which surprised her because she thought he would know where it was since he said he took her sleep-walking ass home a few times.

“Oh, uh you passed the entrance,” she pointed out.

“I know, I’m taking you to my place. I’ve seen the chaos you call your room, and there’s no way your immune system can handle one more night in that environment.”

“Hey!” she hit his arm lightly, “I’ll have you know that just last week I made my bed.”

When they pulled through the gates of the property, she was shocked to not see any wolves roaming the grounds like last time.

“Where is everyone?” she asked, taking a moment to wipe her still-runny nose on her sleeve.

“Probably inside,” he shrugged as he parked in the massive garage, “did you think I lived in this huge house alone and made them all stay outside in their wolf forms?”

“Uh, no, of course not….” she laughed nervously as he led her inside. The kitchen was empty and he instructed her to wait there while he got some cold medicine for her. He was only gone a minute before she heard a door in a nearby hallway open and at least ten people filed into the kitchen. All of them were imposingly tall, even the women. They looked to be around the same age as Luke, if not younger, which makes her wonder what happened to the older generations. Were werewolf lifespans short like dogs?

“Hey Y/N! It’s been awhile, glad you’re back,” said a curly haired guy towards the front.

“Sorry, do I know you?” she peered over the group and can’t recall meeting any of them during either of her visits.

“Oh, right, you don’t know our human forms,” the guy laughed, “I’m Ashton, and that’s Calum.” He gestured over to the guy next to him. Now that she thinks about it, their hair color does exactly match the wolves she met. Calum gives her a shy wave while Ashton lists off the names of everyone else. She tried her best to be polite even though all she wanted to do was eat some chicken noodle soup and sleep for 48 hours.

“Guys, really?” the chatter stopped the moment Luke stepped back into the room, “I said not to bother Y/N. She’s sick and she doesn’t need you lot pestering her with questions.”

“It’s okay Luke,” she put a hand on his arm and his gaze softened a little, “they were just saying hi.”

“C’mon, you need to rest,” he put a hand on the small of her back to lead her upstairs, and threw a warning glance back at his pack. When they arrived in his room, she was overwhelmed with the scent of him. It made her eyes heavy and she practically floated over to the big bed. He handed her a measurement of cold medicine and she was so stuffed up that she didn’t even have to plug her nose when swallowing it. She got cozy under the puffy comforter and looked up at him drowsily.

“Need anything else?” he asked. She shook her head and he started turning to leave before she grabbed his hand.

“Don’t go. I don’t like to wake up in unfamiliar places alone,” she whined. She knew she was being childish and he definitely had better things to do than play nurse for her, but her sick brain was inherently selfish and she couldn’t help it.

“You’ve slept here twice already, it’s not unfamiliar,” he said, but he didn’t seem as firm in his resolve as he usually was about things.

“Please?” she gave him her wide pleading eyes and she knew she had persuaded him. He sighed and crawled onto the other side of the bed, sitting up on top of the covers.

“Happy?” he asked as she frantically turned to face him.

“Yes,” she said contently, shuffling a little closer to him, “You look tired, you should stop giving your bed to strange people.”

“It’s alright, I just want you to get better.”

“You can rest your eyes if you’d like. I won’t tell anyone you took a nap, it’ll be our little secret,” she said, patting his arm reassuringly. He nodded at her with the same sleepy look she probably had and a lazy smile. Feeling she had accomplished her mission, she closed her eyes and quickly drifted off, feeling like she had finally scratched that itch that had been nagging her for weeks.

Waking up in someone’s arms was not a common occurrence for her. Lately her romantic life has consisted of quick hookups at parties, and her last boyfriend, Brad, always said cuddling is for ninnies in romantic comedies. Their relationship obviously didn’t last long. She wasn’t angry that she opened her eyes and had two arms around her and a steady heartbeat resting against her ear. It was a nice change to waking up alone in the twin-size bed in her dorm. She shifted her head up slightly, expecting to see his intense blue eyes looking down at her, but instead saw that they were closed. It was weird to see him sleep. He had always seemed so alert and guarded around her that she was almost surprised he sleeps at all. Since she was feeling worlds better after her nap, she gave herself clearance to take in his features in a way she would be too intimidated to do if he were awake. She sat there for god knows how long, eyes tracing over the freckles she didn’t realize he had and the soft curve of his nose and the way his eyelashes rested on his cheeks and how his mouth was slightly open to let out quiet snores. The sun was setting through the blinds, but she was in no rush to go home. It was only the rumble of her stomach that stirred him from sleep and forced her to think about the reality of the situation. He seemed to do the same for a moment once he opened his eyes, looked at how she was tucked securely into his large frame. Who initiated the cuddle, she didn’t know, but she hoped Luke didn’t have the same negative stance as Brad if she were the one who subconsciously started it. She watched a smile twitch onto his lips and was relieved that she wouldn’t have to move from his warm embrace.

“Hungry?” he asked after a few minutes when her stomach growled angrily again. He had started lightly combing through her hair like he had when she was crying, but this time it seemed to be for his own enjoyment rather than her comfort. She internally scolded her stomach for not shutting up so she could stay like this. It was weird how normal it felt to be so close to a dude she met three weeks ago. Somehow, it was like they already knew each other on a molecular level, like every fiber of her being was trying to be close to his. She knew virtually nothing about him besides what he is, but the way he held her you would think they had been best friends since childhood. It was kind of dizzying to think about because she never felt this way for any guy so quickly, but something about him was the exception to everything she had previously known.

“Don’t want to move,” her voice was muffled by his shirt, and she thought she heard his heartbeat flutter at that.

“C’mon, I can hear your stomach growling. What will the police say if a girl dies of starvation in a house full of food?” his voice was light and carefree like she had never heard it before. He finally got her out of the bed when he mentioned that the others had ordered pizza. She relished in how he looked as they walked downstairs, his clothes rumpled and his hair messy. The kitchen was chaos. There was at least one large box of pizza for each member of the house. Everyone had a slice of pizza in one hand and a beer in the other except for a few guys who (she hoped) were brawling for fun. It was exactly like any college party she had been to if frat houses were unisex and had expensive furniture and appliances.

“Heyyyy feeling better Lukey? Did you get your fix?” one of the guys whose name she didn’t remember shouted from across the kitchen. Luke only gave him a dangerous glance before handing her a plate.

“You can have whatever you like, I think we bought up the entire town’s supply of pizza,” he joked, but he still seemed more guarded now that they weren’t alone, like he was afraid one thing would send her running. She filled her plate with sausage pizza and moaned at the taste. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. Someone came and whispered something to Luke and his face changed to completely serious. He told her he had to go take care of a few things, but that he would be right back, leaving her alone in the routy kitchen. She was starting to feel a bit out of place until a girl with pretty braids in her long hair approached her with a smile.

“Hi, Y/N, I’m Claire. I’ll show you somewhere less turbulent to eat,” she pulled her out of the way before the wrestling dudes knocked over the entire kitchen table. She followed Claire down the hall to a living room sort of area with lots of couches. This environment was much more relaxed, she recognized Ashton and a few others who seemed to be a few years older than the less mature wolves fighting in the kitchen. Ashton gave her an encouraging smile and patted the seat beside him for her to sit. Claire sat next to her.

“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” Ashton asked. She nodded.

“This place is great, but it’s a little…” she trailed off, not knowing how to get her point across without offending them.

“Reminiscent of a frat house? I know, that’s the disadvantage to being older. All work and no play. Although most of that falls on Luke, poor bloke,” one of them interjected.

“What happened to everyone else? I mean, isn’t there anyone else who could be in charge besides Luke? He’s so young…” her curiosity bubbled up all at once and she couldn’t help asking. A somber pause fell over the group and she realized she had said something wrong.

“A pack is like a family. The wolf gene is hereditary, so we stick together and live as a community. Most packs are much bigger, with hundreds of wolves at one time. But… a few years ago, our enemy pack that lives south of us attacked us in the middle of the night, breaking a centuries’ long truce. They killed everyone they could find, our parents and grandparents. Only 23 of us survived because we hadn’t gone through the change yet and wolf law prohibits any wolf from killing a human. Luke was only 14, but since he had the alpha gene his change came early when our old alpha was killed,” Claire finally explained. Tears welled up in Y/N’s eyes imagining the story unfold.

“He went through the change all by himself, then helped the rest of us through it when we changed. He’s never been able to lean on someone for support, always has to shoulder the entire burden himself. I think that’s why he’s had trouble accepting the situation between you two. But every time he sees you, he’s a little closer to being how he was before the tragedy and---”

“Wait, what situation between us?” she interrupted Ashton. They all turned to her with shocked looks.

“You… you don’t know? He hasn’t told you?” asked one guy, she thinks his name might be Glen.

“Gale, leave it, it’s not our place,” Ashton warned the other guy.

“Ash, we both know he’ll never get around to telling her anytime soon with how cautious he is, and she deserves to know,” Claire added.

“Know what?” Y/N demanded. The suspense of three weeks of confusion was finally building up to something, and they couldn’t leave her hanging now.

“You’re his mate Y/N….” Ashton lowly, as if the words themselves might set off an alarm if said too loudly.

“What? Like his friend or…?”

“No, like a soulmate, a life partner. That’s why you trailed after him like a lost puppy when you were sleepwalking. And why you got sick after not seeing him, and magically got better after a few hours with him. It’s your subconscious reacting to what you didn’t know yet in your logical brain,” Glen explained. She sat stunned for a moment, just trying to process the information. It made sense, in hindsight. Thinking about him nonstop, and being so dependent on his touch when she finally saw him.

“But then why---” her question was interrupted by heavy footsteps coming into the room. Luke was back in his skinny jeans and boots, and the uninterested expression had resumed its hold over his face. The people around her stiffened.

“Ashton, go talk to Kevin and Jenna, they’ll fill you in on the situation. Y/N, I’m taking you home,” Luke said in a stern voice. She noticed the keys in his hand and said a quiet goodbye to everyone before following his imposing figure to the garage.

The car ride back reminded her of the first time he ever took her back to campus. It was silent and his hands were tight on the steering wheel. When they were rounding the corner to her dorm, she finally gathered the courage to speak.

“You really have nothing to say? I know you heard what they told me,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied quietly as they pulled in front of her dorm.

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”

“I mean we’re not going to be together, we can’t,” it was the first time he had ever raised his voice at her, “A girl died in the woods last night, that’s what happens when someone like you is around someone like me. I’m sorry you got mixed up in all of this, but I’m going to fix this and it’ll be like we never even met.” A cold chill ran through her body at his words and what they suggested. She didn’t know what ‘fix’ meant, but she assumed it involved breaking the tie between them.

“Has it occured to you that I might like some say in something that so heavily involves me? I’m not some ragdoll you can toss around whenever you like. You could have at least told me what was going on so I didn’t think I was going insane,” she opened the car door roughly and stepped out, “If this is going to affect my health and god knows what else, I should have just as much say in it as you. Keep that in mind next time you want to keep a secret from me. But since my human-ness is such a bloody nuisance to you, then I’ll leave you to your miserable self from now on.” She slammed the door and stomped into her dorm, not daring to look back at his reaction.

Request for part 4 :)

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 53: Trees and Shadows (Transcript) - 6th February 2017

Credit for transcribing this episode goes to @laqueus-ludovicus! A big thanks to her for helping me with this project, it’s massively appreciated.  

tw: animal mutilation

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Some of the things we see aren't what they appear to be. Heather Bowie and her cousins learned that lesson back in 1989. She was eleven at the time and according to her mother, Karen, it was a bright winter day, the sort of day where the sun reflects off every inch of snow, which always has a way of making dark objects like houses and trees stand out. Heather and her cousins were walking along a small country road that ran between their town and the next when they saw a dog sitting in a stream near the roadside. Well, stream might be too strong of a term, it was just a bunch of run off, the sort that passes beneath roads through those big metal tunnels. It was a drainage ditch basically, but kids love dogs, so Heather and the others veered off the road side and into the snow to walk toward it. They assumed it was a local pet that had wandered a bit too far from home, so they planned to check its collar and see what they could do. But even from a distance it looked a bit odd. To be specific it looked too big to be a dog. They took one more step toward it and then stopped. They stopped because that's when the dog turned to look at them. And as it did so, it did something they weren't expecting - it stood up on its hind legs like a human. Obviously frightened, the girls ran home as fast as they could. Humans have always had a connection to animals. We live with them in our homes. We depend on them for food and resources. We identify with them, sometimes even treating them more like people than beasts. We speak to them, we name them, and we project human personalities on them. For thousands of years, we've treated them as if they were more than animals. But of course, that's just our imagination. If we believe the stories, though, it might be more true than we expected. As I said before, some things aren't what they appear to be. Sometimes, they’re worse. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Our connection to animals is nearly as old as humanity itself. We've almost always treated them as important parts of the world around us, although different cultures have expressed that importance in a variety of ways. The common thread, though, is that animals have always helped us better understand our world. Some cultures have revered them as gods to worship. Others have seen them as valuable sacrifices to offer to whatever deity they wanted to please. In many cultures, animals have served as our companions through daily life, and in others they journeyed with the dead to the afterlife. Just think of what we know of ancient Egyptian culture. There were entire cults built around specific animals, like bulls and cats, their dead were frequently buried alongside animals that held personal or spiritual significance, and many of the Egyptian gods and goddesses were represented through simple animal symbolism. Anubis, for example, was part man, part jakel. Sekhmet was a woman with the head of a lion. Ancient Hindu teachings for thousands of years have demanded deep respect for the animals around us. In China, the ancient philosophies of Confucianism and Daoism both stress the same thing. With the Hindus, that respect is founded on the idea of reincarnation, in China, it's rooted more in moral responsibility, but the result is the same. Animals are and always have been important to us, and yes, I know that ancient cultures focused a lot of their religion and practice around the sun and moon and stars, but they often framed those complex systems with simple animal language. Thats why so many cultures have their own zodiac symbol, where the major constellations are represented by animals. The Greek root of zodiac, by the way, literally means “circle of little animals”. Just an aside – the ancient Egyption word for cat was meu, which sounds a lot like the noise that cats actually make. And that classic stereotypical dog name, Fido? It comes from the Latin word fidelis which means loyal and faithful.

It's easy to see then how animals have helped us understand our world a little better. They help us find our bearings and keep us company in a big, wild world. More significantly, though, they've helped us understand ourselves by giving humans a sense of identity and purpose, a theme or a banner to unite around in a sense. Sometimes those themes are took the form of religion, as was the case in Egypt with the bull cult. Sometimes it's more of a totem thing, where an entire tribe or community built their identity around a significant animal in their environment. Sometimes they did it for a feeling of safety, sometimes it was a symbol of power. In Icelandic folklore the Norse warrior class known as “berserkers” were members of the bear cult. Berserkr in Old Norse literally meant “bear shirt”, but it also embodied tha fierce, powerful nature that they wanted for themselves as warriors. They were often depicted wearing bear skins and sometimes even bear heads as head coverings. That's a tradition that still survives, by the way. You can see it in the ceremonial military caps worn by some personnel in multiple European countries. The most common tribal animal, though, has always been the wolf. It's a global fascination, with examples found in Mexico, North America, India, Mongolia, and the Middle East, and this is probably because wolves represented so much of what early humanity identified with. They moved in packs, they hunted their food, and they have a distinct social order. Any hunter-gatherer community would instantly admire those qualities. And like bears, wolves were also seen as brave and powerful warriors. Ancient Persian and Hittite warriors were known to dress in wolf skins for battle. Interestingly, though, they also had a reputation for tossing their weapons aside and just jumping on their enemies, literally biting them like wolves. For a very long time, you see, humans have wanted to be animals, which of course led to stories where that was the case - animals that became people, people that became animals. It's an idea so powerful that we can find it hiding inside the folklore of dozens of cultures. The Native American skinwalker, the Nagual of Central America, and of course, throughout much of Europe, there's the werewolf. These are stories, of course, artifacts from another time, when animals were gods and humans desperately wanted to imitate the divine. And yes, these stories also address our dual nature, because we are in so many ways nothing more than animals ourselves, but those moral lessons have a way of distracting us from the plot. For thousands of years, people have told stories about mysterious beasts – and it turns out those stories might be more real than we care to believe.

In 1989, a woman was driving along the same country road that Heather Bowie and her cousins had just walked along weeks before when they sighted that strange creature. In Lorraine Endrizzi’s case it was well after sunset, so she was doing the responsible thing and scanning the edges of her headlights for wild animals. Wisconsin has plenty of deer, after all, and deer don't mix well with windshields and front ends. Lorraine worked as a manager at one of the local bars in Elkhorn and had just wrapped up a very long, very tiring shift. All she really wanted to do was get home safely, but when she did notice something unusual, it wasn't in the periphery of her headlights. It was right in the road in front of her. Seeing it early gave her the chance to slow down and swerve to avoid hitting it, but it also helped her get a good look at it. From a distance it looked as if there was an animal hunched low to the pavement of the oncoming lane. It's head was gently bobbing at an irregular rhythm. She couldn't tell for sure, but it almost seemed to be eating. As she slowly passed it, she claims she saw everything. It was eating, alright. Whatever it was, the creature was hunched over a pile of roadkill, pulling big chunks of flesh off the dead animal. Lorraine said she could clearly make out what appeared to be long, white fangs that protruded from a gray snout. Together with the pointed ears, she couldn't help but think of as a wolf. The trouble was this wolf was kneeling on the road, like a human. It's one story, I know, and stories that are born in the middle of the night after an exhausting day of work are often full of flaws. That might very well be the case here. I think we've all had moments where we've seen things that don't make sense, so Lorraine’s story could just be a bit of midnight confusion, I suppose – if it wasn't for the other stories.

Two years later – on Halloween night, in fact – it was Doris Gibson’s turn. She was just 18 at the time and had been driving out to pick a friend up for some trick or treating back in town. Like Lorraine before her, she was driving that same stretch of country road, named for the old Bray family farm that it passed. According to the story Doris later told to a local reporter, she’d briefly taken her eyes off the road to switch channels on the radio when she felt the car lurch. It was as if, she said, she'd run something over. Frightened by the possibility of what had just happened, she stopped her car, put it in park and then got out for a look. Doris, it seems, wasn't a big horror movie fan, because anyone who knows anything about horror films knows that you never, ever get out of the car. Ever. Still, there wasn't a scratch on her car. The bumper was spotless, there was no sign of blood or fur or anything else that might hint at fresh road kill. And even more convincing, there was nothing on the road, no dead animal, no unlucky farmer out for an evening walk, not even a pothole. There was no clue anywhere that could explain the bump shed felt. She was about to turn and head back to her car when movement caught her attention. There was something in the trees and shadows along the roadside. According to her, it was a large figure that stood upright like a man but seemed hairy and very muscular, which (as you might imagine) was a pretty shocking thing to see on a dark, lonely country road. So Doris did the smart thing and bolted for her car door. As she did, this thing, whatever it was, chased after her. Doris said she could hear the heavy thud of the creatures feet on the pavement behind her and the sound of the deep, panting breaths. Thankfully, she managed to get into the car and shifted quickly back into drive, but as she pulled away, she felt her car shudder once more. When she looked in the rear view mirror, all she could see was the dark silhouette of the creature filling her back window. It had jumped onto the trunk.

Whatever her attacker was, she claims that it fell off when she got her car moving quickly enough, but she wasn't willing to stop for another look. She did, however, continue on to her friend’s house and eventually they both headed back to town for some Halloween fun. Later that night, on her way back along Bray Road to drop her friend back off at home, Doris swears she saw the figure one more time. It was far off in the distance, at the edge of her headlights, but it was the same unmistakable shape. Tall, thick and very animal like, but standing upright on two legs. It wasn't until the next day in the safety of her own driveway and by the light of the noon day sun that she took another look at her car. There, on the trunk, she found evidence that something very unusual and very dangerous had taken place the night before: long, vicious scratches all grouped together as if they were made by claws.

This is the point in the story where you're probably expecting me to clarify what the creature was. All of the physical descriptions certainly point toward the folklore regarding werewolves, but almost no one in Elkhorn made that connection. Maybe that's because there were never any stories of humans transforming into the monster, or perhaps it's because the sightings weren’t limited to full moon nights. In the end, whatever it might have been, the people of the area took to calling it the Beast of Bray Road. There were other theories, of course. One common suggestion was rooted in the Native American folklore about a giant wolf known as the Shunka Warakin, which was described as sort of a hybrid between a wolf and a coyote. Others have made comparisons to the Inuit stories of the Amarok or the Waheela, both of which were enormous, monstous wolves. But honestly, there are far too many human charactristics attributed to Bray Road creature to make the comparison stick. Then, that’s without taking into account the additional sighings. Because Lorraine and Doris weren’t the only witnesses to see something strange along that stretch of country road and once they spoke to a local reporter, others found the courage to come forward with their own tales.

Marvin Kershnick was one of them. According to his testimony, he had his own encounter way back in 1981, a full decade before Doris Gibbson. Unlike the others, though, his sighting didn't happen in the dark. He'd been driving along Highway 11, which runs just north east of Elkhorn, and as he approached the turn off for Bray Road, he saw an unusual animal in the trees along the side of the road. Kershnick slowed down when he saw it and then pulled over to get a better look. The way he described it, much of the creature was obscured by the underbrush, but it was clearly wolf-like. They stared at each other for a moment before the beast moved toward the car. Frightened, Kershnick drove away quickly. Five years later, in 1986, Diane Koenig was traveling in the same area, returning home after a day in nearby Berlington. From a distance, her headlights didn't give her a very clear view so at first it just looked like a tall man was walking along the side of the road with something heavy in his arms. As she drew closer, though, all of that came into focus. According to Koenig, this man had the head of a wolf, and the heavy burden that it held in its arms turned out to be a full sized deer. Unlike Kershnick though, Koenig didn't stop for a closer look and instead sped up, just in case the creature decided to give chase. She kept the story to herself for years out of fear that she’d be considered a lunatic.

More stories flooded in. One unnamed girl told the authorities that she'd been chased up a tree by a wolf then had to stay there for over an hour while it paced around, trying to find a way to climb up after her. What struck her as odd, though, was that the wolf walked around the tree on its hind legs. When she led her parents back to the tree the next day, they found large claw marks on the lower portion of the trunk. Even Scott Bray, who lived on the family farm that gave the road it’s name, claimed to have seen unusual things, including enormous wolf tracks on his property. Local animal control authorities were called to several homes in the area to examine and collect a large number of mutilated animal corpses. A few townsfolk tried to blame that one on Satanic cults, but everyone else agreed it was just the Beast of Bray Road. There was a good amount of fear in town, as you might expect, but the sightings were also creating something else that's lasted to this day. A reputation. The bar where Lorraine Endrizzi worked created a menu item called the Silver Bullet Special. A bakery in town started making wolf shaped cookies. Think Roswell New Mexico and UFO collectables but with wolves, and I think you'll get the idea. Even Chuck Coleman, a local state representative, got involved by using the Beast of Bray Road in his election marketing. He ran an ad that showed a man dressed up as the Beast casting his vote for Coleman. Perhaps proof of the popularity of the Bray Beast stories, Coleman won his election. Doris Gibson's encounter also seemed to have been the last sighting of the creature by travelers on Bray Road. After that, Elkhorn Wisconsin sort of became quiet – for a while, at least. You see, in the spring of 1992, county animal control officer John Frederickson was called to a field outside of town, to the east near Bray Road. This is a man who was used to the occasional road kill or injured farm animal. He’d seen a lot in his career. But when he arrived at the field, he was well out of his depth, because there, laying in the pasture, were the bodies of five horses. Their throats had all been slashed.

It seems that people are drawn to animals and we always have been. And if the internet’s collection of cat videos and dog tricks tells us anything, it's that our passion for these animals isn’t fading any time soon. Perhaps they meet a deep, unspoken need in our soul or maybe they just trigger the right pleasure center in our brains. Whatever the reason might be, animals are significant to us. But every time I see someone dress up their dog in a sweater, I can't help but think of how, for a very long time, humans used to be the ones dressed up as animals. We envy their grace, their strength and their power, and that envy has woven itself into the very fabric of global folklore. But what if there's another reason why we tell stories of animals that act human? What if, deep down, we fear the possibility, or that our ancestors told just enough stories about human-like animals that we wonder, just a little? Whatever it was lurking in the trees and shadows of Elkhorn, Wisconsin back in the early 90s remains a mystery to this day. No answers have been uncovered, no unusual corpses have been found in the woods or along the roadside, no nests or dens, or whatever sort of dwelling a creature like the Beast of Bray Road might have lived in. All we have is story. Sometimes all we ever have is story. All of the witnesses who came forward to tell their stories seemed to agree on the details, and surprisingly all of them appear to be telling the truth. When a documentary on the events was being produced in 2008, all of the witnesses agreed to take a polygraph exam, and each of them passed. It's not irrefutable proof, I know, but it's enough to make you wonder.

Sometime after the events of the early 90s, a local who lived along Bray Road looked out his window to see a man standing in his driveway with a handgun. Obviously frightened by the sight of an armed stranger in his yard, he called the police, who quickly arrived. José Contreras was immediately arrested and his handgun, along with 50 rounds of ammunition, was confiscated. He eventually went to trial and his lawyer attempted to build a case around self defense. Contreras, he told the judge, was looking for the Beast of Bray Road, which he believed was a werewolf. That meant, according to his defence, he wasn't a danger to anyone else. The judge, though, dismissed the notion and convicted Conteras anyway. His reason? Apparently none of the bullets in the gun had been silver. Maybe it's fantasy, maybe it's real, but it's amazing in the very least how parts of fantasy can become so accepted that they play a role in something as significant as a criminal trial.

One final tale. Just six years ago, more witnesses came forward about a new sighting. One night in October of 2010, six people were driving together down Bray Road. Down the road ahead, they watched as shadows seemed to move across their path. As they drew closer, they watched the shape run into the open field to their right. What they say might seem hard to believe, so we’ll have to take them at their word. They claimed it was an animal, covered in fur, and similar in appearance to a wolf - except it was running on two legs and not four. Once it reached the field, the beast dropped to all fours and bolted off into the darkness. One final detail sets this report apart from all the others, though, because unlike every other encounter dating back over 30 years, this one finds a way to make the Beast of Bray Road even more frightening. According to the witnesses, it wasn't a single creature. There were two of them.

[Closing statements]

[yasbxxgie]

In college, I drove a little electric truck around campus and picked up bins of fruit and vegetable waste, plant clippings, and coffee grounds, and hauled them to a 50-foot long, 5-foot-tall compost pile at the student farm. Although we asked that our pick-up sites didn’t put any post-consumer waste in the bins, “compostable” plates, cups, and bags inevitably found their way to our pile. And when they did, I’d pull them out and throw them in the trash.

That’s the problem with labels like “biodegradable” or “compostable.” These products—typically made from plant sources, often corn—biodegrade eventually, meaning that microbes and other organisms break the materials down into soil. But the environment the products are disposed in matters. As the banana peels and straw morphed into crumbly compost, the “compostable” bags and “biodegradable” cups hung around, full intact. They would have decayed if they were sent to a large-scale, industrial recycler, where workers manage the conditions and chemistry of materials, ensuring the frenzied action of millions of microbes capable of breaking down these tough materials. But here? Not for years, if at all.

On Sunday, scientists at the University of Plymouth published a study highlighting the problem of confusing labelling. The researchers tested the degradability of several bioplastic bags—with labels like biodegradable and compostable—and conventional high-density polyethylene (read: plastic) bags in soil, outdoor air, and marine water. After three years in water and soil, all but the compostable bag were still able to tote a load of groceries. It was still around after 27 months underground, but easily tore apart.

“In day-to-day living, [these labels are] misleading,” says Imogen Napper, lead author and marine scientist. While the products are intended for an industrial composter, that’s not where most of them are going. Napper argues consumers are misled by the labels into thinking that the products do readily decay in natural environments like the ones she tested, when the reality is that the timeline from product to soil can be many years. “When it says biodegradable or compostable, what’s the time frame that you think of for a product in the natural environment?” she says. “For me, it would be days to months. As soon as you start to say two years to three years, does that have any meaningful advantage to the environment? I'd argue not.”

Headlines about the study have echoed that sentiment, such as Vice's "Biodegradable Plastic Bags Aren't Better For The Environment." Most of the reports focused on the fact that the biodegradable bags could still carry groceries after three years underground. But, as alarming as that finding is, the reality is a bit more complex.

It starts with the difference between labels. In theory, “biodegradable” and “compostable” should mean the same thing—that organisms in the soil can break down a product. But the truth is that “biodegradable” gives you the same amount of information as the label “natural” on a food item does, says Kate Bailey, policy and research director at Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycling organization. Biodegradable simply means that at some unspecified time in the future—months, years, decades, who knows!—the product will break down.

To continue the food analogy, the term “compostable” is more like “organic,” in that regulators are trying to ensure it meets certain standards, though what exactly those standards are is still a work-in-progress. When a product carries the label of “certified compostable,” that means when you send it to an industrial facility, it becomes compost in about the same amount of time as other things in the pile like food waste and yard clippings—usually between 90 and 180 days. There are a few third-party verifications of this, including one by the ASTM International, an organization that develops standards for thousands of products and services. “We are definitely seeing some movement toward ‘this [label] needs to mean something,’ and it can’t just be getting thrown out there and confusing consumers,” says Bailey.

But biodegradable remains a stress-inducing word for composters, Bailey adds. “There’s a lot of concern about the labelling,” she adds. “Composters want it to be certified compostable—biodegradable doesn’t work for them.” Really, biodegradable is just another greenwashed phrase, one companies use to make us feel good about a pricey purchase, even though its environmental benefit isn’t actually clear.

Some agencies are taking action. The Federal Trade Commision in its most recent "Green Guides" says that "degradable claims" need to backed up by "competent and reliable scientific evidence that the entire item will completely... decompose into elements found in nature within a reasonably short period of time after customary disposal." California is also cracking down on decomposition deception. The state has banned sales of products marketed as "biodegradable", "compostable," etc. unless they have evidence to prove it. The Golden State has a $1.5 million settlement coming its way after district attorneys sued Amazon for selling products with misleading labels, including "biodegradable."

By now, you might be questioning the little green bags you use to line the compost bin on your kitchen counter or the eco-friendly foodware at your office, wondering if it’s all a waste of money. If your city does partner with a composter, like San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland do, great! There’s a dedicated place where these products can go to become soil. Just double check the label. “Look for the certified compostable label,” says Bailey.

But what if you’re among the roughly 95 percent of households that don’t have such a service available? Even if a product is “certified compostable,” it might not be preferable to plastic. Right now, a lot of compostable bags, cups, and foodware are made from corn, and that process has all sorts of environmental impacts, from the pesticides that leach into rivers to the greenhouse gases emitted from plants manufacturing the products. “There’s a lot of hope that we can make compostable plastic out of things like mushrooms, algae, or hemp—things that could be much more beneficial than plastic,” says Bailey, “But right now … with most things coming from corn, it’s not clear that there really is much of a benefit [compared to plastic].”

Research from the Oregon Department of Environment Quality underscores this point. Scientists reviewed previous life cycle assessments of different "packing attributes"—labels like "recycled content," "biobased," and our friend "compostable." Each study analyzed the product's environmental impacts across its "life," from manufacture to disposal. The analysis concluded that compostable products aren't an easy answer to plastics. "Many compostable packages are made of biobased materials and inherit the significant environmental burdens from their production," the authors wrote. "These burdens are often much greater that the offset benefits that composting provides."

Much of the environment impacts of these greenwashed products arise from their production. As a factsheet for the study states, “39 percent of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions take place before a product even reaches a consumer, and only 2 percent of GHG emissions occurs from disposal (landfill, compost and incineration).”

Still, these life cycle assessments largely ignore what happens when an item doesn't stick to its ideal disposal route, whether that's a landfill, recycler, or compost pile. But plenty of plastic veers off course each year. In 2010, one study found that 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic debris wound up in the ocean. And plastic in the environment doesn't decompose—it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces with the same chemical structure. These microplastics are a problem because they're near-impossible to clean up and are eaten by marine life, even ending up in the fish we eat—and, as a result, inside our own bodies.

Compostable products could have an edge when it comes to curbing this ocean plastic disaster. In the study from University of Plymouth, compostable bags dissolved in marine water within three months. So, while they might not be beneficial from a life cycle perspective, they’re perhaps less harmful to marine organisms.

While there are many ways to weigh the impacts of conventional plastic versus biodegradable alternatives, there is one clear route to win on all environmental fronts. It’s the one you’ve heard before: cut back on plastic, especially single-use items, and you’ll create less litter and use fewer resources. But for those situations when you can’t avoid disposable bags, cups, or plates, “more clear labelling standards [for compostable products] are a great first step,” says Bailey.

[preeshera]

If Love Be Blind

Angsty multi-chapter love square monstrosity (you have been warned)

I would be nowhere without my lovely Beta - Bell

Read on AO3

Chapter 1

“You realize I am a doctor too, right?!” the psychologist exclaimed, flushed with anger, as he fought a losing battle to maintain his composure.

“Whatever you say, Marcus,” scoffed a man in lab coat and stormed out of the office. The doctor closed his office door harshly to hide his embarrassment.

He marched back to his desk and sat down forcefully, knocking over his favorite picture frame and breaking it into pieces. Merde. Now this. He swept the shards off his work notepad, muttering angrily.

“Not a real doctor? NOT A REAL DOCTOR? That arrogant ass!”

They underestimate you, don’t they?

What? Had someone entered his office? He looked around but the door was still firmly shut.

They ridicule you, laugh at you.

He could feel his anger bubbling up again.

No more, I say! My name is Hawkmoth, and I can give you the power to take revenge. All I ask in return is two little trinkets…

What do you think of my offer – Dr. Mind Control?

A regular cloudy Parisian afternoon found the Collège Françoise Dupont as it usually was – busy and bustling with students.

“Come on, Marinette! We’ll be late!” Alya hollered, already halfway down the corridor from the homeroom class as Marinette was trying her best to catch up.

“But Alya, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, I didn’t know you were so passionate about the environment…” Marinette smiled at her friend sheepishly, once she finally caught her.

Alya was clearly excited, what with her near jog and all the hand waving, but Marinette didn’t really understand. Sure, the big shipment of chemicals being delivered through Parisian streets was a big deal – there was a proper protest organized and everything – but Mayor Bourgeoise assured everyone that the security was of utmost priority. Besides, Marinette mused as she ran to keep up with her excited best friend, this just didn’t seem to be the kind of topic that would get Alya this heated up.

“Of course I am passionate!” Alya declared resolutely. “Why – wouldn’t the protest be a perfect opportunity for Ladybug and Chat Noir to make an appearance?”

Aha! Voila, there it was. The true motive! Marinette sighed, but then smiled indulgently at her friend.

“Okay, okay. I mean, what are best friends for, right?”

Alya grinned cheekily and hooked her elbows with Marinette.

“Right you are Mari!”

The girls made it just in time to see the procession of several large container trucks accompanied by a queue of police cars. The gathering of protestors along the main street was a bit loud, but Marinette noted gratefully that it looked peaceful, couple of rather rude placards aside, and didn’t think anyone looked angry enough to attract Hawkmoth’s attention.

She smiled at Alya, who was snapping pictures left and right and clearly in her element. Hopefully her friend won’t be too disappointed if Ladybug didn’t show…

A loud screeching sound tore Marinette out of her reverie. She turned around with growing dread.

Of-fucking -course. She just had to jinx it.

A man hovered above the line of trucks and police cars, flying in a throne-like office chair, dressed in an outfit that looked like a real-life optical illusion, and cackling manically.

Marinette sighed and stole a quick glance to Alya. Luckily, her friend was preoccupied by the commotion. She ducked into the nearest alley and dove behind a dumpster after a quick glance around the area. She opened her purse and hissed: “Tikki, we’ve got a problem!”

The tiny red kwami looked up at her with worried blue eyes.

“What is it Marinette? What’s wrong?”

“Akuma, Tikki. Quick, spots on!”

Her transformation flowed over her in a stream of pink light and Marinette let it take over, enjoying the pleasant rush that came with Tikki’s presence surrounding her.

Disguised as Ladybug she appeared from behind the dumpster fully suited and ran back towards the street, quickly dialing Chat’s number and leaving him a message to come as fast as he could.

The akuma was wreaking havoc, though Marinette couldn’t figure out exactly how at first. The formerly peaceful protest had turned into a full-blown riot in the short while she took to transform. Marinette just couldn’t understand it. It was only once she noticed the unnatural, blood red eyes on one of the protester’s faces that it hit her – they were all being controlled!

“Well, well, if it isn’t Paris’ favorite superheroine!” The akuma screeched as he turned his attention to her. She quickly shot her yo-yo at a nearby aerial and pulled herself up on a rooftop to get away from the frenzied crowd and behind a cooling unit on the rooftop to pull out the communicator screen of her yo-yo. Chat still wasn’t picking up.

“Where are you, Chaton?” Marinette whispered to herself.

“The famous Ladybug, hiding, while the citizens of Paris are in danger? I sense some confidence issues! Tut-tut. A therapy session or two, and you’ll be right as rain!” the akuma announced as he rounded the rooftop and came face to face with Marinette.

Ugh, the suit was painful to look at. Marinette had to avert her eyes – optical illusions always gave her a headache.

“I am Dr. Mind Control, give up your Miraculous Ladybug and no one will get hurt!”

Marinette groaned. Not this spiel again. She pushed down her uneasiness and glared at the akuma. The blood red irises that met her were extra freakish, but not as freakish as the book in his hands – a therapy notepad, but pitch black with a single glowing red eye on it.

That’s it! That must be where the butterfly is hiding.

“Give up your miraculous, Ladybug, or Paris will suffer!”

“I am afraid that’s impawsible,” came a cheeky reply. The akuma spun on his chair to glare at Mari’s very own smirking partner.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Dr. Mind Control sneered, but Chat Noir’s grin didn’t waver.

“Need a helping paw, my Lady?”

“Chaton,” Marinette groaned, but she was glad to see her partner there. Fighting akumas on her own always made her a bit uneasy. “Stay focused! The akuma is in his notepad, we need to get to it – stat!”

“Last chance, Ladybug!” The akuma threatened, obviously not happy about being ignored.

Marinette hopped up onto the air conditioning unit she previously hid behind and threw her yo-yo at the akuma’s chair. Quickly pulling herself in, she tried to knock the notepad out of his hands, but he was expecting her.

“My Lady, no!” Chat screamed as the book glowed red, ready to pull Ladybug under the akuma’s control.

She dodged.

Plummeting to the ground, she barely managed to use her yoyo and veer quickly in opposite direction in time. By the skin of her neck the vibrating beam of the akuma’s power missed her and exploded against the building behind her.

Thank kwamis for all Ladybug’s luck.

She rolled onto a different rooftop and barely got to her feet before the akuma was shooting at her again. Dodging and swerving from rooftop to rooftop Mari Ladybug completely lost sight of her partner. Only when she dodged another one of the too-close-for-comfort attacks did she realize her companion was nowhere to be seen.

“Chat, a little help?” She cast her eyes wildly all around for the black of his suit. At last she spotted him on the street underneath. Only then did Marinette realize her partner had his hands more than full. While she was dancing around dodging Dr. Mind Control’s attacks, he had to deal with the raging crowd below. Ladybug’s stomach dropped at the sight of the mass of civilians bashing the large canisters full of chemicals that were towed on the trucks below her with whatever they could find.

Merde, merde, merde, MERDE!

“I’ve got my claws full, LB!” Chat yelped as Marinette just barely dodged another black beam. This wouldn’t do.

“Lucky Charm!” She threw her yo-yo up in the air, and air crackled with power.

A soft, silky scarf landed in her out-stretched hand. What the…?

She was just about to look around for clues when a resounding clamor from below drew her attention. Chat Noir was getting overwhelmed while the civilians were getting close to damaging the cistern. She had to get down there, but the akuma with his aerial advantage was proving way too tricky. Screw it, she really needed some time to figure out her Lucky charm!

Mari could hear sirens – police, or the fire service, or hopefully both, but they were too far away to help yet. She growled in frustration as she dove in between buildings and landed on the pavement next to Chat, knocking the mind-controlled civilians to the ground.

“Thanks for the assist, Bugaboo, things were getting a bit hairy down here.” Chat grinned.

“What did I tell you about calling me Bugaboo, you alley cat?”

“Meowch, my Lady, you wound me!” Chat exclaimed theatrically, throwing his clawed hands over his heart before waving them around again, laughing at his own antics.

The bubbling laugh transformed midway out of Marinette’s mouth into a gurgled gasp. You see, the akuma did not take kindly to being ignored, and he used their distraction to his advantage. In the split-second Mari wasn’t on high alert, a beam of black light shot right by her and hit Chat square in his chest.

The smile melted off his face as his eyes turned crimson.

“Chat, NO!” Marinette screamed, but to no avail. Her friend wasn’t there anymore.

“Now, now, Ladybug. Where were we? It’s rude to run out on your doctor!”

Chat hunched menacingly, and Mari took an instinctive step back. And as if all this wasn’t enough, the people she had knocked down were starting to stir and get back up on their feet. She shot out her yo-yo and quickly pulled herself up on one of the trucks. She needed to get to higher ground, fast.

With dread, Marinette realized Chat’s claws were doing a right number on the metallic containers beside her, and while she dodged away unscathed, the truck had started to sprout leaks. The pressure in the large container caused the chemical inside to shoot out forcefully through every small opening. Dr. Mind Control laughed manically as air filled with screams of civilians hurt by the leaking chemicals. The few remaining outside akuma’s control were trying to help, but it just wasn’t enough. Ladybug looked around frantically, trying to find something to aid her. The sound of sirens was getting closer, and she hoped against hope that the sorely needed help would arrive with it.

Her earing gave a warning beep and she looked down at the silk scarf, still clutched uselessly in her hand. She had to think of something!

“Get her, Chat Noir!” the akuma commanded, but Ladybug, distracted by looking around for clues, reacted too slow. The familiar arms of her partner, now harsh and unforgiving, circled her. In one swift move Chat brought her down to the ground with a heavy slam. One of his clawed hands circled her neck while the other posed to strike.

“Unmask her.” The akuma ordered coldly.

The black aura of cataclysm surrounded Chat’s hand and Marinette yelped, casting her gaze up helplessly to catch his unseeing blood red eyes. Please. Look at me. Snap out of it. She struggled underneath him but he was too strong.

“Chat, stop it! Chaton, please! It’s me, it’s your Lady!” she begged, tears welling in her eyes against her will, as she writhed against his crushing grip.

However, her Chat was not there. The last thing she saw was a streak of black on red as pain like lightning exploded in her head. His claws came down on her face, and a burning, horrible sensation spread from her eyelids where his cataclysm first made contact.

“Get away from her you monster!” a familiar voice screamed, and with a heavy wet whoosh Chat’s weight was lifted off her. She struggled to pry her eye open. Finally, her eyelids lifted heavily. Everything was blurry and hurting, her ears were ringing, and she was dripping wet for some reason. The sirens. It must be the firefighters. Of course, Marinette thought hazily, they brought out the power hose.

“Ladybug, can you hear me? Ladybug?” Alya, sweet, beautiful Alya was clutching her by the shoulders. “Ladybug, are you – are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Her vision swam, fluttery and unclear, her world a mass of swirling black spots and pounding excruciating pain. She couldn’t answer.

“Your suit…!” Alya whispered, voice quiet and horrified like Mari had never heard it before – and when her gaze dropped to her own trembling hands she could see her bare fingertips as the ladybug suit slowly crumbled. Tikki was losing her hold on the transformation.

“Please, please hold out. I will be back.” She tried to sound brave but her voice shook.

She had to run. Diving into the nearest alley she left the sounds of struggle behind, as the fire department waged a losing battle on an akuma and a corrupted superhero. They needed Ladybug, but she couldn’t help them. Crying, she fled.

Her suit crumbled of her feet and legs as she ran. She ran as fast as she could, ignoring the growing black spots in her sight, ignoring the pain, she ran to the only place she knew she could get help. Master Fu. Marinette could feel the shreds of the suit falling off her shoulders. Her time was almost up. The familiar weight of her mask disappeared just as she came up to the door of Master Fu’s shop. She saw a bright red dot drop lifelessly into her outstretched palm. She clutched her kwami to her chest as she banged on the door, streams of hot tears running down her face.  Her whole world narrowed down to a soft fluttery pulse in her palm. Her kwami, her companion, her Tikki.

“Marinette?” The look of surprise on Master Fu’s old face was lost on the girl. His eyes ran up and down her shaking frame and widened; she looked a sight – dripping wet, crying and bloody, with shreds of spotted armor still falling down around her. “Oh child, come in.”

“Master I can’t-” Marinette sobbed. “– I can’t see…”

----

TBC

[personalcoachingcenter]

Transformational Coaching- Finding Your Deliberate Journey

New Post has been published on http://personalcoachingcenter.com/transformational-coaching-finding-your-deliberate-journey/

Transformational Coaching- Finding Your Deliberate Journey

A Coaching Model Created by Evan Wilson (Transformational Coach, UNITED STATES)

Introduction

Every one of us is on a journey – probably multiple journeys. As individuals, we might be working toward a better job, a degree, a new or closer relationship, enlightenment, or a project. As part of a team or organization, perhaps we are working toward a product launch, improved employee engagement, better collaboration skills, or increased productivity.

Whether conscious or subconscious, each journey we are on has both intent, purpose, and a destination. The Deliberate Journey Model is about recognizing the importance of every aspect of the journey consciously, deliberately, and intentionally.

The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Lao Tzu

Deliberate Planning

Step 1: Choose a Destination

Step 2: Determine Where You Are

Step 3:

Create a Roadmap

Step 4:

Determine How You Will Travel

Step 5: Gather Your Resources

Enjoy the Journey!

Perspective

Sometimes we take a journey alone. Other times, we have travel companions, or we meet other people along the way. They may take the entire journey with us or just part.

Everyone holds a different perspective. Even when they are walking right beside us they may see the same thing in a completely different way, based on experience.

Other travelers and local experts are an invaluable tool, even when you are traveling alone. When you go to a new city, isn’t it great to get favorite restaurant recommendations from the locals?

Deliberate Journey Model

Every transformation is a journey – and sometimes we need to stop and ask for directions. The Deliberate Journey Coaching Model is a literal roadmap to keep you on track, handle changes more nimbly, and plan for roadblocks along the way.

To plan a journey, it can be helpful to break it down into smaller excursions. Let’s say you want to take a trip around the world. Where would you go first? What is the best place to start? What if you decide you want to stay in one place longer than others?

Step 1: Choose a Destination

  There is an abundance of advice telling us to “forget the destination, enjoy the journey.” In fact, Zen Buddhism even says to ignore both and simply exist at the moment – everything else is immaterial. Having a destination does not mean we can’t enjoy the journey, or that the journey isn’t important. It simply provides a horizon on which to focus so we don’t get lost at sea. When we are confident in where we are headed, it can be easier to accept and enjoy the present exactly as it is.

A destination helps to give the journey purpose and meaning, allowing us to determine the quality of the experience we have. Without it, we wander aimlessly, exploring whatever happens to be on our path at that moment. As attractive as that sounds, we may inadvertently get lost, stuck, or never get anywhere. When we get lost or hit a roadblock, a destination can get us back on track and help us focus so we can get back to enjoying the journey.

The first step is to choose a destination. Keep it simple and achievable. Creating a roadmap for the rest of your life will be overwhelming and counterproductive. If you want to travel around the country, try a weekend road trip first, with a specific destination. The first time you attempt this model, it is recommended to start small – something specific that will take no more than a week. A household chore or small home improvement project, like painting a room, is often a good start.

Step 2: Determine Where You Are

To know what it is going to take to get where we want to go, we need to know where we are. This step requires an honest, realistic assessment of the tools that we have already developed or acquired, as well as those we will need before and during the journey. Understanding the gap between where we are and where we want to go helps us determine what will be needed.

Logically, you might think this should be first. How would we know where to go unless we can say where we are? This step is second for many reasons, but most importantly, it reduces the risk of compromising or canceling the journey before it even begins. Your current location should not determine where you want to be. Determining the destination first allows us to be future and forward motion focused.

Let’s say we’re in Chicago and we start with “I’m in Chicago – where can I realistically go from here?” We might look at places closer to home, what we can afford right now, what we can realistically plan for, etc. But if we have done some reflection and decided first, “I really want to go to Rome,” we are far more likely to figure out what it’s going to take to get there – budget, timeline, steps, blocks  – and we will more likely get where we really want to go instead of limiting ourselves to someplace we don’t want to go, but belief is as far as we can get.

Step 3: Create a Roadmap

Every journey requires some planning to get us from where we are to where we want to be. A visual roadmap is a powerful way to bring the journey to life. Visual roadmaps provide tangible assistance to…

Remind us where we are going

Show our progress

Get back on track when we diverge from the path

Identify and prepare for roadblocks or difficulties

Be more adaptable to changes

More easily make decisions

This is where you will spend the most time; to plot the course from where you are to where you want to be.

Grab a piece of paper – I recommend unlined or sketch paper. At the top of the page draw a circle with your destination. At the bottom of the page, draw another circle with your current location (think “you are here” star on a department store map).

Most often, the next bit will not be as simple as drawing a line from one circle to the other. Depending on your destination there will be stops, side trips, layovers, traffic, and roadblocks. Begin adding additional stops or decision points you will need along the way. If you are painting a room, this may include trips to the hardware store,

deciding on a color, and so on.

This is a good time to stop, reflect, and ask yourself the following questions:

What is the purpose of this journey (why do I want to paint the room)? To reach the end? To learn? To transform?

Do you want the route that gets you there the fastest and most efficiently? Or do you want the most scenic and enjoyable path? Too many paths will only serve to overwhelm and result in inaction.

What are the values that align with this journey? When our journey has meaning, we are more motivated to continue. We are also more likely to enjoy the journey itself.

Keep in mind the roadmap is a living document. Change is constant and our map may need to be adjusted, based on traffic conditions or roadblocks. This is where commitment comes in. Choose the path that most aligns with your goals and your purpose; and deliberately commit to it.

Step 4: Determine How You Will Travel

This is where deliberate thinking really comes into play. Consider the tools, people, and transportation you will need on your journey. Who or what will make decisions easier and get you to the next leg of the journey? Who or what will make the journey more enjoyable? Who or what will you need to get past roadblocks? Now is the time to begin planning what you will need to propel you forward when you stumble, get stuck, or veer off course. Write these items on the roadmap where you will need them.

As mentioned in the last step, change is constant. Don’t try to plan for every potential outcome. You are merely looking to get a handle on what is going to propel you forward along the way, and what to do when things change course or you get stuck.

Step 4 is also a great place to begin recording your journey in a travelogue or journal. 15 minutes each day to check-in is all that is needed. Set this time aside in your calendar and stick to it. The night is recommended, while the day is fresh in your memory. This is a deliberate activity that will make you welcome changes in your environment, as well as set you up for success every day. Options abound for what to record, but the simplest that most people have found to be effective is to ask yourself the following questions:

What went well today?

What did not go well or as planned?

What would I like to do differently tomorrow?

It is also recommended to spend a few minutes in the morning with an intent for the day and gratitude for where you are on the journey, at this moment. You may have an intent to be more compassionate of others or productive. Write these down in your travelogue if so inclined. Just list a couple of things for which you are grateful – again, at this moment. In addition to the daily check-in, these prove to be invaluable, especially in times of difficult change or when things don’t go the way you want them to.

If you stumble along your path or start down an unplanned detour (“look! Something shiny!”), record it so you can look for patterns. This includes what you may have been feeling at a particular point along your path. As you develop roadmaps for other journeys, this will help you see where you stumbled, got stuck, veered off course, or successfully cleared a roadblock – and you can correct course or plan accordingly.

Step 5: Gather Your Resources

In Step 5, you will gather the Product, People, and Process (PPP) resources you wrote down in Step 4.

Products are tangible items, like your roadmap or a planner. To paint a room, you will need paint, tape, brushes, etc.

People are those that you trust to help or support you, as well as potential experts you may need. Perhaps a friend will help you paint (great bonding time, by the way). Or maybe you will need a handyman to repair holes in the wall.

Processes are anything that you might need to do to complete a leg of the journey. Examples might be laying down a tarp before you begin painting or proper storage of photographs and artwork while the project is in progress.

The idea behind this step is like the chef’s mantra of “mis en place.” Loosely translated, it means setting up or everything in its place. It prepares you for cooking by laying out the ingredients and tools that you will need to prepare the dish, measuring the ingredients, washing and checking the equipment, and so on. The point is to prepare yourself as much as possible, so changes are less jarring.

Enjoy the Journey!

Shove off and enjoy the journey! There may be unexpected roadblocks and changes, but you are prepared. You know where you’re headed and why. You have written down the meaning and purpose of this journey to remind you why you are taking it. You have started a travelogue to keep track of progress and get you through tough spots. And you’ve identified those who can help and support you.

When things change – and they inevitably will – you will have the agility to adeptly shift. The peace of mind in knowing And at the end of this journey, you will have a written record to help you on the next journey.

Being Deliberate

All the steps in this model require a bit of deliberate forethought and action. You need to contemplate the destination you truly desire, as well as honestly assess where you really are. The act of planning – even if things don’t go as planned – is a deliberate act. As you go along your journey, your travelogue will help you to be deliberate, honest, and realistic with your progress.

Being present and enjoying the here and now also requires being deliberate. It is easy for our brains to ruminate about the future, jump ahead to the next thing we need to complete, or the next hurdle we need to jump. It is part of the human condition to be disappointed when things don’t go as planned, or to face change with fear.

As important as the idea of where you are going, is to stop and deliberately appreciate where you are, right now, at this moment.

Be Deliberately Present

“Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies the future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with the future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.” (Tolle, 1997)

Learn How to Create Your Own Coaching Model

Your Coaching Model reflects your values,  philosophies and beliefs and must communicate who you will coach and the problems you will solve.  Read more about creating your own coaching model

Original source: 

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[tothediaspora]

Divorcing the Male Gaze After 10 Years in the Natural Hair Movement (Pt. 1)

After countless hours in the salon chair, getting my hair curled, primped, and straightened over my teen years, I felt overwhelmed. Like many young black women, after high school, I needed to decide what I would be doing with my hair. Over the years, my mother had purchased every deep conditioning treatment and Dominican blowout. She permed my hair herself, bought everything one would need to transform the curls and kinks to a dramatic bone straight that the boxes advertised. My hair flowed past my shoulders with shine and the gleam of health. I was grateful. I felt like a woman. This is how black women looked like on the perm product boxes, the media, and around my hometown. The hair on my head was “bad hair” and their’s was rectified: straight, silky, and long. I grew to understand it as a natural transition for me to appear as those images. I have memories of my Haitian mother beaming when she picked me up from the salon after hours of waiting, washing, and straightening. I temporarily treated the problem. In two week’s time, I was to go through the process anew. I had no prospects on a hair stylist the summer before my freshman year of college. If it was only for the sake of “good hair”, I decided to forgo the risk of scalp burns that I may have caused if I had completed the process on my own. I did not yet know that I was in the process of a collective reclamation of black beauty. After ten years in the natural hair movement, I have learned to reconstruct my beliefs.

Three weeks later, I found myself in my dorm room after moving into my university. As I combed through my shoulder-length sew-in weave in the mirror, I felt it tight on my scalp. I thought, underneath, that my braided natural hair was flourishing. After weighing in how the cost of the hair maintenance added up quickly, straightening my hair seemed illogical. I chose to save money to travel in the near future. Over time, those tight coils that used to materialize after a wash day became impressive mainstays under braids and weaves. I escaped a demanding routine and felt liberated. I was, however, in hiding. I felt ashamed of my crown. I bought into the rhetoric that my hair was essentially unkempt. Synthetic and human hair covered up the tresses that needed constant maintenance. Each time I would replace the purchased hair, my fingers lingered longer in my own natural hair. I had not managed it often, thus the follicles that grew like roots emerging from my scalp felt foreign.

At eighteen years old, I chose to cut the permed tips of my hair when I went home for winter break in 2007. Three times the stylist asked me if I was certain — not quite confident that I wouldn’t be upset at her after I saw the effects of her deed. My “big chop” entailed cutting right above the mark between where my natural hair ended and my straight perm began. I nodded and agreed to a transformation. I watched as long pieces of hair shed and cascaded to the floor. My eyes veered down during the anxiety-provoking process. When I slowly glanced up to look at myself in the mirror, I felt hideous. I perceived my face as too masculine; I often thought that I had betrayed my gender. I still believed a woman was meant to have long silky hair. Upon seeing my afro when I got home, as typical of my Haitian father, he asked me why I “messed with my hair”. I defended my choice but felt a bit insecure. Although I have curves, I sometimes was mistaken for a man. From behind, I was called “sir” — even while wearing a dress or form-fitting clothes. This strange behavior was a testament to how many men perceived womanhood to be limited to the superficial appearance of long hair. I had learned over time that long straight hair was the ideal and that womanhood was inexplicably and irrevocably tied to it. I felt out of place in popular spaces like bars and clubs. It seemed that every other black woman around me wore long flowing weaves. I was gawked at as I walked into professional white-centric settings. Despite not speaking about the subject much amongst each other, my black natural-haired girl friends had experienced similar reactions.

When before I saw my hair as just one thing or another, good or bad, I was now aware of a whole spectrum of nuances inspired by black women sporting their natural hair. Physically, I felt admired when I had straight permed hair. I had the appearance of expected glamour and I was proud that it was my own. I found that the portrayal of womanhood was familiar to many men living in this particular corner of the United States. I was well aware of the performance of my gender. A flick of my hair and the ends caressing my back I perceived as signs of my female nature. I felt glamorous. Glamour, as I’ve been taught, always equated to silky hair with length. The longer it was, the better job I was doing at being a woman. I enjoyed when someone I was seeing would look at my face then my hair and smile as if I held his expectations. With a long weave, I received, even more, attention from men. My hair had large waves that fit in with the images I saw in advertisements and commercials. I was seen as more attractive, I realized that I wore more makeup. My style transformed a bit to match the conspicuous nature of my hair. Everything I wore was a little more eye-catching. In my routine, everything else I would put on matched the style of the weave I wore. I would notice a drastic change in how I felt about myself and was hungry for more attention when it was time for the weave to come off.

I donned braids mostly in the summer. Other styles, like straightened hair, would not last long in the Florida humidity. Weaves sometimes felt uncomfortable. Braids, along with extensions, provided a respite from maintaining my tresses. I felt a child-like familiarity with them. I saw myself as practical. During the times I wore braids, I realized that I was addicted to the attention I received from fitting into the traditional beauty standards. I did not get as much of what I was accustomed to. That diminished of self-esteem conveniently slipped my mind when I began to wear a weave again. With braids, I moved around my day to day activities with a more carefree approach. I had only two things to take care of: in the morning, I needed to maintain my scalp’s health for the three to four weeks with oil, in the evening I wrapped my hair with a scarf — preventing a night of tossing and turning in my sleep to ruin the braids. With each style, I followed a script, ignorant of the fervent and unsustainable rehearsal for this grand performance of my own black female form. It was warped in European perception and underneath it was the black female desire to beautify and transform herself. The growing challenge of accepting myself came about through one seemingly trivial decision of cutting the strands of hair that didn’t fit me anymore. It weighed me down; the decreased psychological weight accelerated change.

Furthermore, I also felt free from the strict image of womanhood and the high-maintenance play of gender. While casually walking around off-campus, I often encountered people of color who approached me. Many black men would express that I reminded them of India.Arie. Some would say, Erykah Badu. Others would shout at me “Jill Scott!”, as they passed. I found it humorous that these three black women did not appear alike. Though these comments were unsolicited; I did understand the strangers’ intentions. To them, I shared with these artists similar presentation. I began to understand how socially nuanced the role of my hair was. My personal and observations informed me of social norms; I took it as a challenge to be more aware of assumptions. I picked apart why certain types of men approached me. The hyper-masculine muscular black men no longer sought to meet my eyes. To white men, I was now completely invisible. I saw less of my black girlfriends with weaves. Not by my own volition, but due to a difference in interests and external presentation. Those who were now primarily focused on me identified as “Afro-centric“. Many of them called me queen. Initially, I felt like a fetish. As I was named a queen, it conjured up imposter syndrome. Who was I to be called “queen”? While passing by me, some men even stopped in their tracks, smiled and bowed. I didn’t know how to feel; this was unfamiliar territory.

After some time, I began to take the time to re-evaluate what I saw in the mirror. My reconnection to my roots by way of my hair was a transformation that I couldn’t have predicted. I made it a point to tell myself that I was free. I exhibited the presence of authenticity. I was now unencumbered with chemicals that pushed me to fit an unsustainable form. As a confident woman in flesh I felt otherworldly, I took pride and walked with assurance. The change in mindset led to an increased self-image. I thought: as I am, I am beautiful. Contrary to social expectations about my dramatic change in appearance, I didn’t need to alter part of my body with chemicals to be accepted. I chose my own course. My coarse hair didn’t define me either. It was only a part of my body. As I moved about, I ignored the stares, sometimes even relished in them, and carried the tresses passed down to me by my ancestors as my own legitimate crown.

I now understand that the male gaze doesn’t define who I am and how I present myself to the world. Freedom to change my appearance, the way the hair on my head and body grow, the different ways I express my style and personality, no one has the power to take my choice from me or force me to feel any different. My hair is maintained how I see fit and I move about in my environment unencumbered. I also accept that others will do as they please with their own body. Black women have a variety of styles that we sport on rotation and express ourselves through hair. I now know that glamour is only based on a cultural viewpoint. I do sometimes enjoy the western appearance of glamour; however, I no longer feel it so emotionally tied to self-esteem and attention-craving. My appearance does not dictate my sense of importance and value to others. I choose natural hair for the majority of the year, occasionally straighten it, and sometimes braid it to express myself. After ten years of growing to love my natural hair, there were many unexpected changes from a more obscure trend of natural beauty to a mainstay. There was also a change in how I was seen by the people around me; I allowed myself to subconsciously connect with my ancestors and accept the certain attributes I can change but choose not to. Even if much of society sees my hair as wild, uncontrollable, or unprofessional, recognizing the inherent beauty of my hair has taught me to love it all regardless.

[bubble-tea-bunny]

on the right bank of the seine

[diana prince x reader]

author’s note: fluffy lil imagine for diana((: might write another part to this in the future, i actually kinda like the concept

word count: 1,523

This morning Diana’s walk to work is quiet, as it usually is. Her boots click quietly on the concrete as she makes her way down Rue de Rivoli. It’s cloudy, but lately the day has always started out as such, and then given way to clear skies and a welcoming sun as the hours went on. She inhales deeply, smiling as she takes in the crisp, cool air. Every day she makes this walk it’s like seeing everything with fresh eyes. At this time, there aren’t many tourists up and about yet. It’s only those on their way to work.

The Napoleon Courtyard is empty when she arrives. The fountains are switched on, and they gurgle quietly. Diana greets the receptionists and other employees in the lobby when she steps into the museum lobby. Her steps are curt, footfalls echoing in the large pyramid and accompanied by hushed voices of others on their way to their offices. She turns on the lights when she gets to hers, and sets her bag on the ground by her desk. She shrugs her coat off and drapes it over the back of her chair before she takes a seat, proceeding to check the e-mails she’d gotten after she left yesterday.

The Louvre opens at 9 AM. Because Diana arrives so early, she never sees the line which grows in the lobby, excitable and lively tourists shuffling around between stanchions as they wait to buy their tickets. She doesn't doubt that it’s quite the sight. People from all over the world meet at this center of art. For all she knows, two people standing next to each other in line could be from opposite sides of the globe.

When she finishes going over her emails and reviewing the documents sitting on her desk, most of which are about the new pieces expected to come to her department within the next week, she likes to go see the crowds. Enough time has passed since opening that the rooms are busy, tours flitting through, classes sitting on the wooden floors as a guide teaches them about the painting on the wall which stretches from the floor all the way to the ceiling.

Diana smiles as she takes in the visitors, watches as some take pictures; read the little card next to the painting which has all the technical information; or have discussions about a piece—about its artist, about the time period it’s from. It’s beautiful to see this coming together, this appreciation of art, an activity that crosses cultures. One doesn’t need to know a certain language when they look at these paintings. They need only their eyes and a heart willing to feel what the artist felt when they created these wondrous oeuvres—that passion which drives man to paint a picture, to paint their soul.

It’s not hard to tell which room contains the Mona Lisa. There’s a sea of people to wade through in that area. The portrait is kept behind a wall of bulletproof glass to defend against any attacks. Diana sticks to the back of the room and she can just barely see the painting from here, peeking out over the heads of those who crowd around it. She sighs quietly and glances at the opposite wall—The Wedding at Cana hangs proudly in all its vibrant coloring, but only a few pay it any mind. It’s the largest canvas in the museum’s collection. Her eyes rove over the expanse as she walks past it and into the next room. It’s an incredible piece. She wishes more people would notice it. Perhaps one day.

The crowd is much thinner in the next room. The click of camera shutters is distinctly absent here. There’s a tour that’s just on their way out, which leaves only small groups: families and couples dotted around. She spots you on the far side of the room, back to her as you sit on a bench facing one of the smaller paintings. She knows which one it is, and she’ll admit not many focus on it. Not when there are many other larger pieces to its left or its right. It’s easy to overlook. Quietly she makes her way closer, and when she’s within range she notices you’re hunched over slightly, a small sketchbook in your lap. The blue lead you use makes it hard to see the picture clearly from where she is, especially beneath the glare of the lights, but she can tell well enough that it’s of the painting in front of you.

“That’s very beautiful,” she compliments softly so as not to disrupt the silence.

You glance up and smile sheepishly, shrugging offhandedly. “Oh, this? It’s nothing special. But thanks.”

She smiles back and walks closer, eyes focused on the piece on the wall. “Are you a fan of Gainsborough?”

“I have no favorites. Every painting here is amazing.”

“May I?” Diana points at the bench.

“Of course.” You nod quickly, scooting over slightly so you’re not in the center. The two of you sit there in silence, admiring the painting which isn’t more than 2 feet tall.

“Do you often draw paintings you see?” Diana asks, motioning to your sketchbook.

“Among other things. Sometimes when I’m at the aquarium I’ll draw the fish. I’ve drawn some of the statues in the Jardin des Tuileries too.”

“You’re talented.” Diana feels she’s stating the obvious, but you’d brushed off her earlier comment, so she wants to say it, to drive home just how much skill you have and how special that is. “Do you draw them just because they catch your eye, or have you researched them before?”

“Whatever catches my eye. Although I do like to do a bit of research when I find what I want to draw next.” You hold up your phone, smiling slightly.

Diana smiles and points to the Gainsborough painting. “And what can you tell me about this one?”

You purse your lips as you look at the piece, trying to remember what you’d read when you first sat down and looked it up. “Conversation in a Park by Thomas Gainsborough was created in 1745. It’s something called a ‘conversation piece,’ which demonstrates the influence of French art on English aesthetics in the eighteenth century. The landscape is very reminiscent of Gainsborough’s style.” That’s about all you can recall. You glance at Diana to find her smile has widened.

“Impressive.”

“I try,” you respond playfully.

Diana doesn’t remember seeing you around before. The Louvre is large, yes, but she does work here, and if you’ve stopped by more than once, she reckons she should have at least seen you during one of your visits. But you’re a new face. “I’m Diana.” Admittedly she doesn’t speak with many visitors. The most had been answering questions about a painting they might have been looking at and she happened to be passing by at the time. Never did the conversation veer in a direction where she felt she should introduce herself.

“[Name],” you tell her, eyes bright and friendly. You hold your hand out, and when she takes hold of it to shake, her grip is firm. It does catch you a little off guard—most people whose hands you shake don’t put much force behind it. You always wonder why.

“It was very nice to meet you, [Name]. But I’m afraid I must get back to work. They may wonder where I’ve gone,” Diana jokes.

You wave your hand. “No problem. I’ll just be here drawing.” You motion to your sketchbook and chuckle.

Diana stands as she asks “Will I be seeing more of you?”

“Do you want to see me around more?” You look at her as you push your glasses up slightly so they rest more comfortably on the bridge of your nose.

She doesn’t hesitate with her answer. “I do.”

Her response elicits a shy smile from you and you look away momentarily, trying to fend off the warmth in your cheeks, but to no avail. You meet her eyes again. “Then yes. You will.”

Her gaze is warm and her smile kind as the sun. “Wonderful.”

You watch as she walks out of the room and disappears around the corner, and sigh when she’s out of sight. You look back down at your current sketch. You’d drawn the man and woman in the painting but had yet to start on the environment. You look up at Conversation in the Park, noting the tree behind the bench, and when you return your attention to your drawing, you get as far as outlining the trunk before you stop.

This isn’t nearly as exciting as talking with Diana. You bite your lip as you give one more glance at the Gainsborough painting, then turn to a new page in your sketchbook. Even though you hadn’t been conversing with Diana long, you think you memorized the features of her face quite well. You’re not sure how much longer you’re sitting there, drawing her, burning her image into your brain, but you look so deep in concentration that no one bothers you.

[onestowatch]

Music For Intimate Moments,  Epic Collaborations, & How Engineering Launched His Career: A Q&A With SG Lewis

From playing guitar in his bedroom to DJ’ing to now playing his own original music to sold out crowds, British producer and singer-songwriter Sam Lewis, aka SG Lewis, is a talent like no other. His music, a combination of natural singer-songwriter vibes with R&B and electronic production, has an ethereal quality to it that is entirely his own. 

23-year-old Lewis immediately made a mark with the wild success of his debut EP, Shivers, which featured the talent of vocalists like JP Cooper and Louis Mattrs. It even got a stamp of approval from Pharrell Williams. His second EP, Yours, followed the trend of collaboration with the likes of Gallant and Bishop Nehru. But while he’s known for having worked with some incredible vocalists, make no mistake: the young artist is involved in multiple aspects of his craft, everything from the production to writing to singing, and now to the assembly of his live show. After playing at major festivals like Coachella and Life Is Beautiful, SG Lewis has just wrapped his first full U.S. tour.

As one of the last stops on his tour, Lewis played L.A. for the first time at the El Rey Theatre. Needless to say, the show was sold out, and believe me when I say it was one for the books. It’s often difficult to translate electronic music into a band in a live setting, but Lewis has managed to masterfully create a live show that is fully immersive. Because his music is ultimately rooted in singer-songwriter feels, the translation into real instruments in conjunction with electronic sounds presents his music in a different yet seamless manner. With the way the entire room was buzzing, it’s safe to say that SG Lewis has a long and successful career ahead of him. Before we became just a few members of a crowd of nearly 800, we had the opportunity to chat with the multi-talented artist one on one.

OTW: I’m so excited to hear you live tonight! How has touring been?

SG Lewis: It’s been crazy! I’m currently on my first full U.S. tour, and it’s the first time I’ve been on a bus tour. We actually went to South America first for Rock in Rio in Rio de Janeiro, which was the craziest experience. We got to really kind of get to know the city, and it was incredible. We played Life Is Beautiful in Vegas, then we played in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Denver, Detroit, San Diego, and tonight, L.A. It’s been crazy. To finally bring the full live show over as opposed to just DJ stuff has been a really amazing experience, and to connect with fans at this early stage has been really humbling.

OTW: What’s been your favorite city so far?

SG Lewis: Oh, good question. New York was pretty crazy. I love New York as a city, and the crowd really came through for us there. The surprise of the tour was Denver. I didn’t really think that anyone would like my music in Denver, but the crowd was amazing and so hype. It was crazy.

OTW: What’s one thing you miss about home while you’ve been on tour?

SG Lewis: This is really soppy, but my girlfriend (laughs).

OTW: (laughs) That’s so sweet! Moving away from the touring stuff, let’s get to know you better as an artist. When I was preparing for this interview, the one quote that always came up was about being “the weird kid” who just played guitar.

SG Lewis: Yeah, it’s really stuck. I said it just kind of prodding at myself at this MTV thing, and they really ran with that. They did a headline like, “Weird Kid SG Lewis” (laughs). I’m fine with it. It’s pretty funny.

OTW: (laughs) But more seriously, going from that early stage of just constantly playing guitar, what has your journey been to get from there to where you are now?

SG Lewis: As I said, I was, I guess, the weird kid playing too much guitar instead of going out. I think that by nature I’m an introvert, but playing music has given me confidence, and playing live as well has forced me to put myself in scenarios and make myself uncomfortable. I really believe that if you’re not putting yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable, then you’re not growing as an artist. You have to take risks and do things that are out of your comfort zone. It started out with DJ’ing in Liverpool, then down the line it was producing my own tracks, then it was singing on some of those tracks, and it was all just trying to push myself as much as I can as an artist, really.

OTW: And you went to university for music?

SG Lewis: Yes, so I was going to study mechanical engineering, which is much more traditional. I was doing maths and physics. I had a Form Tutor sit me down at sixth form—which is kind of like high school—and he asked me what I would do if money weren’t a problem. I said I would make music in a studio. He said I would kick myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t give it a try. So we sat down and looked at different options and came to the decision that studying sound engineering would be a really good option for me. I wanted to be behind the board. I never intended to be an artist originally, but once I got there and was learning the technical aspects of sound engineering, I quickly realized that I wanted to be creating music myself. I learned lots of amazing tools while I was there that helped me in my music today. I mix 90% of the records I put out as well, which is generally kind of unusual for pop producing. My time spent as an engineer helped with that. But then once I realized that I wanted to be creating music myself, I sort of veered away from the technical side and focused on being creative as a musician as opposed to as an engineer.

OTW: How do you think your time formally studying music or relationships you made in university shaped your artistry?

SG Lewis: I think that one of my strengths is that I’m not really formally trained in music. I’ve taught myself piano and was studying engineering, but it was almost like laughed at that someone in an engineering course should be making music. The guys in the music course knew every scale and mode back to front and knew every bit of theory, but once you learn all that theory, sometimes you have to unlearn that stuff in order to free your mind creatively. You can listen to music from an emotional point rather than pointing out the theory. And totally, the people I met affected me as well. I met my manager there. My manger and I were in the same flat at uni, and he was studying in the management course. He’s been fundamental in building my career. The connections you can make in places like that are invaluable.

OTW: You touched upon how you’ve been producing, writing, and even singing. Your sound is also such a combination of many different elements. With all these different aspects, who is SG Lewis as an artist to you?

SG Lewis: I think my music serves a purpose in more intimate moments. It’s not really music that’s shared at the height of a party. It’s music that’s maybe shared with someone who’s alone afterwards. I want to bring emotional musical context into styles I like. For example, I’ve been listening to loads of hip-hop, and I want to see if I can inject emotion in to the production and sonically into those styles. On top of that, I just want to create sonic environments for the listener and convey an emotion I was feeling when I was making that track and hopefully accompany some memories for people.

OTW: You’ve had a lot of incredible singers on your tracks, like JP Cooper and Gallant. What has that experience been like?

SG Lewis: It’s been amazing. When you work with people who are that good at singing, it forces you to be very critical when you’re working on your own stuff. For me, I’m such a fan of vocals and R&B vocals that it’s such a fun experience to work with different vocalists. Every time I work with a new vocalist, that artist brings a new element into the creative process, and I get to bounce off of them. I really consider myself lucky as an artist because I get to wear 100 different hats. I don’t have to be the same guy every day.

OTW: You’ve had two amazing singers on your recent singles as well. Can you share a bit about your most recent releases, “Smart Aleck Kill” and “Times We Had?”

SG Lewis: Yeah so I recently released two tracks, “Times We Had” with Toulouse and “Smart Aleck Kill” with Col3trane. With Toulouse, I heard some of his music, and we followed each other and had a mutual appreciation, so we were sending some stuff back and forth. I sent this instrumental to him because he lives in New York, and I had never really done this before as well. I kind of like to work in a room with an artist, but I said I had some cool instrumentals and sent him something. And literally the first thing he sent back was “Times We Had” almost as you hear it without any tweaks. When he sent it, I was on my way back from a festival, and I was pretty drunk sat in the back of a car. This email pops in, so I put in on the aux and played it, and I was freaking out in the back of the car just in love with it. I started drunk tweeting like, “Toulouse is the best artist in the world!” I woke up in the morning and was like oh wow okay, I better listen to this. Thankfully, it was as good as I remembered.

With “Smart Aleck Kill,” my friend Tom manages Cole. Tom played me the only track that Cole had finished. I thought it was incredible. We got in a room and just clicked straight away. I haven’t met many people where you just click straight away like that musically, and he’s one of the most impressive talents I’ve ever met. If I could back one name as someone who’s going to be huge, it would be Cole. He’s 18 years old, and the level of intelligence in his lyrics and the speed at which he writes is impressive beyond belief, and he’s only at like 5% of his potential at the moment, if that. It’s going to be really exciting to watch him grow as an artist.

OTW: Now let’s go back to the EPs. Where were you released Shivers, and how did that progress into Yours?

SG Lewis: With Shivers, I had my record deal and had just dropped out of uni, and I sort of had this collection of songs. I was living at home and commuting to London, and a lot of my friends were still at university, so it was kind of a lonely time for me. The music is slightly more melancholic of that era because I was just spending a lot of time alone. I just spent a lot of time by myself, and I think that reflects in the music a bit. Progressing from there, the Yours EP was just me growing in confidence as a producer and meeting more people and trying different styles. I think you can start to hear the hip-hop influence, even in “Yours” being a more hip-hop style beat, and “Gone” with Bishop Nehru being my first attempt at working with a rapper and stuff. It was really just me growing in confidence and trying my hand at different styles. With Yours, it was summer of last year. I was just enjoying life.

OTW: What was the process of going from the studio to playing live?

SG Lewis: It’s been a lengthy process. What’s been good is that we haven’t done our first live show in L.A. until today. I’ve always had this vision of how the music would come together in a live context. It’s counterintuitive when you make music on a laptop largely and you’re making it as one person. It’s counterintuitive to how it is played live because the sounds aren’t necessarily real instrument sounds. You have hurdles about how you recreate those sounds live and how you split it over a band set-up on stage, but it’s been the most rewarding experience of my entire life. Only now am I at the stage where I’m proud of it because there were various incarnations of the show prior to this, and I’m sure in a year’s time I’ll go, “Oh no, that show is rubbish.” I’m always changing things and I’m always a perfectionist, but it’s really just been doing shows and changing something when it’s bad. And it’s just been learning how to interact with crowds and what the fans want to see and what I want to share, but I wanted to build an experience for the listeners. I didn’t want to just be playing the songs. I wanted to draw the listener in and hopefully take them on a journey.

OTW: What’s coming up for you?

SG Lewis: I just finished up my album, which I can’t say too much about. I can say it’s not traditional album in many ways. I’ve been fascinated with how people are digesting music, and I’m trying something a little bit different. That’s all I can say at this point (laughs), but I’m really excited. I think my fans are going to love it and I’m working with some amazing people. I have a couple more surprises before the end of the year as well.

OTW: Finally, who are your ones to watch?

SG Lewis: I think he’s everyone’s one to watch right now, but Daniel Caesar. I’m obsessed with that album. It’s incredible. As a brand new artist, Col3trane. Honestly, his new tune, “Penelope,” for an 18-year-old, I can’t even process how he’s come up with that. It’s incredible. I’m more excited about him that any other artist in the world right now.

[ntrending]

Are biodegradable bags better than plastic? It’s complicated.

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/are-biodegradable-bags-better-than-plastic-its-complicated/

Are biodegradable bags better than plastic? It’s complicated.

In college, I drove a little electric truck around campus and picked up bins of fruit and vegetable waste, plant clippings, and coffee grounds, and hauled them to a 50-foot long, 5-foot-tall compost pile at the student farm. Although we asked that our pick-up sites didn’t put any post-consumer waste in the bins, “compostable” plates, cups, and bags inevitably found their way to our pile. And when they did, I’d pull them out and throw them in the trash.

That’s the problem with labels like “biodegradable” or “compostable.” These products—typically made from plant sources, often corn—biodegrade eventually, meaning that microbes and other organisms break the materials down into soil. But the environment the products are disposed in matters. As the banana peels and straw morphed into crumbly compost, the “compostable” bags and “biodegradable” cups hung around, full intact. They would have decayed if they were sent to a large-scale, industrial recycler, where workers manage the conditions and chemistry of materials, ensuring the frenzied action of millions of microbes capable of breaking down these tough materials. But here? Not for years, if at all.

On Sunday, scientists at the University of Plymouth published a study highlighting the problem of confusing labelling. The researchers tested the degradability of several bioplastic bags—with labels like biodegradable and compostable—and conventional high-density polyethylene (read: plastic) bags in soil, outdoor air, and marine water. After three years in water and soil, all but the compostable bag were still able to tote a load of groceries. It was still around after 27 months underground, but easily tore apart.

“In day-to-day living, [these labels are] misleading,” says Imogen Napper, lead author and marine scientist. While the products are intended for an industrial composter, that’s not where most of them are going. Napper argues consumers are misled by the labels into thinking that the products do readily decay in natural environments like the ones she tested, when the reality is that the timeline from product to soil can be many years. “When it says biodegradable or compostable, what’s the time frame that you think of for a product in the natural environment?” she says. “For me, it would be days to months. As soon as you start to say two years to three years, does that have any meaningful advantage to the environment? I’d argue not.”

Headlines about the study have echoed that sentiment, such as Vice’s “Biodegradable Plastic Bags Aren’t Better For The Environment.” Most of the reports focused on the fact that the biodegradable bags could still carry groceries after three years underground. But, as alarming as that finding is, the reality is a bit more complex.

It starts with the difference between labels. In theory, “biodegradable” and “compostable” should mean the same thing—that organisms in the soil can break down a product. But the truth is that “biodegradable” gives you the same amount of information as the label “natural” on a food item does, says Kate Bailey, policy and research director at Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycling organization. Biodegradable simply means that at some unspecified time in the future—months, years, decades, who knows!—the product will break down.

To continue the food analogy, the term “compostable” is more like “organic,” in that regulators are trying to ensure it meets certain standards, though what exactly those standards are is still a work-in-progress. When a product carries the label of “certified compostable,” that means when you send it to an industrial facility, it becomes compost in about the same amount of time as other things in the pile like food waste and yard clippings—usually between 90 and 180 days. There are a few third-party verifications of this, including one by the ASTM International, an organization that develops standards for thousands of products and services. “We are definitely seeing some movement toward ‘this [label] needs to mean something,’ and it can’t just be getting thrown out there and confusing consumers,” says Bailey.

But biodegradable remains a stress-inducing word for composters, Bailey adds. “There’s a lot of concern about the labelling,” she adds. “Composters want it to be certified compostable—biodegradable doesn’t work for them.” Really, biodegradable is just another greenwashed phrase, one companies use to make us feel good about a pricey purchase, even though its environmental benefit isn’t actually clear.

Some agencies are taking action. The Federal Trade Commision in its most recent “Green Guides” says that “degradable claims” need to backed up by “competent and reliable scientific evidence that the entire item will completely… decompose into elements found in nature within a reasonably short period of time after customary disposal.” California is also cracking down on decomposition deception. The state has banned sales of products marketed as “biodegradable”, “compostable,” etc. unless they have evidence to prove it. The Golden State has a $1.5 million settlement coming its way after district attorneys sued Amazon for selling products with misleading labels, including “biodegradable.”

By now, you might be questioning the little green bags you use to line the compost bin on your kitchen counter or the eco-friendly foodware at your office, wondering if it’s all a waste of money. If your city does partner with a composter, like San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland do, great! There’s a dedicated place where these products can go to become soil. Just double check the label. “Look for the certified compostable label,” says Bailey.

But what if you’re among the roughly 95 percent of households that don’t have such a service available? Even if a product is “certified compostable,” it might not be preferable to plastic. Right now, a lot of compostable bags, cups, and foodware are made from corn, and that process has all sorts of environmental impacts, from the pesticides that leach into rivers to the greenhouse gases emitted from plants manufacturing the products. “There’s a lot of hope that we can make compostable plastic out of things like mushrooms, algae, or hemp—things that could be much more beneficial than plastic,” says Bailey, “But right now … with most things coming from corn, it’s not clear that there really is much of a benefit [compared to plastic].”

Research from the Oregon Department of Environment Quality underscores this point. Scientists reviewed previous life cycle assessments of different “packing attributes”—labels like “recycled content,” “biobased,” and our friend “compostable.” Each study analyzed the product’s environmental impacts across its “life,” from manufacture to disposal. The analysis concluded that compostable products aren’t an easy answer to plastics. “Many compostable packages are made of biobased materials and inherit the significant environmental burdens from their production,” the authors wrote. “These burdens are often much greater that the offset benefits that composting provides.”

Much of the environment impacts of these greenwashed products arise from their production. As a factsheet for the study states, “39 percent of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions take place before a product even reaches a consumer, and only 2 percent of GHG emissions occurs from disposal (landfill, compost and incineration).”

Still, these life cycle assessments largely ignore what happens when an item doesn’t stick to its ideal disposal route, whether that’s a landfill, recycler, or compost pile. But plenty of plastic veers off course each year. In 2010, one study found that 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic debris wound up in the ocean. And plastic in the environment doesn’t decompose—it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces with the same chemical structure. These microplastics are a problem because they’re near-impossible to clean up and are eaten by marine life, even ending up in the fish we eat—and, as a result, inside our own bodies.

Compostable products could have an edge when it comes to curbing this ocean plastic disaster. In the study from University of Plymouth, compostable bags dissolved in marine water within three months. So, while they might not be beneficial from a life cycle perspective, they’re perhaps less harmful to marine organisms.

While there are many ways to weigh the impacts of conventional plastic versus biodegradable alternatives, there is one clear route to win on all environmental fronts. It’s the one you’ve heard before: cut back on plastic, especially single-use items, and you’ll create less litter and use fewer resources. But for those situations when you can’t avoid disposable bags, cups, or plates, “more clear labelling standards [for compostable products] are a great first step,” says Bailey.

Written By Ula Chrobak

[staple-soap-blog]

Jiangshi - I

Jiangshi Masterlist |

Genre: Drama/Noir | Mafia!AU

Word Count: 2360

Warnings: Violence, Blood

Loud music. Blinding lights. Massive crowds. The perfect place for shady business to happen. The large number of people easily concealed those who did not wish to be seen, and it lowered the chances of a shootout. There were multiple exits in case things did go south, and external security guards were bound to get involved, allowing the inconspicuous to slip away without a trace. Yes, this place was perfect. But it was also extremely predictable.

To the trained eye, it was easy to spot those who looked even the slightest bit out of place. To the trained eye, it was a simple task identifying a target, even though they had never before seen or met who they were looking for. And tonight, one particular individual with a trained eye was seated at the bar of the bustling nightclub, patiently waiting for another particular individual to come strolling through the crowd.

They called him the Jiangshi, because like the mythological monster he was nicknamed after, he was swift and deadly. And he, of course, preferred to work at night. The Jiangshi was invisible, no one truly knew who he was, they only knew his reputation. Some even believed that he might indeed, be a real undead creature. But the man behind the monster was, in fact, a highly trained hitman by the name of Huang Zitao, and tonight, he meant business.

Tao periodically sipped on a glass of Bourbon, which he ordered with extra ice to dilute the alcohol. He didn’t want to be drunk on the job. To the untrained eye, he looked exactly like a rich, young businessman out for a night of fun. The blazer and half-unbuttoned dress shirt, paired with well-fitted pants and boots perfectly sold the story, and it’s exactly what Tao wanted.

A man with a stoic face caught Tao’s attention. He was dressed accordingly with the scenery, albeit much fancier, similar to what Tao was currently wearing. He weaved his way through the crowd, pushing past the drunken, swaying bodies of the dance floor. But what really caught his attention were the two men following behind, just a few metres away, but weaving through the exact same pathway as the more well-dressed man. As if they were protecting him.

Bingo. With a simple glance across the sea of bodies, Tao had identified his target and the two guards that accompanied him.

Tao hopped off his bar stool and left a couple notes for the bartender before following his target through the crowd. He kept his distance of course. The three men headed towards the back of the club where the private rooms were. Tao veered to the right and walked out of the crowd until he gained a clear view of the entrance. His target walked inside the private room, followed by only one of his guards. Tao managed a small glimpse inside the room before the remaining guard shut the door and stood beside it.

Tao had no idea how long business would last inside the room, it could last hours or just a couple minutes, so it was now or never. He ruffled up his hair to give the appearance of a drunk, this was his bargaining factor. He waltzed up to the guard by the door, skilfully adding an intoxicated hobble to his step before finally speaking.

“Hey there buddy how’s it goin’?” he slurred. The guard simply shot him a judgemental stare before looking straight ahead with ignorance. He had bought the façade. “What are you doing standing here?”

“It’s none of your business,” spat the guard, his gaze still fixed to the front.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if I just…” Tao grabbed the door handle and twisted it, “…took a quick peek inside.” Tao swung open the door and stumbled inside.

Two men sat on velvet couches with beautiful women in tight dresses either side. The couches surrounded a small coffee table with playing cards, pistols and bags of white powder scattered across the surface. In the middle sat his target, who had looked up to see who had come bursting through the door. Six more pairs of eyes landed on Tao, the eyes of the other guards inside the room.

“Who the hell is this guy?” sneered one of the high-profile men on the couch.

The guard from outside came running in from behind and stopped next to Tao. “Sorry boss, he’s just a drunk who let himself in.”

“Well get him outta here.”

Tao took the time they were bickering to study the surroundings further. He could see a back exit on the other side of the room which he knew led to the parking garage. He had studied the layout of the club before arriving. He also noticed the gun that the guard standing next to him carried. Tao could basically envision the future possibilities just by glancing at his environment. Perfect. He could complete his task now.

Just as the guard had grabbed Tao’s arm to lead him out, Tao spoke up. “If I were just a drunk, how do I know what you’re involved with illegal domestic drug trades?” The room fell dead silent, but Tao continued. “Not only that but you’re cutting off the supplies of other involved parties, and they don’t seem to be very happy about that, which is why I’m here.”

“Kill this motherfucker,” ordered the target, and the guard next to Tao obediently pulled out his gun.

A dangerous smirk crept across Tao’s face before he swiftly grabbed the arm of the guard and pulled it over his own shoulder. Tao spun around and faced the door with the guard flush against his back. As expected, the other four guards fired, killing the man that was stuck behind him. And now he was also armed with a weapon.

Tao grabbed the gun from the dead guard's hand and spun around, keeping the body upright as a meat shield. Tao spotted the two guards still firing at him, as well as one of the high profile businessmen who stupidly stayed behind, shouting orders.

Bang! Bang! Bang! All three were killed in an instant with bullets to their heads. Tao smirked, proud of his near perfect aim, and dropped the body. His eyes landed on the open back door where the rest of the party had escaped.

As soon as Tao stepped through the back door, he fired a shot to his left. He had expected a guard to be there, and the bullet hit him in the shoulder. Blood splattered from the wound before Tao fired another shot to the guard’s head.

He ran along the dimly lit hallway as quickly yet silently as he could. The parking garage came into view, and up ahead, he could see his target and the four remaining men running off to find their vehicle.

Tao paused his chase and fired another shot, effectively taking down another guard. The two remaining fired back, and Tao ducked behind a parked car to avoid the projectiles aimed at him.

He continued his advance, weaving between the parked cars and peeking through windows to keep his eye on his target. The two guards continued to fire at him, the bullets hitting the windows of the cars and spraying glass all over him. Tao raised his arms to protect himself from the showering splinters.

He fired more shots in order to keep the others shooting, they had to run out of bullets eventually. As Tao his behind the vehicle of a now severely punctured car, the sound of a dull click echoed throughout the parking garage. One of the guns had been spent.

Tao kept firing, but the guard was smarter than he’d expected and didn’t waste any more ammunition. Tao tried his best to take down one of the guards from the cramped position he was in, but the two bullets he fired hit the concrete wall behind. His aim was only near perfect.

A dull click sounded from Tao’s gun. He was out of ammo. He growled in frustration before wiping the gun on his blazer to rid it of fingerprints and discarding the empty weapon. He peeked through the shattered window of the car he hid behind.

The three remaining men had found their vehicle, and the guard with the loaded gun was busy with fishing out the keys from his back pocket. Tao saw an opportunity and he took it. He sprinted out from behind the car and tackled the guard, effectively knocking the keys and gun out of his hands. Tao lay a punch on the man’s face, giving Tao enough time to kick the weapon and keys out of reach.

The guard aimed to strike Tao with a balled fist, which Tao blocked with his forearm. The two began a dance of fists and quick feet, Tao landing more swift punches than the other. The second guard came up from behind and restrained Tao from punching. He flicked his head back, head butting the second guard and elbowing him in the stomach.

Tao focused his attention on the second guard, landing punches across his body, some of which were blocked. An unexpected blow from behind caught Tao off guard. Apparently, the first guard was still strong enough to continue fighting. With his focus torn in two, Tao could never have expected the knife. He heard the blade being whipped out of its sheath, but he wasn’t fast enough to react. The second guard drove the blade into the left of his abdomen, sending an intense pain through his side.

Tao was more or less used to the pain, so it only fazed him slightly. He pulled the knife from his side and shoved it into the chest of his attacker, who promptly collapsed onto the concrete below. Tao settled for knocking the other guard out by landing a powerful blow to his temple.

With his two attackers disarmed, Tao could turn his attention back to his target, who was a good hundred metres ahead, running at full speed towards the exit of the parking garage. Tao spotted the kicked gun on the ground and limped over to retrieve it. His target was at the other side of the massive parking garage, almost free. With a shaking hand and incredible aim, Tao fired a shot and watched his target collapse to the ground. Unfortunately, the bullet was off target.

Tao took his time to limp over to his target with his hand pressed against his side to stop the bleeding from the knife wound. His target was on the ground wailing in pain, clutching the side of his neck. The bullet had skimmed the flesh of his neck, and fresh blood lured from between the target’s fingers. He gave Tao a nasty snarl as profanities spilled from his mouth. Tao held up the weapon in his hands and aimed it at his target’s head before delivering the lasts words he would hear:

“I missed.”

With a loud Bang! that echoed throughout the walls of the parking garage, Tao delivered the final shot that would complete his mission.

Tao wiped the gun on his blazer, again ridding it of his fingerprints before tossing it aside. He could now press both hands against his wound to further stop the blood loss, and he groaned in pain at the action. In the distance, the wailing of sirens could be heard getting nearer and nearer, that was his signal to leave.

Tao limped out of the entrance to the garage and out onto the street beside the club. He had parked his own vehicle two streets down, so he began the painful trek towards his car. The street was quite busy with people, but most of them paid no attention to him. Those who did would express faces of shock and concern, to which he simply smiled and continued walking.

He found his car parked under a tree where he knew no one would be standing around. He unlocked the driver's seat with his keys and scrambled inside, wincing at the movement of his pierced abdomen.

Tao locked the car from the inside and tossed the keys onto the dash before reaching into the glove box and pulling out a first aid kit. He unbuttoned the bottom buttons of his dress shirt, exposing the wound which was covered in blood. He hastily dug through the kit, displacing multiple medical tools before finding some antiseptic wipes. He ripped open the packaging with his teeth and began to clean the wound, hissing at the stinging sensation it left behind.

The blood was still pouring from the puncture wound. He needed to seal it. Tao quickly grabbed the medical staple gun and pinched the skin of the wound together. Tao’s hand shook as he brought the staple closer to the wound. He locked the wound shut with two presses of the staple gun and groaned in agony. With the adrenaline out of his system and no anaesthetic, he could feel everything.

He dropped all his tools and released a deep, loud sigh. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain emanating from his left side. He stayed like that for a few minutes, getting used to the soreness.

Tao reached for his phone in the glove box and opened his messages. He typed out a message to his boss, ignoring the bloody fingerprints that smeared onto the screen.

Tao: It’s done

Unknown: Both of them?

Tao: Yes

Unknown: Your payment has been sent

Tao locked his phone and placed the device back into the glove box, satisfied at completing his task. Of corse in this business, one would be paid handsomely. And with his reputation, we’re talking high six digits.

Tao was snapped out of his thoughts at the feeling of liquid seeping into the band of his pants. The wound still hadn’t stopped bleeding, and if it continued it was bound to get infected. This wasn’t something Tao could stitch up himself. He needed proper help.

Reluctantly, Tao turned on the engine and began his painful drive to the nearest hospital.

A/N: Surprise! The main character is Tao! Y’all thought it was Lay didn’t you? Congratulations if you guessed it. And don’t worry the reader will be introduced in the next chapter.

[theconservativebrief]

Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s second-term secretary of Homeland Security, quips in a recent Washington Post op-ed that “abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal; it’s about as serious as the claim that Mexico’s ‘gonna pay for the wall.’”

It’s a bit unfair. Both the idea of a Gulf-to-Pacific border wall and the idea of coercing Mexico into paying for it suffer from essentially insurmountable technical problems, whereas ICE in its current form only dates back to 2003 and clearly the bureaucratic org charts could be redrawn again to get rid of the agency.

But on another level, it’s a decent analogy. Building the wall and making Mexico pay was a potent campaign signal that marked Donald Trump as an advocate of unusually harsh border security measures and a confrontational attitude toward Latin American governments. It was a slogan that people understood and connected with — both supporters and opponents — on an emotional level, even as they almost certainly understood that the specific elements of the program were a little fanciful.

“Abolish ICE” is the progressive response. Democrats are adopting the line as a signal to voters that they reject Trump’s vision of a closed America, one that separates children from parents as they seek asylum. They aren’t offering a 17-point plan to restructure immigration enforcement.

ICE is operating exactly as designed when it rips screaming children from parents. That’s exactly why we must abolish it.

We MUST have the moral and political courage to #abolishICE.

Weak half-measures do nothing. This is a defining moment of our time – the time to act is now. pic.twitter.com/0viiQ4qdz8

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) June 19, 2018

Democrats are following in Trump’s footsteps by prioritizing emotionally resonant constructs over detailed, practical agendas for action. Other popular progressive rallying cries of the moment, from “Medicare-for-all” to “free college” to “guaranteed jobs,” are incredibly ambiguous as policies. The activists and elected officials promoting them often seem more focused on building support for the slogans than for a particular vision of what they mean. It’s striking, for example, that most “Medicare-for-all” proposals would enroll people in programs that are very different from existing Medicare.

This is an aspect in which Trump very much is normal. What’s abnormal was the fad for most of the Obama years for very literal campaigning. An old saying about American politics holds that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. In the Trump era, it’s back to poetry. And all of us — perhaps especially the literal-minded among us — had better get used to it.

Once upon a time, of course, Barack Obama was the airy, sloganeering fantasist of American politics.

His 2008 health care plan was basically unworkable, which Clinton pointed out at the time. Obama implicitly acknowledged this in office by adopting her individual mandate proposal that he rejected as a candidate. As a first-term senator, he seemed underqualified for office. He vowed to violate traditional diplomatic protocols and norms of office by holding direct talks with the leaders of rogue states, and his most memorable campaign pledges were “hope” and “change you can believe in,” rather than actual policy promises.

It turned out, however, that the president can’t unilaterally change American political culture — especially when the opposition party in Congress has a vested interest in stymying him by turning everything under the sun unto a partisan food fight.

What he can try to do is make people’s lives better in concrete ways, which is what Obama did. He pivoted his political strategy to emphasize that fact.

Detail-oriented, policy-focused journalists like Michael Grunwald, Jonathan Chait, and a number of other writers who now work at Vox created a supportive online media environment for his approach.

Then Republicans drew the comically-inauthentic but plausibly-competent Mitt Romney as their nominee, and Obama’s reelection bid turned into a historically unusual wonk-off.

Obama attempted to pass the baton to Clinton, who had long been openly derisive of his more idealistic streak and whose approach across two primaries and one general election campaign might be characterized as featuring the audacity of hopelessness.

[embedded content]

I’ll confess that I, personally, always liked this about Clinton. Clinton was an open practitioner of Max Weber’s politics as a vocation in a world full of phonies preaching unworkable charismatic leadership models. At the end of the day, though, part of embracing an ethic of responsibility is recognizing that you need to win to do anything. And plodding literalism is not a great way to do that.

The important thing is to be ready to govern, not to spell it out in detail on the trail.

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign annoyed a lot of establishment Democrats by being so obstinately, flagrantly unrealistic.

People who lived through bruising congressional debates that ended up killing even a weak public option and exempting auto dealers from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight knew that there was simply no way Democrats were going to spend 2017 enacting a single-payer health care system and breaking up big banks.

But by detaching itself entirely from the practical realities of the legislative landscape, Sanders managed to get in touch with a much clearer set of values that animate people in progressive politics. The reason that Democrats fought for the Affordable Care Act is they didn’t think people should find themselves blocked from the ability to get medical care by lack of money. And while the ACA took large strides in that direction, various proposals to further tweak it did not speak to those values in the same way that a call to extend Medicare coverage to everyone did.

Since the election, most Democrats seeking national leadership have been trying to capture some of that magic. And that drive to articulate values more clearly has — even more than movement to the left on policy — been the main shift inside the party.

While endorsing the call to “abolish ICE,” for example, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) didn’t really say anything different on policy than what Obama said in his second term. What she found was a more emotionally resonant way to say it.

I believe we need to protect families who need help, and ICE isn’t doing that. It has become a deportation force. We need to separate immigration issues from criminal justice. We need to abolish ICE, start over and build something that actually works. https://t.co/JtSN68k4Fd

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) June 29, 2018

What exactly starting over to build something that actually works entails is unclear, just as nobody has yet written a “Medicare-for-all bill that explains exactly where the revenue will come from. The point, however, is that most Americans believe that people should be able to get medical treatment they need regardless of ability to pay. For Democrats who want to own that brand, signaling that the party shares the public’s beliefs on health care, “Medicare for All” is a profound, important, and useful statement of values.

There’s no sense hectoring normal people for preferring comprehensible slogans and high-minded aspirations to tedious disquisitions on the art of the possible, and there’s certainly no sense in hectoring practical politicians for trying to give people what they want.

That said, it is always worth keeping in mind that governing is difficult. Republicans over the years have veered so far into the realm of sloganeering that they barely retain any capacity at all to develop policies that bear any resemblance to their campaign rhetoric. Years of promises to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with something that would address some of people’s frustrations with the program turned out to be completely vacuous — which seemingly surprised even many GOP members of Congress.

Democrats should remember that even their more wonk-oriented party suffered from some serious failures of policy substance — most notably an underpowered stimulus bill, a health care law that wasn’t structured to support short-term economic recovery, a group of excessively timid and unimaginative Federal Reserve appointees, and an inability to grapple with the foreclosure crisis in a timely manner — that played a larger role in generating electoral defeats than any shortcomings of sloganeering.

It’s incumbent upon politicians embracing the new poetry of the activist left to spare some time for thinking about what, exactly, it is that they want to do if they take office.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is a classic of American oratory notwithstanding the fact that it was not, strictly speaking, accurate. But the New Deal itself became an iconic success story because Roosevelt married his rhetoric to policy initiatives that (mostly) worked on a technical level.

The tough question for Democrats on immigration isn’t really about whether or not to abolish ICE or even what exactly that means, it’s what should the entire progressive program on immigration look like in an era when the quest for a grand bargain is dead. But the trend toward putting the poetry back into politics ought to be seen as a welcome turn to normalcy, not some kind of objectionable left-wing flight of fancy.

Original Source -> Democrats are campaigning in poetry again

via The Conservative Brief

[personalcoachingcenter]

Transformational Coaching- Finding Your Deliberate Journey

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/transformational-coaching-finding-your-deliberate-journey/

Transformational Coaching- Finding Your Deliberate Journey

A Coaching Model Created by Evan Wilson (Transformational Coach, UNITED STATES)

Introduction

Every one of us is on a journey – probably multiple journeys. As individuals, we might be working toward a better job, a degree, a new or closer relationship, enlightenment, or a project. As part of a team or organization, perhaps we are working toward a product launch, improved employee engagement, better collaboration skills, or increased productivity.

Whether conscious or subconscious, each journey we are on has both intent, purpose, and a destination. The Deliberate Journey Model is about recognizing the importance of every aspect of the journey consciously, deliberately, and intentionally.

The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Lao Tzu

Deliberate Planning

Step 1: Choose a Destination

Step 2: Determine Where You Are

Step 3:

Create a Roadmap

Step 4:

Determine How You Will Travel

Step 5: Gather Your Resources

Enjoy the Journey!

Perspective

Sometimes we take a journey alone. Other times, we have travel companions, or we meet other people along the way. They may take the entire journey with us or just part.

Everyone holds a different perspective. Even when they are walking right beside us they may see the same thing in a completely different way, based on experience.

Other travelers and local experts are an invaluable tool, even when you are traveling alone. When you go to a new city, isn’t it great to get favorite restaurant recommendations from the locals?

Deliberate Journey Model

Every transformation is a journey – and sometimes we need to stop and ask for directions. The Deliberate Journey Coaching Model is a literal roadmap to keep you on track, handle changes more nimbly, and plan for roadblocks along the way.

To plan a journey, it can be helpful to break it down into smaller excursions. Let’s say you want to take a trip around the world. Where would you go first? What is the best place to start? What if you decide you want to stay in one place longer than others?

Step 1: Choose a Destination

  There is an abundance of advice telling us to “forget the destination, enjoy the journey.” In fact, Zen Buddhism even says to ignore both and simply exist at the moment – everything else is immaterial. Having a destination does not mean we can’t enjoy the journey, or that the journey isn’t important. It simply provides a horizon on which to focus so we don’t get lost at sea. When we are confident in where we are headed, it can be easier to accept and enjoy the present exactly as it is.

A destination helps to give the journey purpose and meaning, allowing us to determine the quality of the experience we have. Without it, we wander aimlessly, exploring whatever happens to be on our path at that moment. As attractive as that sounds, we may inadvertently get lost, stuck, or never get anywhere. When we get lost or hit a roadblock, a destination can get us back on track and help us focus so we can get back to enjoying the journey.

The first step is to choose a destination. Keep it simple and achievable. Creating a roadmap for the rest of your life will be overwhelming and counterproductive. If you want to travel around the country, try a weekend road trip first, with a specific destination. The first time you attempt this model, it is recommended to start small – something specific that will take no more than a week. A household chore or small home improvement project, like painting a room, is often a good start.

Step 2: Determine Where You Are

To know what it is going to take to get where we want to go, we need to know where we are. This step requires an honest, realistic assessment of the tools that we have already developed or acquired, as well as those we will need before and during the journey. Understanding the gap between where we are and where we want to go helps us determine what will be needed.

Logically, you might think this should be first. How would we know where to go unless we can say where we are? This step is second for many reasons, but most importantly, it reduces the risk of compromising or canceling the journey before it even begins. Your current location should not determine where you want to be. Determining the destination first allows us to be future and forward motion focused.

Let’s say we’re in Chicago and we start with “I’m in Chicago – where can I realistically go from here?” We might look at places closer to home, what we can afford right now, what we can realistically plan for, etc. But if we have done some reflection and decided first, “I really want to go to Rome,” we are far more likely to figure out what it’s going to take to get there – budget, timeline, steps, blocks  – and we will more likely get where we really want to go instead of limiting ourselves to someplace we don’t want to go, but belief is as far as we can get.

Step 3: Create a Roadmap

Every journey requires some planning to get us from where we are to where we want to be. A visual roadmap is a powerful way to bring the journey to life. Visual roadmaps provide tangible assistance to…

Remind us where we are going

Show our progress

Get back on track when we diverge from the path

Identify and prepare for roadblocks or difficulties

Be more adaptable to changes

More easily make decisions

This is where you will spend the most time; to plot the course from where you are to where you want to be.

Grab a piece of paper – I recommend unlined or sketch paper. At the top of the page draw a circle with your destination. At the bottom of the page, draw another circle with your current location (think “you are here” star on a department store map).

Most often, the next bit will not be as simple as drawing a line from one circle to the other. Depending on your destination there will be stops, side trips, layovers, traffic, and roadblocks. Begin adding additional stops or decision points you will need along the way. If you are painting a room, this may include trips to the hardware store,

deciding on a color, and so on.

This is a good time to stop, reflect, and ask yourself the following questions:

What is the purpose of this journey (why do I want to paint the room)? To reach the end? To learn? To transform?

Do you want the route that gets you there the fastest and most efficiently? Or do you want the most scenic and enjoyable path? Too many paths will only serve to overwhelm and result in inaction.

What are the values that align with this journey? When our journey has meaning, we are more motivated to continue. We are also more likely to enjoy the journey itself.

Keep in mind the roadmap is a living document. Change is constant and our map may need to be adjusted, based on traffic conditions or roadblocks. This is where commitment comes in. Choose the path that most aligns with your goals and your purpose; and deliberately commit to it.

Step 4: Determine How You Will Travel

This is where deliberate thinking really comes into play. Consider the tools, people, and transportation you will need on your journey. Who or what will make decisions easier and get you to the next leg of the journey? Who or what will make the journey more enjoyable? Who or what will you need to get past roadblocks? Now is the time to begin planning what you will need to propel you forward when you stumble, get stuck, or veer off course. Write these items on the roadmap where you will need them.

As mentioned in the last step, change is constant. Don’t try to plan for every potential outcome. You are merely looking to get a handle on what is going to propel you forward along the way, and what to do when things change course or you get stuck.

Step 4 is also a great place to begin recording your journey in a travelogue or journal. 15 minutes each day to check-in is all that is needed. Set this time aside in your calendar and stick to it. The night is recommended, while the day is fresh in your memory. This is a deliberate activity that will make you welcome changes in your environment, as well as set you up for success every day. Options abound for what to record, but the simplest that most people have found to be effective is to ask yourself the following questions:

What went well today?

What did not go well or as planned?

What would I like to do differently tomorrow?

It is also recommended to spend a few minutes in the morning with an intent for the day and gratitude for where you are on the journey, at this moment. You may have an intent to be more compassionate of others or productive. Write these down in your travelogue if so inclined. Just list a couple of things for which you are grateful – again, at this moment. In addition to the daily check-in, these prove to be invaluable, especially in times of difficult change or when things don’t go the way you want them to.

If you stumble along your path or start down an unplanned detour (“look! Something shiny!”), record it so you can look for patterns. This includes what you may have been feeling at a particular point along your path. As you develop roadmaps for other journeys, this will help you see where you stumbled, got stuck, veered off course, or successfully cleared a roadblock – and you can correct course or plan accordingly.

Step 5: Gather Your Resources

In Step 5, you will gather the Product, People, and Process (PPP) resources you wrote down in Step 4.

Products are tangible items, like your roadmap or a planner. To paint a room, you will need paint, tape, brushes, etc.

People are those that you trust to help or support you, as well as potential experts you may need. Perhaps a friend will help you paint (great bonding time, by the way). Or maybe you will need a handyman to repair holes in the wall.

Processes are anything that you might need to do to complete a leg of the journey. Examples might be laying down a tarp before you begin painting or proper storage of photographs and artwork while the project is in progress.

The idea behind this step is like the chef’s mantra of “mis en place.” Loosely translated, it means setting up or everything in its place. It prepares you for cooking by laying out the ingredients and tools that you will need to prepare the dish, measuring the ingredients, washing and checking the equipment, and so on. The point is to prepare yourself as much as possible, so changes are less jarring.

Enjoy the Journey!

Shove off and enjoy the journey! There may be unexpected roadblocks and changes, but you are prepared. You know where you’re headed and why. You have written down the meaning and purpose of this journey to remind you why you are taking it. You have started a travelogue to keep track of progress and get you through tough spots. And you’ve identified those who can help and support you.

When things change – and they inevitably will – you will have the agility to adeptly shift. The peace of mind in knowing And at the end of this journey, you will have a written record to help you on the next journey.

Being Deliberate

All the steps in this model require a bit of deliberate forethought and action. You need to contemplate the destination you truly desire, as well as honestly assess where you really are. The act of planning – even if things don’t go as planned – is a deliberate act. As you go along your journey, your travelogue will help you to be deliberate, honest, and realistic with your progress.

Being present and enjoying the here and now also requires being deliberate. It is easy for our brains to ruminate about the future, jump ahead to the next thing we need to complete, or the next hurdle we need to jump. It is part of the human condition to be disappointed when things don’t go as planned, or to face change with fear.

As important as the idea of where you are going, is to stop and deliberately appreciate where you are, right now, at this moment.

Be Deliberately Present

“Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies the future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with the future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.” (Tolle, 1997)

Learn How to Create Your Own Coaching Model

Your Coaching Model reflects your values,  philosophies and beliefs and must communicate who you will coach and the problems you will solve.  Read more about creating your own coaching model

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