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soccerbites · 4 years ago

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WHAT IT WAS | RAFE CAMERON

Masterlist on pinned!

A.N: Heeyy, if you find this familiar it could be because you read it on my wattpad account or on here before I deactivated! English is not my first language so please be kind!

WORDS COUNT: 4k

WARNINGS: a lot of them, swearing, blood, drugs, etc.

You hadn't thought about it in months when you finally were getting over it, suddenly came back, all the memories, good and bad, all the euphoria, when everything was angelic, when it was cruel, when suddenly it was radiant, then turned violent, and ended up being painful. When you gave up on it because you could not take it anymore.

Your family was the typical kook one, you grew up in a life full of luxury, you got everything you wanted due to your mum's richness.

Sarah and you were best friends since you were born and his brother was your boyfriend practically since both of you learned that word. The Cameron's and your family had everything arranged between you two, Rafe and you were supposed to be together for the rest of your lives, he was going to take care of his dad's company, the next step would be getting married, travel around the world, having lots of beautiful kids and live happily ever after.

2008

It was your 5th birthday party, all your friends were there and you felt extremely happy with the big amount of presents you had received from them all. You were not the typical little girl your parents desired you to be, you had begged for them to let "Pirates of the Caribbean" be the theme, you hadn't really seen the movies but you loved pirates! Rafe and you would always pretend you were them in his dad's yacht because Sarah did not like them at all, you couldn't understand how it was so fun! Your friend would lend you one of his plastic swords and play the whole afternoon. The best part was that you always won, but now, many years after, looking back at it Rafe was probably letting you win. However, your mum forced you to make your party about Cinderella, you hate princess but especially Cinderella, there wasn't a reason for it, you just did.

Weeks before you had told the little boy your birthday was going to be about pirates and he was so excited about it, you babble about it for days, so when Rafe arrived at your house with his family and saw all the princess decorations and the angry but yet sad face you had on, he instantly understood what was going on, you both were little but very smart for your age, plus he had sympathy for you due to his similar family conditions.

Everyone but you and him enjoyed the celebration, the young man and you stayed together in a corner of your backyard playing alone. Rafe picked up two small branches and played as you were pirates like you would usually do, he knew that was what you really wanted at that moment.

When it was time to blow the candles you looked at your sky blue and pink cake, wishing it had Jack Sparrow's face on it, Rafe smiled at you and you smiled back at him. Everyone sang the typical song, you blew the candles and buried three of your little fingers into the cake, thinking of three wishes.

being a pirate

playing as pirates with Rafe

Sarah wanting to play as pirates with you two

2010

It was almost summer and you were really excited about all the little adventures Rafe and you were going to have in the next months.

You felt so much older, your first year of primary school was over and it had been great! Even though Sarah was not hanging out with you as much as she was before; you had the hope of playing with her more now that you had nothing else to do.

Those weeks were great, you almost didn't see your girl best friend, but her brother and you were getting closer and closer as days went by. Rafe always protected you from everything and made you laugh a lot, he was funny.

Summer '10 was lovely, one of your favorites memories of you and the boy happened during that time, your first kiss. You didn't really count it as the very first kiss, but you had to admit that, at that time, for you was even more than what it actually was.

It was an extremely warm day and you invited Rafe over to play in the fort you both had made in your backyard, right where years before you were pretending to be pirates while your birthday party was going on inside the house. He was 'building' a table as you made mud cakes.

"Look at the cake i made for us!" you abruptly shouted, thing that scared Rafe, but he didn't let you notice because the last thing he wanted was for you to make fun of him.

"It looks delicious y/n, we should eat it!" he said, excitement on his face while sitting beside you.

"ARE YOU CRAZY RAFE?" you were shocked, the drama queen in you was starting to jump out, "IT'S MADE OF DIRT THAT'S DISGUSTING!" you looked at him, terrorized by what the little boy was saying.

"i- i- i wasn't serious, i- i just thought you'd like me to say that" he was so embarrassed.

"oh, i'm sorry" you apologized to him.

There was silence for a few seconds, it wasn't uncomfortable so you didn't mind about it.

"wanna know what Sarah made me do?"

"mmmm, maybe"

"she made me watch 'The Princess And The Frog', TWO TIMES" he sounded so mad, "and then she told me that Topper kissed her" he looked at you, you were not understanding why he was telling you this, but before you could talk; he continued, "and i was thinking that may- maybe we can d- do it too" you opened your eyes wide open, kissing him? like in the mouth?

"i- in- the mouth?"

"yeah, i mean, that's what she told me" you stared into his eyes, trying to figure out if he was just messing with you or was actually serious about it.

"uhm, i guess so?"

"you do?" he had a frown formed in his face.

"if that's what you want to" he nodded with a smirk on his lips.

You both turned and were now facing each other, without an idea of what to do you followed him, he started to lean forward and you did too, he closed his eyes and you did as well, and after what felt like an eternity but was actually almost four seconds, your lips touched his; ending up in a little pecked kiss.

After that day neither you nor Rafe talked about it again, it was like it never happened, which, at your really short age, was normal.

This year your family and you decided not to celebrate your birthday due to your grandma passing away two weeks before, it didn't feel right for them. At seven years old it was hard to fully understand what death was, you had heard about it but never experienced it before. Rafe felt really bad about it and on the day you finally turned seven he went to your house and spent it with you, so that way, you would not feel as lonely.

2012

Rafe was starting to change, he did not want to play with you anymore and that made you sad and upset. Your mom told you it was normal for boys to not hang out with girls once they grew up, but that wasn't him, it didn't felt like him. You never thought that the boy who was your best friend, the only kid you really enjoyed being around, especially after Sarah hang with more friends that were not you, would leave you alone.

You started to search for fun on other stuff and found that you loved to read stories about wonderful adventures, and when you finished every single book in your house about the topic, you started to flip through the pages of some old books regarding birds and insects, you were amazed by the stunning draws and colors of them and wanted to make your own.

For your ninth birthday you decided to do an exchange, it was difficult to convince your parents but they finally gave in, instead of a party you wanted them to give you a pretty journal with some color pencils. That way you would have your own investigation diary about those interesting creatures you were obsessed about.

Summer had ended and school season started, you and your little notebook were inseparable, you took it with you to class and spent all the recess doing little notes about birds you had seen during the day so when you arrived home you could search and learn about them.

One cold winter night, your dad told you that the Cameron's were coming home to have dinner, you couldn't wait for them to arrive, maybe that was the moment you had the opportunity to befriend Sarah again and show Rafe all the information you had collected during the months you didn't hang out. But they never appeared, their parents had gone but not them, Sarah was not feeling well and Rafe was sleeping over at a friend's house.

2014

Sarah was talking to you! you were friends again and there was no way you would not see each other every single day.

Spending every minute of the day over at her house was completely normal at that point. You two hanging out again made your families closer.

It was like your parents didn't care at all you were just a pair of ten years old, almost eleven, kids.

Rafe would always try to be with his sister and you whenever you were around at their house, but Sarah would just scream at him 'LEAVE US ALONE!' which ended in him giving up and walking away. It was sad, you missed spending time with the boy.

2014 was the year you turned eleven, and also had your first period. Everyone was so excited about that and you just hated it, with your whole heart, it made you want to cry every single time. Due to that, your body started to change, and boys started to notice it, including Rafe.

2016

The year it all started.

It was your thirteenth birthday and you did not felt like doing a big party, that night the Cameron's and your family went to a restaurant. Sarah, Rafe, and you were talking about what you were going to do the next week while Wheezie just listened. Finally, the boy and you were good friends again. When the food arrived you all shut up and started eating while paying attention to what your parents were talking about.

"oh yeah, of course, they are definitely getting married at some point," Ward said to what your father nodded.

"it's the best for them" this time your mom spoke.

"of course it is!" Rose laughed, "he will be taking care of the family business, they are going to have a splendid life together"

"Who are you talking about?" Rafe got into the conversation.

"we are talking about you silly!" you looked at your mom, not understanding what was going on.

"wha- what?" Rafe was just as surprised as Sarah and you were.

"yeah kid, we are talking about yours and y/n's future together" Ward stated as taking a piece of meat to his mouth.

"what exactly do you mean?" you stepped in this time.

"what you heard kid, your future life, your marriage, and all" your dad said as if it was the most normal thing to say to a thirteen-year-old.

"their marriage?!" Sarah was furious, you could notice it in her voice tone, Rafe and you stared at each other.

"you just are too young to realize yet" Rose brushed it off. None of you talked for the rest of the night.

Just a few months after that, your dad and Ward had already made a reservation for you two at the exact same restaurant. When you arrived you saw Rafe already there in a table positioned in a corner. Now looking back at it, everything was so fucked up, you were just kids. You approached him and sat, he smiled at you while you did.

"hi", he said, shyly, of course. It was really weird, you both had been alone before but never this way, this was completely different, your families were hoping that you turned this into something romantic. "Are we on a date right now?".

"i think so?" you laughed a little bit, "please, don't make this awkward, i don't get why they do this".

"i do" he said, you looked at him with a confused face, was he agreeing with all of this? "i mean, i can see why they want us to be together" after that he took a sip of his soda and started serving you some.

"Rafe, you should be allowed to 'date' whoever you wanted"

"And what happens if who i wanna date is you?" you were shocked at your friend's words.

"Rafe what are you talking about? i just turned thirteen and you are about to turn fourteen, you like it or not we are kids" you were a little bit mad due to what he was saying.

"well, Juliet was thirteen and Romeo was around that age"

"Rafe you did- you did not just compare us to Romeo and Juliet, have you read the book?"

"no, i did not"

"THEY DIE, THEY DIE AT THE END" you knew you were making this a lot bigger than it actually was but didn't care about it, "of course you didn't read the book" you whispered but he heard.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" now that you're remembering everything you can't believe that a pair of thirteen years old could be so dramatic.

"I MEAN WHAT I SAID," you said while leaning over the table.

"you know what, why don't we shut up and finish with this as fast as we can, i don't want to be here" Rafe proposed.

"sounds perfect to me, i do not want to be here too"

Either of you spoke again until you had had dinner and Ward picked you two up.

2018 / 2019

In the past two years, Rafe and you had finally got together. Your parents were over the moon about it and you were also really happy. You both were discovering and experiencing together what being in a relationship was.

The first months were a little bit strange, you both knew that it was not a real relationship, for everyone else you were together, but in reality, you hadn't had that many kisses as you thought you were supposed to have and outside school didn't see each other that much.

Summer '18 the Cameron's took you with them on their holidays to the Bahamas, it was amazing, not just because Rafe and you spent a lot of time together but also because you got to hang more with Sarah who you were not seeing a lot since it all started, and the reason was that whenever you went to their house you were with her brother, and they definitely didn't get along that much.

Unfortunately, the 'real' part began in 2019, you and Rafe turned sixteen and started going to parties and being more around of what people called 'pogues'. During the school year, it was like a daydream, he picked you up and went together, you had lots of dates and spent beautiful moments together, those were the times when your relationship was at it's highest, where you realized that, after all, maybe your parents were right and your destiny was, indeed, be together.

Your favorite moment from that time in your life was with him. You both were laying in the grass of your house's backyard, it was really cold outside, and decided to take some blankets with you to be warm. You were laying in his chest while he hugged you, appreciating the stars. He pressed a kiss to your head and you smiled to yourself.

"wanna know something?" you looked up to him.

"pretty boy is thinking! someone please record this!" you said, just to annoy him.

"shut up" he laughed, knowing you were messing with him, "you want to know or no baby?" he asked, a more serious tone on his voice.

"of course i want to know" you took his hand into yours, the warmness made you shiver, to what he hugged you harder.

"i read on the internet that you can buy stars online, maybe one day i'll buy you one and name it Rafe so whenever you wanna get rid of me you would not be able to" the boy started swinging you side to side in a slow speed, you'd never felt that peaceful in your life before.

Once again you looked at him "that's a little bit wicked of you" he giggled, "however, i think that would be the most divine present someone could ever give to me" he backed down his head and kissed your cheek, "and also, i'm never getting rid of you" you could feel him smiling while pressing his chin against the side of your head.

That was the last happy time you genuinely can remember at perfection.

You still don't know what happened when summer '19 arrived, it was the breaking point of your relationship. Parties at the beach were being held by pogues most of the time, and you never went because partying was not your thing, all of them ended up in disaster, pure and authentic disaster. You are grateful the only one you went to was the first one. Rafe was extremely drunk and you were trying to take care of him but it was being hard, especially when Topper got into a really intense fight with JJ and John b, two of the few pogues you knew, it was tragic and it got worse when the blonde one pulled a gun at Sarah's boyfriend head, while all that happened you lost Rafe and found him after like five minutes beating up someone that was on the ground, barely moving. You ran towards him and with all your straighten you push him.

"YOU'RE KILLING HIM RAFE!" you yelled at your boyfriend, when you finally got to see him he was covered in blood, you took him by his hand and got out of there, arriving at your house where you helped him clean up himself.

"i think i'm in love with you" he tried to say but was too drunk to pronounce the words properly.

"don't start with that now when you almost killed a random guy tonight, for what? explain" you were furious.

"'cause he is a pogue, he deserves it y/n" you both walked to your bed and laid down to sleep.

"no he doesn't Rafe, that's not an excuse for what you did, they are people just like us" you scolded him.

"whatever" he ignored you.

Some time after that Sarah started to see John B behind Topper's back and she asked you to keep her secret safe, which you did.

At midsummers Rafe escorted you, it was a fantastic night, you two were together the whole time and drank lots of expensive champagne while you danced. The pride on your dad's face was priceless, in that moment you forgot about what had happened a few nights before and just enjoyed the moment, smiling at your boyfriend, always.

"you wanna know something?" Rafe whispered in your ear while you danced to a slow song, his hands on your waist and yours behind his neck.

"mmm, this brings back good memories" you smiled to the handsome man in front of you.

"i love you"

"i love you too Rafe"

"let me finish pretty girl" you laughed a little bit, "please stop smiling like that, i'm not sure what will happen if you keep doing that" this time your laugh was stronger, getting some looks from people around you.

"i'm just really happy right now, wouldn't want to be anywhere else" you hugged him without stop moving.

"i know, me too"

A few minutes after he disappeared, and you did not have an excuse to stay so you went home. The next day you found out he was trying to beat up the blonde pogue, JJ.

You don't really know why but for some reason it went away and everything was perfect again, but it only lasted a few days.

You were really bored at your house and after contemplating whether you should or shouldn't go to the Cameron's house, you got into your car and drove around the few blocks that separated your house from Rafe's. You knew his parents were out of town that day and Sarah was probably hanging out with John B and his friends so you didn't bother on knocking and just got in. You heard your boyfriend's voice from the downstairs bathroom. Once you got into it you saw his clothes on the floor and he was applying toothpaste to his arm.

"Rafe?" he looked at you scared.

"y/n- i- i" he was crying, you directed your eyes to his arm, a huge new burnt was there.

"Rafe what happened?" you got closer to him, "is that blood?" you pointed at the clothes on the floor.

"no", he denied it but it obviously was blood.

"Rafe, what's going on?"

"i- i got into a fight" ha answered.

"with who? baby who did this?" you helped him with his injury.

"Barry" but as soon as you heard that name you pulled away.

"Barry? as the drug dealer Barry?" he didn't even look at you, "Rafe are you doing drugs?" completely ignored you, and when he did that you figured out the answer, "how much do you owe him?" you asked, one hand on you waist and the other one on the bathroom door.

"some thousands" your jaw almost touched the floor, and your face was full of disappointment and anger. "don't look at me like that" he begged, and tried to grabbed you and pulled you closer to him but you just pulled him away.

"DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT? THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY?" he didn't reply "FUCK RAFE, THOUSANDS? YOU OWED THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO A DRUG DEALER AND YOU EXPECT ME TO STAY CALM?"

"i can explain."

"NO YOU CAN'T, WHAT? TOPPER AND YOU GOT BORED OF THE STUPID WEED AND WANTED TO TRY SOMETHING STRONGER? WHAT DID YOU BUY? COKE? NOW YOUR HOBBY IS BUY THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON COKE? THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT TO EXPLAIN TO M-"

"GET OUT" he screamed to your face as he got closer to your body, while pointing to the door, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY DAMN HOUSE" you looked at him and turned away, walking towards the door and he didn't follow you.

"HOPE YOU HAVE AN AMAZING LIFE RAFE" you screamed without closing the door.

After that you didn't see him in a long time, you didn't go out of your house anymore.

You heard that Sarah and John B were missing, you missed her. You had no one to talk to, just your own thoughts.

A few weeks later, everything came out to the light, Ward went to jail for killing John B's dad and being kinda responsible for another poor man's death.

Rafe confessed that it had been him the one who shot the detective, but they found out about his drug addiction and blamed it on that, so he ended up going to rehabilitation and not directly to jail.

2021

It was your eighteenth birthday, Sarah was coming to your house to keep you company until your parents got out of work.

As you were walking towards the kitchen the doorbell rang.

"hi" you said as opening the door.

"hello, is this y/n?" the man in front of you asked while reading your name from a box.

"that would be me" you said, and after signing some papers he gave you the package.

You placed it on the table and started opening it. It seemed like a picture frame, when you paid attention to it, tears fell from your eyes, there was a little letter on it.

i did not name it after me, i realized that you were, are, and always will be the big star that keeps me going. I hope you know how much i miss you and regret everything i did, maybe one day you'll forgive me and love me again. I took that for granted and i'm so sorry of that. happy eighteen birthday y/n, i expect you still think this is the most divine present someone could ever give you.

- Rafe

It was a star, he had bought a star and named it after you, Rafe kept his promise, and even though you had said to yourself, just the night before, you will move on and forget about him, you couldn't help but smile; wishing you could re-do everything and go back to what it was that night from a few years before.

#rafe cameron #rafe #cameron #obx #drew starkey #obx fanfic #rafe cameron fanfic #rafe cameron x reader #obx x reader #outer banks #outer banks x reader #rafe cameron obx #outer banks fanfic

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lennox-levin-little-lilith-did · 4 years ago

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Hello people who follow me

For people who haven’t been following my blog all that much, I have Dissociative Identity Disoder, more commonly known as Spilt Personality, or Multiple Personality Disoder (which it’s no longer called this, the shortened version is DID)

DID is a disordercharacterized by the presence of two or more distinct personality states. A reaction to trauma as a way to help a person avoid bad memories.

Symptoms are;

Behavioral: impulsivity, self-destructive behavior, or self-harm (check, check, and check)

Mood: anxiety, feeling detached from self, or mood swings (check, check, and check)

Psychological: altered consciousness, depression, or flashback (check, check, and check)

Also common: amnesia or blackout (huge check)

Let’s start this my early childhood-

I never had a dad, he was in and out of my life constantly. So I was always looking for a father figure.

It didn’t help my mom was hopping from man to man at the time.

However I had one man in my life that never left and loved me like his own. That man was my uncle. I loved him so much, I still do, but by no means was he a good role model. He was in to drugs, never took his medication, and I think was in a gang (that if he hung out with some really bad people). One memory I have of him is him letting me help him make a roll (weed roll) when I was three or four.

I had a been diagnosed with ADHD by the time I was five. It was severe when I was younger, I couldn’t sit still or focus on anything, including school.

Anyways, one day, I come home from school, like any other day. I was happy because my grandmother had picked me up and said she would be staying with me for a while. (Mind you, this is what I’ve been told, I have zero recollection of this month). I come home to strange people and cars around my home, but I go about my greetings as usual. My mom had a boyfriend at this point, his name was Angel, he was nice (we’ll get back to him later). I was told to stay in my room with my kitten, Ella (yes the same cat I talk about to this day) and my dog, Sassy. My grandmother would come in to make I was okay, which I was. The next day was even weirder, a lady in a police uniform watched me get dressed for the day. My teachers treated me differently and I had to leave school early. I was confused, I also hadn’t seen my uncle in two days without communication. I was asked multiple questions about my uncle and I answered them honestly. I later learned that he had buried a woman’s body, had he killed her or not is a mystery as there was someone else with him that day he buried her.

My uncle had schizophrenia, and he had just revealed to me that he had an episode when everything was happening and he was off his meds.

We had moved in December of that year due to people screaming slurs at me whenever I went outside. I don’t remember this, again I have no recollection of that month.

I developed severe emotional issues, including bottling things up and exploding in violent outburst. My ADHD made it hard to focus on schoolwork, specifically reading. I alway spaced out while reading, and heard a small distracting voice, telling me to play with my stuffed animals or watch TV (I didn’t tell my mom this and I still haven’t). My mom didn’t understand why I was like this. She thought I was acting out for attention. So first through third grade I suffered and started to hate school. I started to hate my classmates. So I started to let that little voice speak for me. Eventually I started blacking out during school.

I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.

I didn’t know that when my mom asked what did I do at school, she thought I just didn’t want to talk about school.

Time skip to sixth grade (the worst year of my entire life)-

I was eleven at the time. I had friends, I was a social butterfly. Yeah, sure I had people I didn’t like, but I didn’t let them effect me.

Until November 29, 2016 (yes I remember the exact date)

The weekend before I had slept over at my bestie’s house, then I went home because I had 4-H on Sunday. I got my phone taken away Sunday night because my ‘friend’ wouldn’t stop texting me. I saw on my google docs I had a new document, shared with my teachers. It was nice, complimenting them on their teaching skills. But I didn’t write it. It wasn’t my typing style.

I went to school on Monday like any other day, happy and cheerful. Around second period, I got called to the office. I was asked if I wrote the doc that was under my email. I said yes because it was nice, I didn’t think anything was wrong with it.

Boy, was I wrong... (holy shit I’m about to cry writing this)

I got called down a second time, this time my principal was saying I hacked into others school accounts and wrote a threatening letter on google docs under another student’s account. I started to deny that I wrote anything, that I thought the doc was written on a spur of the moment.

The third time I was called down, it was with my best friend, Angie. We both didn’t know what was going on and denied any and all accusations.

The fourth and final time I was called down was at the end of the day... my teachers were there. They wouldn’t listen... they didn’t care what I said... I was a sweet girl with dreams and passions. I loved my teachers with all my heart... it didn’t matter to them. Nothing mattered to them (here come the waterworks).

I said I did it to protect my friends from getting in trouble...

In the end, I got three days of in school suspension and a beating from my mom that I don’t remember.

The first day, they forgot I was there. I was in a little white room, with a chair and a desk. The social worker came in and asked me if I had really done it. I had a good relationship with her, I really liked her... I shouldn’t have trusted her.

The second day... the second day, the principal, vice principal, and social worker of the school came into the room and I was confused. Then the screaming started... the banging on the desk. They thought on Monday I had written another doc to my teachers, saying they didn’t scare me and they could go fuck themselves and I changed a student’s pfp to a bloody knife.

Then the principal came around behind me, still screaming her head off, and slammed her hands down on my shoulders and squeezed, hard, resulting in bruises later that day. After that, the little voice took over and started crying. Sobbing for them to leave us alone. They walked out leaving a broken child in their wake.

I had curled up under the desk and continued to cried, repeatedly saying, “I want to die, I don’t deserve to live...” the social worker came back in and tried to calm me down, but I looked at her and said I wanted to die. This was the first time of so many, that I had a suicidal thought.

211 services were called and I told them I felt bad about everything I’ve ever done, continuing the lie I’ve been dragged into. I can’t tell the truth... They wouldn’t believe me anyways... I had thought. I went home and stayed home for the rest of the week. That night I walked into my kitchen and opened my knife drawer and pulled out the biggest knife, mind completely blank. I gently slid it against my wrist, thinking about cutting. I didn’t. I put the knife away and went back to my room, empty. I felt lost, and like I was drowning.

A third voice slowly developed. It was a boy this time, he was sad and hated talking to others (I’ll get to my second voice development in a bit). He took over during school, all though I could think on my own and speak, he had main control. I had a mental breakdown later that week after my class had been too loud, I told my music teacher it was because I had sensitive hearing (which was part of the reason). I stayed hidden during recess, and I sat in the back of the lunchroom with people I didn’t like or know. My outbursts only got more violent and more frequent, to the point where I would push my mom and stepdad (remember Angel, yeah him), resulting in more beatings from my mom.

My aunt got a lawyer to extinguish the suspension from my permanent record. The lawyer didn’t want to help all that much because he thought I was hiding something, which I was, but I refused to tell. The suspension was extinguished and I was allowed to use the school computers again.

I went to a new school the next year and transferred to where I’m located now...

First-seventh grade (the second voice’s development)-

My stepdad (Angel) was nice the first year my mom dated him. Then everything started to change. He started coming home drunk. After my little brother was born, things only got worse (and no, I don’t blame my brother for the change, it was envitable). He started getting angry at my mom, and at me. He started calling me a bitch, a little shit, a mistake.

I started to have out of body experiences, whenever I violent towards him. Pushing him, slapping him, punching him, scratching him. One time he slapped my mom and my mom’s therapist called DCF on her. I’ve been told I had walked into the kitchen right when he slapped her. However I don’t remember, I just remember the feeling of uncontrollable rage spreading through my body.

I don’t remember there being a voice in the beginning, I remember being one place or doing one thing, get angry, and suddenly being somewhere else. Especially when Angel started calling me names.

Another time, right after my mom had carpal tunnel surgery, he left suddenly. I was in the basement reading and playing with my bunny at the time. I came back up when my mom started screaming for me. The front door was left wide open and my brother left in the living room. We had Max and Ella, it was the summer of 2016. My mom was hysterical, screaming at me, saying it was my fault he left, that everything was my fault. I left the house and stayed with my neighbors for an hour, waiting for my mom to calm down. I went back and was sent straight to my room. I remember being angry, so mad at myself for no reason. I hated myself. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression the next year.

There’s a shit ton of stories I could tell about Angel getting drunk or leaving the house and coming back drunk. I won’t. I’m not here to tell a sob story, I never will ask for pity. I’m telling you how small things to certain people can be huge to another. My mom didn’t think it affected my all that much, my therapists thought I didn’t need intense therapy despite everything. All because I didn’t know that hearing voices other than your own wasn’t normal.

I started looking up depression and anxiety to help manage it better, and stumbled upon an article about schizophrenia. I looked more into it and found out about DID when I was thirteen, two years ago. However I still didn’t tell anyone... I was scared.

I was a freak

I was unnatural

I had three voices, three other people, inside of me. They wanted control, they wanted a voice too. They became unbearable, and when I started high school, I broke.

I tried to kill myself. I started starving myself the previous school year and started cutting over that summer... I finally told someone about the voices but no one believed me, and still no does. They think I’m lying...

So I’m not diagnosed, but I know I have DID.

Who’s who-

Little was voice one- she’s a little, under the age of ten. Little isn’t her real name but I don’t want her name out there on the internet where people can manipulate her. She has ADHD and is incredibly hyper. This body doesn’t get much rest, so after someone else fronts, we usually have to sleep. She’s also a trauma holder, knowing what happened that month blackout. She has no interest in people romantically (obviously, she’s a child)

Lilith is angry blackout/voice two- she’s ageless, a prosecutor, and a secret keeper. She’s a trauma holder to the verbal and physical abuse I suffered when I was younger, really up until last year I was verbally abused by my mom. She has anger issues and severe mood swings. She rarely fronts, but when she does, Levi or I have to co-con with her so she doesn’t murder someone. She’s angry and is always aggressive towards me and Little. She leaves Levs out of her aggression though. Lilith is bisexual (no, not pan like I identify).

Levin/Levi/Lev(he goes by all of them however I prefer calling him Levi)- he has insomnia and major social anxiety. (Also is co-conscious with me rn) He’s apathetic and very neutral when it comes to opinions, but he’s humorous and super sarcastic when he’s comfortable. He’s a gatekeeper and he’s 18. He as food related anxiety, but no major eating disorders. He’s has no sexual desires, but is romantically attracted to girls.

Lennox(the writer of this)- they age with the body, so 15, and host/often front. They have social anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and is the first alter, or first recognized alter. They are nonbinary and pansexual.

I’m going to start labeling who your talking to, or who’s out at the time, like this

-Lennox (Kay?)

Thank you for reading!

I’mma tag some people I think should see this-

@one-pissed-off-child @madame-ree @queenzie-xo @anon-nom-nom95 @liveto-100 @aleiakit @gogetyoselfsomesoup @nadia-saaaaan @mai-ki-000 @martinidrinkingmartin @scalybunnypapi69 @pumpkineiji @cristinaweeb @pikaweebo @siyarduous-lazyaf @reijishiki

And to lighten my mood and for giggles-

POWER WALK BEFORE YOUR LATE ZUZU!!!

🤣🤣🤣🤣

#tw suicude #tw self harm #dissociative identity disorder #this is me

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yukirena88 · 4 years ago

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HKT48 Sakamoto Erena Encount Article Part 1

2020.07.16

HKT48 Sakamoto Erena’s encounter with “Kikuchi P” changed her destiny. Her talents bloomed when he endorsed the lyrics she wrote and sent to him “the earliest”

Interviewer: Satoshi Oda

【Interview part 1】 A "Dance Girl" when she was a kid, she was awed by Hamasaki Ayumi and dreamt of becoming a singer 　HKT48, the idol group based in Fukuoka started their first-ever Stream-Only Live performance from their dance lesson room on July 5th. Maintaining adequate social distance to prevent the spread of COVID-19, they limited the performing members to just 10, and 3rd gen Sakamoto Erena, 2nd gen Tashima Meru, 3rd gen Tanaka Miku, as well as other regular Senbatsu members, took to the stage to deliver a compassionate message the people in the regions of Kumamoto and Kagoshima hit by the heavy rainfall and flood disaster. In this article, I will trace the footsteps of Sakamoto who is striving to realize her dream to become a singer while overcoming various obstacles.

　Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, theater performances and handshake events have all been postponed. Unable to communicate directly with fans who support them, it is difficult to deliver messages of comfort to those hit by heavy rainfall and floods. That is why Sakamoto wants to put her soul into songs which she believes "delivers a message stronger than words" and cheer people up. She passed HKT48's 3rd gen audition in 2013, 7 years ago. Since then, she has paved the way to her very own idol career.

　While Sakamoto, born in Fukuoka prefecture, was slightly shy as a child, she was also a very "active girl" who would play outside the whole time during recess time. It may have been a natural calling for an active girl like her to immerse herself in rock and hip hop dance classes for all 6 years when she was in grade school.

　Invited by a friend, she went to watch an "HKT48" stage performance and was charmed by 1st gen Kumazawa Serina's sharp dance moves and decided to audition for the group, but when was the first time Sakamoto thought "I want to become a singer"? Going back, she says she had a role model when she was younger even before she started taking dance lessons.

"When I look at my nursery school and kindergarten album, I wrote 'To become a singer' as my future dream. I drew pictures of myself basking in the spotlight and singing, so I had wanted to sing in front of an audience ever since I was young. Thank to my mother's influence, I really liked Hamasaki Ayumi, and she was the starting point of my dream to become a singer"

However, she had never taken a singing lesson before joining HKT48, and when she first started her career as an idol, "Myself included, everyone around me did not see me as a singer". Coincidentally, something she was told during her Trainee days became her guiding compass.

"I was better at dancing then, and did not have confidence in singing. But during a sound recording, a staff praised me saying, 'You have a nice voice' and that made me really happy and made me think 'I'll put in effort in singing', 'This is what I should work on improving'. I'm really grateful for those words.

Her "Solo A Capella Video" Led To Her First Senbatsu, while Her Encounter With "Kikuchi P" Changed Her Destiny After being promoted to a Team Member from Trainee in 2016, Sakamoto performed in the "6th AKB48 Kohaku Utagassen" held in December for the first time. She was chosen to represent HKT48 as a member of Team Vocal, along with Minegishi Minami & Oda Erina (AKB48), Yamauchi Suzuran & Furuhata Nao (SKE48), and Shiroma Miru (NMB48), the members from each of the 48G who are well known for their singing abilities, and together sang "Mata Anata No Koto wo Kangaeteta" a capella.

This prompted her to start recording her "Solo A Capella Video" which she posted on "Google+" for the first time in March 2017, which later became a video series. In the same year, she was chosen as senbatsu for the first time for HKT48's 10th Single "Kiss wa Matsu Shikanai Deshoka?", released in August of that year.

"I was thinking of ways to express my love for singing. While looking for a way, I saw videos of people singing in harmony, and went 'This is it!' When I started arranging a capella version of songs, I got really good reactions and it encouraged me to continue singing a capella and in harmony. I believe I was chosen as senbatsu for the first time thanks to my 'Solo A Capella Videos', so it was definitely a turning point in my idol career"

Sakamoto is a competitive person at heart, recalling how "When I lost at the trump game 7 rows, I would cry out of frustration." After becoming aware of her own strengths, devoted herself to the path set out in front of her. She was presented with another opportunity, again at the "AKB48 Kouhaku Utagassen." Kikuchi Shin (AKA "Kikuchi P", who has produced various music shows on Fuji TV), the Producer for the event suggested to her, "Why don't you write a song?"

"When I performed at the (7th) AKB48 Kouhaku in 2017, Mr. Kikuchi P praised my singing. I realized it was a great opportunity and spent 3 weeks thinking of a lyric, and while I wasn't sure if it was good enough... I sent it to him while questioning myself, and 1 week after that, he brought the music for the song all the way to the venue of our handshake event. He said, 'you're going to sing this at ZEPP TOKYO (for the music talk show Kikuchi Kara GIRLS' FACTORY NEXT) in summer 2018' and I froze, going 'Huh?' (lol). It all happened so quickly and I was really surprised"

She was never given a guarantee that it would become a song. Kikuchi Producer also talked to other members about it, but the one who "sent it to him the earliest" was Sakamoto, and that enthusiasm gave birth to her original song "Motto, Kitto".

"I'm glad I sent it early (lol). Kikuchi P has made a huge difference in my life. Thanks to his arrangement, I teamed up with idols from other group to form the idol unit 'Gachinko☆(Star)' and was able to gain a lot of experience in singing. My song has not been put on a CD yet, so I will do my best to publish it as a CD"

Sakamoto, who snatched this chance with her own hands and cleared a path to a new stage in her career, would experience a tumultuous time ahead.

(Continued in Part 2)

　□Sakamoto Erena was born on September 12, 2000, in Fukuoka prefecture. In 2013, she entered HKT48 as a 3rd gen trainee and was promoted to Team TII in March 2016. Apart from the dance skills she learned in grade school, she also immerses the audience into her world with her gentle singing voice and is one of the aspiring Divas in AKB48 Group. During her "Stay Home" time, she worked out using the popular fitness program "Billy's Boot Camp". Her favorite phrase is "Everybody Is Unique and Special in Their Own Way"

#HKT48 #Sakamoto Erena #坂本愛玲菜

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

Canada’s other health crisis (Washington Post) The novel coronavirus was on the march across Canada, but it was a different public health crisis that turned Shannon Krell’s world upside down. Her brother hadn’t shown up for work, which was unusual. She called the police to have someone check on the 46-year-old, but a friend arrived first and made the sad discovery. Ryan Krell had died of an accidental drug overdose—another life lost to a crisis that has killed more than 15,400 people in Canada since 2016. Their number has increased in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. British Columbia, the epicenter of the crisis, recorded its deadliest month in May—and then surpassed it in June. Nearly four times as many people in the province have died of a suspected overdose this year as have died of the coronavirus. Overdose deaths in the Yukon territory this year are double last year’s tally. Paramedics in the city of Saskatoon last month responded to a record weekly number of overdose calls.

Taller cubicles, one-way aisles: Office workers must adjust (AP) Bergmeyer, a design firm in Boston, has erected higher cubicles, told employees to wear masks when not at their desks and set up one-way aisles in the office that force people to walk the long way around to get to the kitchen or the bathroom. “The one-way paths take me a little out of the way, but it was easy to get used to,” said Stephanie Jones, an interior designer with the company. “It actually gives me the opportunity to see more people and say a quick hello when I might have just walked directly to my desk before.” Around the U.S., office workers sent home when the coronavirus took hold in March are returning to the world of cubicles and conference rooms and facing certain adjustments: masks, staggered shifts, spaced-apart desks, daily questions about their health, closed break rooms and sanitizer everywhere. Employers in some cases are requiring workers to come back to the office, but most, like Bergmeyer, are letting the employees decide what to do, at least for now. Some firms say the risks and precautions are worth it to boost productivity and move closer to normal.

Postal Crisis Ripples Across Nation as Election Looms (NYT) Each day, when Nick Casselli, the president of a Philadelphia postal workers union, sits down at his desk, his phone is full of alarmed messages about increasing delays in mail delivery. Mr. Casselli and his 1,600 members have been in a state of high alert since Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and an ally of President Trump’s, took over as postmaster general in May. Overtime was eliminated, prompting backups. Seven mail-sorting machines were removed from a nearby processing center in West Philadelphia, causing further delays. Now, post offices are being told to open later and close during lunch. Similar accounts of slowdowns and curtailed service are emerging across the country as Mr. DeJoy pushes cost-cutting measures that he says are intended to overhaul an agency suffering billion-dollar losses. But as Mr. Trump rails almost daily against the service and delays clog the mail, voters and postal workers warn a crisis is building that could disenfranchise record numbers of Americans who will be casting ballots by mail in November because of the coronavirus outbreak. At risk are not just the ballots—and medical prescriptions and paychecks—of residents around the country, but also the reputation of the Postal Service as the most popular and perhaps the least politicized part of the federal government.

California power problems (NYT) A heat wave is scorching the Southwest and has forced intermittent power shut-offs in California. Thermometers are cracking 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities. Californians used so much electricity trying to stay cool Friday night that, for the first time in 19 years, the agency that oversees much of the state’s power grid shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for several hours to avoid a damaging overload. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for much of the West Coast. The sweltering heat comes as coronavirus cases are on the rise in California, creating a dilemma for those who could not stay cool at home.

Bald Eagle Sends Government Drone Into Lake Michigan (NYT) A squabble in the sky over Lake Michigan left one bald eagle victorious and one government drone mangled and sunken. Hunter King, a drone pilot at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, was surveying an area of the lake near the state’s Upper Peninsula last month when the $950 drone started “twirling furiously” after it indicated that a propeller had been torn off. “When he looked up, the drone was gone, and an eagle was flying away,” said the department, whose name is abbreviated E.G.L.E. The department speculated that the eagle could have attacked because of a territorial dispute, because it was hungry “or maybe it did not like its name being misspelled.” Julia Ponder, executive director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said that it was likely because the drone had encroached on the eagle’s territory. “They’re the king of the skies,” she said.

National Debt To Surpass $78 Trillion By 2028 (Forbes) The coronavirus pandemic pushed the government into the proverbial corner, prompting it to borrow heavily from the future to ward off a serious threat today. Without this intervention, the U.S. economy would be in a much worse recession or possibly even a depression. Even though borrowing excessively may have been the lesser of two evils, the burgeoning debt will have ramifications in the future. With the debt approaching $27 trillion, and projected to rise to $78 trillion by 2028, it will present significant challenges.

French government pushes for wider mask use (AP) After France recorded its highest one-day rise in virus infections since May, the government is pushing for wider mask use and tighter protections for migrant workers and in slaughterhouses. But France still plans to reopen schools nationwide in two weeks, and the labor minister says the government is determined to avoid a new nationwide lockdown that would further hobble the economy and threaten jobs. France’s infection count has resurged in recent weeks, blamed in part on people crisscrossing the country for weddings, family gatherings or annual summer vacations with friends. Britain reimposed quarantine measures Saturday for vacationers returning from France as a result.

Lukashenko under pressure as rival protests planned in Belarus capital (Reuters) Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was under growing pressure on Sunday with rival protests due to converge on the capital a week after a contested presidential election that has thrown his country into turmoil. Lukashenko, in power for 26 years, has faced down a week of street demonstrations and refused demands for a re-run of an election protesters say was massively rigged to disguise the fact that he has lost public support. Often emotional in state TV appearances, the 65-year-old leader has alleged a foreign-backed plot to topple him. Russia, which has had a troubled relationship with Lukashenko, is watching closely as Belarus hosts pipelines that carry Russian energy exports to the West and is also viewed by Moscow as a buffer zone against NATO. The EU is gearing up to impose new sanctions on Belarus in response to a violent crackdown in which at least two protesters have been killed and thousands detained. Protesters show no signs of backing down.

Campus-based Thai protest movement extends reach to streets (AP) Anti-government protesters gathered in large numbers in Thailand’s capital on Sunday for a rally that suggested their movement’s strength may have extended beyond the college campuses where it has blossomed. Thousands of people assembled at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, a traditional venue for political activities. Hundreds of police were also present, as well as a small contingent of royalists opposed to the protesters. There was no reliable estimate of the crowd size, though it appeared to be one of the biggest demonstrations in several years. The student-led movement has three core demands: holding new elections, amending the constitution and ending the intimidation of critics of the government. Thailand has experienced a successful coup roughly every six years on average since the army toppled the absolute monarchy in 1932 and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. But it has been under military rule for much of the time since then.

10 killed in Somalia in extremist attack on Mogadishu hotel (AP) A Somali police officer says at least 10 people have been killed and more than a dozen others injured in an ongoing siege at a beachside hotel in Somalia’s capital where security forces are battling Islamic extremist gunmen who have invaded the building, Capt. Mohamed Hussein told The Associated Press that the attack started with a powerful car bomb which blew off the security gates to the Elite Hotel.

#headlines #news

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slouchyslouch · 5 years ago

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My 2010s in Records.

10. My Bloody Valentine — mbv

Wrote about mbv on a separate piece.

9. Earl Sweatshirt — Some Rap Songs

Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs is a record of mending and therapy. At the beginning of the decade, rap fans saw the 16 year old prodigy create the most technical and distinctive raps unheard of at that time. Yes, a lot of it was jarring and immature, but the potential was there. While debut mixtape EARL was a teaser and an introduction to his greatness, Doris was his reclamation to the rap game after a period of silence in Samoa. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside in turn spoke for itself. Its morose disposition then made its way onto Some Rap Songs; not quite his masterpiece, but an accomplished period piece nonetheless. As one of the most highly acclaimed rappers in the world today, Earl spills his guts out on this diaristic tape about his relationship with his father and the emotional exhaustion coming from trying to amend it. On “Red Water,” he repeats the same 8 bars on loop as if caught in a recurring dream. “Papa called me chief / gotta keep it brief / locked and loaded I can see you lyin’ through your teeth” he raps in a fugue state, as if coming to the realization that his father was only there for those momentary times of convenience. It’s always difficult to write something that includes family and loved ones. There’s a sense of vulnerability you have to divulge in as well as a catharsis that fulfills one’s desire to let go of one’s agony. The beats on Some Rap Songs run on loose kaleidoscopic loops, production that Earl has mastered rapping over as his idiosyncrasies in his bars do best when complementing them. Thanks to the influence of his buddies Mike and Medhane, he’s learned to channel his eccentric flows onto those beats. “Riot” closes the record with the sentimental instrumental sampling jazz legend, and uncle, Hugh Masekela. It’s feels like a proper ending to Earl’s chronicle, but the events that have transpired will always be apart of his life. At the end of it all, Some Rap Songs will remain forever a tombstone of his anguish.

8. The Spirit of the Beehive — Hypnic Jerks

There’s no other dream pop record this decade that could top this almost-perfect album. The hushed vocalizations of Zach Schwartz and Rivka Ravede offer a quiet intimacy in the dreamscape that is Hypnic Jerks. The title in itself lends to the idea of being half asleep and half awake — to be in an altered state where the real and surreal are just two sides of the same coin. Tracks like “poly swim” and “it’s gonna find you” entrance you into that state of unconscious, while tracks like “can i receive the contact?” and “hypnic jerks” make an effort to wake you up from the sublime. Field recordings filter in and out between tracks, as if you were hallucinating the whole time. It’s when “nail i couldn’t bite” and “(without you) in my pocket” play out that you realize it doesn’t matter what state you lie in. Their lucid pop constructions reward repeated listens to the point of obsession in a somnambulant state. The record’s lack of acclaim only makes it feel like you’re in on a hidden secret. To this day, I am completely spellbound to its sorcery and have yet to unlock its mysteries.

7. Iceage — New Brigade

Back in elementary school, I listened to a lot of pop punk; the kind that was rapturously melodic yet cheesily done and overproduced (Think Blink 182 or All Time Low). Until I listened to New Brigade, I didn’t even realize what true punk music actually sounded like. Iceage was just fucking cool to me. Sure, they had the aesthetic, depicting bloody mosh pits and macabre rune art, but it was truly the music that broke into my spirit, shattering what I thought punk sounded like back in the day. I’d read pieces about their notorious live shows where they would play rapid 15-minute sets in the sunless recesses of Denmark, which only added to the band’s mystique. Upon listening to their debut, I felt musically fulfilled like never before. No more of the whiny, drawn out vocals from pop punk bands. Frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt had the kind of angsty drawl similar to Nick Cave’s when he played with The Birthday Party which offered a kind of obscene yet confident instability to his performance. Johan Surrballe Wieth and Jakob Tvilling Pless’s guitars have just the right amount of filth in them — an abrasive attack on your soul while Dan Kjær Nielsen’s drums are played propulsively in classic hardcore fashion — never meant decelerate. The record didn’t offer the tightest instrumental, but that was the point. Iceage have gone on to release tighter and more spectacular punk records consistently over the decade but their debut broke the ceiling of what to me punk could, and should, sound like. From the cathartic breakdown of “White Rune” to the triumphant “You’re Blessed,” New Brigade was the record that gave me that spark, the one that carried me to rotting heights.

6. Frank Ocean — Channel Orange

Channel Orange will always be a classic to my generation. From Grammy-nominated “Thinking’ Bout You” to the sweet and charming “Forrest Gump,” we surf through Frank’s psyche in smooth and effortless RnB. Frank Ocean’s vivid universe is one of vibrant summers and distant getaways. Its colourful motifs paint a pretty picture for us — pink skies, monks in moshpits, peaches and mangos, roofs of mansions, palm trees and pools, Majin Buu. Most people I know around my age know the lyrics to most of its tracks. They’re as infectious as any classic from the past decade. I still remember listening to “Sweet Life” by the beach with a friend before attending his concert on his first tour. Everything felt right in the world when he sang “so why see the world when you got the beach” as the waves crashed over the sand and the summer heat glistened over the ocean. During its release, he opened up to the world to reveal his love for another man in an affectionate Tumblr post. It gave us an appreciation into an artist’s vulnerable identity while breaking the door open for other artists to come out in their own way. Frank later released his masterpiece in Blonde/Endless and a plethora of brilliant singles from his radio show, but the stories and music from Channel Orange will remain forever timeless.

5. Solange — A Seat at the Table

“Fall in your ways / so you can crumble / fall in your ways / so you can wake up and rise” sings Solange, on the introduction to her restorative album A Seat at the Table. They’re words I try to tell myself in times of darkness. Solange just has that ability to let anybody express themselves through her music, to meditate on life’s injustices and pitfalls. It’s okay to be mad; it’s okay to rest and take care of yourself as much as you need to. We just have to rely on each other to get back into the fight. It feels like a lot of my favourite records from the past decade are imbued with themes of darkness and isolation. Fortunately, I still have Solange to let myself vent out those frustrations. Whether it’s the strings on the beginning of “Cranes in the Sky” that remind me to slow down or the horns projected behind Master P’s stoic orations that fuel my determination to keep afloat, A Seat at the Table plays like an instruction manual for self-care, black empowerment, and righteous activism. It’s consoling to know that I’m not alone in distracting myself from everything that’s wrong with the world today. 2016 was such an appropriate time for this record to be released. Solange gave us hope, grace, stoicism, and the ability to heal and recharge. A Seat at the Table may be a personal record to Solange, but as she sings on “F.U.B.U.,” this shit is for us.

4. Chance the Rapper — Acid Rap

It’s odd to say that my favourite rap record of the decade comes in the form of pop rap album Acid Rap. In making this list, I thought about the obvious greats in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City. In the end, Chance’s second mixtape brought me more joy than any of those records did. It gave me the cringiest but most pleasurable musical moments with the homies singing along to tracks like “Cocoa Butter Kisses” and “Pusha Man.” Releasing it independently and as a free download, Chance’s spoken-word idiosyncrasies reveal themselves as classic pop rap gems by the end of the decade. Chance’s whole thing was just about pure positivity and having fun. The era of albums I could compare to it was during the release of Kanye’s College Dropout and Late Registration, a time when Kanye (sort of) envisioned the anti-stereotype in rappers, countering the machismo and toxic masculinity found in a lot of hip-hop now and back then (RIP old Kanye). Chance didn’t care about getting bitches or getting money. He just wanted to do drugs with his friends — to trip out on acid and go on a spiritual journey with all of us. Hidden beneath the positivity, Chance still creeps in a dash of realism and humanity on tracks like “Paranoia,” illustrating the life of gang-banging in his hometown of Chicago. It’s the earnestness in his raps that always pulls me back, the flourishes of piano when he raps “I lean back then spark my shit / I turn up I talk my shit / hope you love all my shit / I hope you love all my shit / IGH.” It turns out, as he declares on the outro, Everything’s Good.

3. Alex G — DSU

On DSU, time stops. The cult of Alex G is now cemented in indie rock lore at the end of the decade with eight albums full of hooks, dreams, and shattered spirits. DSU was the first record I listened to by Alex G, and remains my favourite by his despite him going on to release better conceptual records in Rocket and House of Sugar. No track can be skipped or listened to passively. With most of them springing under the 2–3 minute mark, ideas flow in and out without direction but coalesce into an impressionistic and breathtaking work of art. Hints of Elliott Smith and Isaac Brock echo in the duality of harsh guitar distortion and melodious pop hooks. Guitar feedback never felt so comforting as it colours the magnificence of Alex G’s composition. There’s a kind of deep melancholy in each track despite the ambiguous surrealism lyrics, a perfect winter record to listen to alone in your room or walk through the piles of snow in the night. Its murky yet lush production somehow reaches out to you, helps you drown in its depths and remain there for its 37 minutes. Whether it’s “Skipper” fully attuning you to its hushed presence, or the entrancing opener of “After Ur Gone,” I just feel like I want to close my eyes and immerse myself in there for as long as it allows me to.

2. Frank Ocean — Blonde

Frank Ocean’s Blonde arrived as a gift from the heavens. For five years, my friends and I have joked and memed about when the new Frank was coming out — whether it was even ever going to come out. Years after its release, it has evolved into the masterpiece that I’ve always wanted him to create. When Endless came out, I felt somewhat disappointed at the material — although later served as the perfect complement to Blonde — because of its lack of sensual pieces similar to those on Channel Orange’s effortless RnB and the latter record’s penchant for easy sing-alongs. Blonde in turn revealed a similar mood: the spacious vapour that fogged up behind Ocean’s intimate croon, the volatility in his voice that permeated your soul — it felt like an emotional load that was difficult to bare, yet something necessary that had to be experienced. I was just getting into my first intimate relationship when Blonde came out, and it’s made me realize how much I wanted to make that person happy, and that I couldn’t take any relationship I had for granted. I felt heavy after listening to this record. The sadboi hours memes ring true to its emotional weight. I would flutter to the arpeggios of “Ivy” as Frank sings “I thought that I was dreamin’ when you said you love me,” bop to the duality of “Nights,” and shed a tear to the wistfulness of “Godspeed.” I wonder how much shit Frank had to go through to even get any of these songs on tape. It’s okay. I like to think think that by the end of it all, Blonde was the catharsis he needed to spill his heart out.

1. Tame Impala — Lonerism

At the end of the decade, seeing Kevin Parker as one of the most highly-touted producers and songwriters in pop music would be an observation if you had asked me a decade ago, when Tame Impala’s first record Innerspeaker — an expansive work of art that recalled 60’s guitar psychedelia — first came out. On Lonerism, Parker’s music evolved into something even more seismic and innovative in scope. As the name suggests, Lonerism is a product of disaffection, self-defeat, and isolation. I’d imagine it was as fulfilling to other music fans of a type to detach from the world and just get lost in another’s. There’s a part on “Keep on Lying” where an endless guitar solo is played in the midst of a dinner party being played out; that feeling of getting dragged to a party when you were just a kid but just wanted to pop your headphones on and refuse to interact with anybody. According to Parker, he put in the sample to make the listener feel even more alienated. It’s a powerful feeling that lets anyone listening to the record in on that vulnerable sensation. In spite of that, tracks like “Apocalypse Dreams” and “Elephant” still give us astonishing psych rock bangers while pop gems “Music to Walk Home By” and “Feels like We Only Go Backwards” demonstrate Parker’s guitar pedal gymnastics over vibrant hooks. Although Currents has skyrocketed him into the fame and acclaim that he undoubtedly deserves, this record will always be his opus in my heart. I’ve daydreamed enough times to the music where its world has settled into my subconscious. It’s a world that comes from genius, but it’s also a world that invites you in to escape from the idea of Lonerism itself, to have something shared with you in solitude.

#top 10 albums #tame impala #frank ocean #alex g #chance the rapper #solange #iceage #the spirit of the beehive #My Bloody Valentine #album review #lists #earl sweatshirt

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pbandjesse · 5 years ago

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Today was a nice day. Sleep was fine. And we got up around 9 and that was all good. I made a bagel and headed to the museum. It was slightly snowy out but it was mostly rainy. It was weird leaving for the museun so late but I didn't have to deal with any traffic.

Not that if mattered because i got to the musuen abd found out that my group had canceled. Because of the little bit of snow they had canceled school in the county. And Jessica had texted me but i didnt see it. Annoying. But she just had me go help with a cannery.

Except then the cannery was to small so thry moved have of us to differnt things. So I spent almost two hours hanging out with Gabby and gluing cans. It was nice.

As I was leaving Kelly at the front desk told me a bunch of ny embroideries sold and she wants me to make more. So I have a Christmas break project. Im excited that people like my work. It Makes me want to make more. Which has been hard lately.

It was raining when I left. And I took a weird way to school. Just to see. And while it took a little longer, it was a nice ride. I stopped for a couple bags of flour for my class's project and went to get lunch.

I had taco bell. And listened to my podcast. And headed back out into the rain.

It was a good day with my kids. I really truly enjoyed my day. I had some girls stay with me in the class during recess to make their clay which allowed me to trouble shoot. And so I made up all the dry ingredients so we could just work as small groups to add water and mix.

And it worked out great. I had a good time helping add flour and everyone made thrir clay. So we have lots to make ornaments and things tomorrow. I hope it works and I can get everything home safely.

We fibisged up the day with a review of the quarter. We had lolly pops. They were special holiday flavors and they smelled good.

Once everyone got picked up I moped the class. And chatted with Tiffany. And headed out into the rain and went home.

I got back here and found I have a very expensive bill from 2016 and was upset and called my dad about it. He made me feel less stupid. But still I was upset. And then I got a bunch of mail about car stuff i do not understand. I just want James to do it all. But I gotts call tomorrow at least.

James got home at 730 and I was reslly glad to see his face. And then friends came. Dnd friends and then Kim from upstairs from the puppy down. And she ended up hanging out for a while and bought a bunch of my clay furbies. I was really excited. And made a post about it which lead to the discovery that I was supoised to mail a clay furby a month ago and somehow it didnt happen and I feel horrible about it!!!! So I have to make sure that gets done tomorrow. They are being real chill about it but I feel very bad!

Its been so nice having all the friends here. So much laughter. And I've been enjoying hanging out and working on small projects. I am going to get my giveaway furbies stsrted tomorrow after work. And I have my first physical therapy appointment in the morning. I hope it goes well. I want my back to stop hurting.

Im going to watch some videos and hang out. Once friends go home well go to bed. And I hope it's s good rest. For all of you as well.

Sleep good tonight friends. Stay dry.

#ootd #work #nice day #happy #monday #kids art

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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This is a heartbreaking investigation into how Donald Trump's DISGUSTING 🤢, VILE, DESPICABLE, APPALLING, and DEPRAVED behavior is trickling down in our society and having REAL LIFE EFFECTS(including suicide) on our children and young people. The FISH ROTS from the HEAD. Melania it looks like your 'BE BEST' campaign isn't working out so well. Perhaps you should start by taking your husband's phone away and removing him from public view. PLEASE READ 📖 and SHARE this investigation. TY 🙏🏻🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

HOW THE BULLY-IN-CHIEF IS TURNING AMERICA NASTIER

By Paul Waldman | Published February 13 at 4:07 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Sometimes we overestimate the degree to which a president can change a country, not just altering federal policy but also transforming our national life. But President Trump, there can be little doubt, will have as profound an effect on America as nearly any president in memory. The problem is that he’s doing it in all the worst ways.

As a new report from The Post demonstrates, across the country schools are reporting increased incidents of bullying and harassment directed at minority children in the time since Trump began running for office:

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

It’s not all kids bullying kids — some of the cases involve teachers telling minority students that Trump will deport them or saying things such as “You’re getting kicked out of my country” (and there are also cases, though much smaller in number, of pro-Trump children being bullied).

Amazing what happens when you take the most repugnant human being in America and put him in the White House.

I exaggerate — but only a bit. I’m sure there are some Americans who are more morally despicable than Trump. Serial killers, for instance. But whether you like his administration’s policies, the president of the United States is a con man, a tax cheat, an accused sexual predator and the most prolific liar in the political history of Planet Earth, among other things.

But he might have been all that and not produced this kind of bullying. In fact, it was utterly predictable, because bullying is at the core of Trump’s being — and his political persona.

When he started running for president in 2015, Trump made clear that not only was he selling an agenda of xenophobia and racism, but he also wanted people to proclaim their hatreds loudly. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he said, and he wasn’t just talking about campus speech codes. He was angry at the foundational idea behind “political correctness,” that in our daily lives we should try to treat each other with respect.

The hell with that, Trump said. Every day he offered an instruction in the liberating power of being offensive. Not only shouldn’t you let a bunch of scolds tell you what kind of language to use, you should revel in the transgressive thrill of telling other people just what you think of them.

Trump plainly believes that if they see it to their advantage, people with more power should attack, victimize and humiliate those with less power. It’s something he’s known all his life, from when he was a young man being sued with his father for housing discrimination for refusing to rent apartments to black people, to when he was cheating struggling people out of their life savings, to when he refused to pay hundreds of small businesspeople what he owed them because they didn’t have the power to fight him.

In every case the logic was the same: He had more power than them, so he did what he wanted.

This is a man who mocked a reporter for his disability and who said women who accused him of sexual assault were too ugly for him to have victimized.

A different person might ascend to the most powerful position in the world and decide not to concern themselves anymore with petty squabbles. But if anything, Trump has accelerated his feuds, increasing the frequency with which he lashes out at those who are less powerful than him. Some are public figures who may be used to that sort of thing, but others are not.

One victim after another describes the disorienting feeling of being an ordinary person and realizing that the president of the United States is going after you. Just this week, Trump decided to attack the foreperson of the jury in the trial of his friend Roger Stone.

Imagine what it’s like to be her right now. You got the notice in the mail, went to do your civic duty, and now the president is insulting you on Twitter — with the inevitable threats and harassment from his supporters to follow.

And this is critical: Trump’s amen chorus celebrates him for his own bullying and the way he encourages others to be bullies. Recall the 2017 incident in which now-Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) body-slammed a journalist to the floor. On Fox News they cheered the assault as “Montana justice,” and host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?” Trump later appeared at a rally with Gianforte and said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”

That’s the ethos of the Trump era: There are no more standards of morality or appropriate behavior or even simple politeness. There is only his power, and how you have to submit to it.

When Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair, they responded to the argument that it had nothing to do with his official duties by saying the president is a role model, so his behavior matters. They were wrong about a lot, but they were right about that.

The difference is that back then, nobody in Clinton’s party defended him for having an affair, let alone praised him for it. Today, Trump sends the message over and over that power and status should be used to punch down, mock, degrade and humiliate those you don’t like. And his legions of lickspittles laugh and cheer.

So it’s no wonder that Trump, who has the world’s biggest megaphone, has managed to spread his particular poison throughout the country, even to children. It would have a been a surprise if it didn’t happen.

*********

TRUMP’S WORDS, BULLIED KIDS,

SCARRED SCHOOLS .... THE PRESIDENT’S RHETORIC HAS CHANGED THE WAY HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN ARE HARASSED IN AMERICAN CLASSROOMS, The Post found

By Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Perry Stein | Published Feb. 13, 2020 | Washington Post | Posted February 14, 2020 |

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle- schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.

“She knows that bullying is a universal problem for children that will be difficult to stop in its entirety,” Grisham wrote in an email, “but Mrs. Trump will continue her work on behalf of the next generation despite the media’s appetite to blame her for actions and situations outside of her control.”

Most schools don’t track the Trump bullying phenomenon, and researchers didn’t ask about it in a federal survey of 6,100 students in 2017, the most recent year with available data. One in five of those children, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied at school, a rate unchanged since the previous count in 2015.

However, a 2016 online survey of over 10,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 2,500 “described specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric,” although the overwhelming majority never made the news. In 476 cases, offenders used the phrase “build the wall.” In 672, they mentioned deportation.

For Cielo Castor, who is Mexican American, the experience at Kamiakin High in Kennewick, Wash., was searing. The day after the election, a friend told Cielo, then a sophomore, that he was glad Trump won because Mexicans were stealing American jobs. A year later, when the president was mentioned during her American literature course, she said she didn't support him and a classmate who did refused to sit next to her.

“‘I don’t want to be around her,’ ” Cielo recalled him announcing as he opted for the floor instead.

Then, on “America night” at a football game in October 2018 during Cielo’s senior year, schoolmates in the student section unfurled a “Make America Great Again” flag. Led by the boy who wouldn’t sit beside Cielo, the teenagers began to chant: “Build — the — wall!”

Horrified, she confronted the instigator.

“You can’t be doing that,” Cielo told him.

He ignored her, she recalled, and the teenagers around him booed her. A cheerleading coach was the lone adult who tried to make them stop.

“I felt like I was personally attacked. And it wasn’t like they were attacking my character. They were attacking my ethnicity, and it’s not like I can do anything about that.”

— Cielo Castor

After a photo of the teenagers with the flag appeared on social media, news about what had happened infuriated many of the school’s Latinos, who made up about a quarter of the 1,700-member student body. Cielo, then 17, hoped school officials would address the tension. When they didn’t, she attended that Wednesday’s school board meeting.

“I don’t feel cared for,” she told the members, crying.

A day later, the superintendent consoled her and the principal asked how he could help, recalled Cielo, now a college freshman. Afterward, school staff members addressed every class, but Hispanic students were still so angry that they organized a walkout.

Some students heckled the protesters, waving MAGA caps at them. At the end of the day, Cielo left the school with a white friend who’d attended the protest; they passed an underclassman she didn’t know.

“Look,” the boy said, “it’s one of those f---ing Mexicans.”

She heard that school administrators — who declined to be interviewed for this article — suspended the teenager who had led the chant, but she doubts he has changed.

Reached on Instagram, the teenager refused to talk about what happened, writing in a message that he didn’t want to discuss the incident “because it is in the past and everyone has moved on from it.” At the end, he added a sign-off: “Trump 2020.”

ust as the president has repeatedly targeted Latinos, so, too, have school bullies. Of the incidents The Post tallied, half targeted Hispanics.

In one of the most extreme cases of abuse, a 13-year-old in New Jersey told a Mexican American schoolmate, who was 12, that “all Mexicans should go back behind the wall.” A day later, on June 19, 2019, the 13-year-old assaulted the boy and his mother, Beronica Ruiz, punching him and beating her unconscious, said the family’s attorney, Daniel Santiago. He wonders to what extent Trump’s repeated vilification of certain minorities played a role.

[ More than 300 Trump-inspired harassment incidents reported by news outlets from 2016-2019]

Anti-Hispanic: 45%

Anti-black: 23%

Anti-Semitic: 7%

Anti-Muslim: 8%

Anti-LGBT: 4%

Anti-Trump: 14%

[ **Note: Some incidents targeted multiple groups and, in other cases,

the ethnicity/gender/religion of the

intended target was unclear. Figures may not precisely add up because of rounding. Source: Washington Post analysis of media reports]

“When the president goes on TV and is saying things like Mexicans are rapists, Mexicans are criminals — these children don’t have the cognitive ability to say, ‘He’s just playing the role of a politician,’ ” Santiago argued. “The language that he’s using matters.”

Ruiz’s son, who is now seeing a therapist, continues to endure nightmares from an experience that may take years to overcome. But experts say that discriminatory language can, on its own, harm children, especially those of color who may already feel marginalized.

“It causes grave damage, as much physical as psychological,” said Elsa Barajas, who has counseled more than 1,000 children in her job at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health.

As a result, she has seen Hispanic students suffer from sleeplessness, lose interest in school, and experience inexplicable stomach pain and headaches.

For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago.

“Unpopular opinion,” Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. “People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.”

A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag.

“Unpopular opinion but: people that are from Mexico and come in to America illegally or at all really piss me off,” he added in a message that spread rapidly among students.

The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby.

“You’re illegal. Go back to Mexico,” she heard one of them say. “F--- Mexicans.”

Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up.

In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected. They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

— Ashanty Bonilla

She had known those boys who’d heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera.

A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck.

“Republican Trump 2020,” someone had written in the dust on her back window.

Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldn’t. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep.

Lewiston’s principal, Kevin Driskill, said he and his staff met with the boys they knew were involved, making clear that “we have zero tolerance for any kind of actions like that.” The incidents, he suspected, stemmed mostly from ignorance.

“Our lack of diversity probably comes with a lack of understanding,” Driskill said, but he added that he’s encouraged by the school district’s recent creation of a community group — following racist incidents on other campuses — meant to address those issues.

That effort came too late for Ashanty.

Some friends supported her, but others told her the boys were just joking. Don’t ruin their lives.

She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away.

After that, she began seeing a therapist and, along with the friend who defended her, transferred to another school. Sometimes, she imagines how different life might be had she never written that tweet, but Ashanty tries not to blame herself and has learned to take more pride in her heritage. She just wishes the president understood the harm his words inflict.

Even Trump’s last name has become something of a slur to many children of color, whether they’ve heard it shouted at them in hallways or, in her case, seen it written on the back window of a car.

“It means,” she said, “you don’t belong.”

Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Slover's English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school.

At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall.

“Every day was something new with immigration,” said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. “That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking.

Clark, who denies the teenager’s allegations, is one of more than 30 educators across the country accused of using the president’s name or rhetoric to harass students since he announced his candidacy, the Post analysis found.

In Clark’s class, Miracle stayed quiet until late spring 2019. That day, she walked in wearing her hair “puffy,” split into two high buns.

Clark, she said, told her it looked “nappy, like Marge off ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Unable to smother an angry reply, Miracle landed in the principal’s office. An administrator asked her to write a witness statement, and in it, she finally let go, scrawling her frustration across seven pages.

“I just got tired of it,” she said. “I wrote a ton.”

Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump — in what she thought were private messages — requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired.

“Every day was something new with immigration. That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

— Miracle Slover, referring to Georgia Clark, her former English teacher

Not always, though, are offenders removed from the classroom.

The day after the 2016 election, Donnie Jones Jr.’s daughter was walking down a hallway at her Florida high school when, she says, a teacher warned her and two friends — all sophomores, all black — that Trump would “send you back to Africa.”

The district suspended the teacher for three days and transferred him to another school.

Just a few days later in California, a physical education teacher told a student that he would be deported under Trump. Two years ago in Maine, a substitute teacher referenced the president’s wall and promised a Lebanese American student, “You’re getting kicked out of my country.” More than a year later in Texas, a school employee flashed a coin bearing the word “ICE” at a Hispanic student. “Trump,” he said, “is working on a law where he can deport you.”

Sometimes, Jones said, he doesn’t recognize America.

“People now will say stuff that a couple of years ago they would not dare say,” Jones argued. He fears what his two youngest children, ages 11 and 9, might hear in their school hallways, especially if Trump is reelected.

Now a senior, Miracle doesn’t regret what she wrote about Clark. Although the furor that followed forced Miracle to switch schools and quit her beloved dance team, she would do it again, she said. Clark’s punishment, her public disgrace, was worth it.

About a week before Miracle’s 18th birthday, her mother checked Facebook to find a flurry of notifications. Friends were messaging to say that Clark had appealed her firing, and that the Texas education commissioner had intervened.

Reluctant to spoil the birthday, Jowona Powell waited several days to tell her daughter, who doesn’t use social media.

Citing a minor misstep in the school board’s firing process, the commissioner had ordered Carter-Riverside to pay Clark one year’s salary — or give the former teacher her job back.

[A snapshot of the harassment in 2019 ( SEE WEBSITE)]

In the three months after the president tweeted on July 14, 2019, that four minority congresswomen should "go back” to the countries they came from, more than a dozen incidents of Trump-related school bullying — including several that used his exact language — were reported in the press.

Jordyn Covington stood when she heard the jeers.

“Monkeys!” “You don’t belong here.” “Go back to where you came from!”

From atop the bleachers that day in October, Jordyn, 15, could see her Piper High School volleyball teammates on the court in tears. The sobbing varsity players were all black, all from Kansas City, Kan., like her.

Who was yelling? Jordyn wondered.

She peered at the students in the opposing section. Most of them were white.

“It was just sad,” said Jordyn, who plays for Piper’s junior varsity team. “And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

Go back? To where? Jordyn, her friends and Piper’s nine black players were all born in the United States. “Just like everyone else,” Jordyn said. “Just like white people.”

“It was just sad. And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.”

— Jordyn Covington

The game, played at an overwhelmingly white rural high school, came three months after Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

It was Jordyn’s first experience with racism, she said. But it was not the first time that fans at a school sports game had used the president to target students of color.

The Post found that players, parents or fans have used his name or words in at least 48 publicly reported cases, hurling hateful slogans at students competing in elementary, middle and high school games in 26 states.

The venom has been shouted on football gridirons and soccer fields, on basketball and volleyball courts. Nearly 90 percent of incidents identified by The Post targeted players and fans of color, or teams fielded by schools with large minority populations. More than half focused on Hispanics.

In one of the earliest examples, students at a Wisconsin high school soccer game in April 2016 chanted “Trump, build a wall!” at black and Hispanic players. A few months later, students at a high school basketball game in Missouri turned their backs and hoisted a Trump/Pence campaign sign as the majority-black opposing team walked onto the court. In 2017, two high school girls in Alabama showed up at a football game pep rally with a sign reading “Put the Panic back in Hispanic” and a “Trump Make America Great Again” banner.

In late 2017, two radio hosts announcing a high school basketball game in Iowa were caught on a hot mic describing Hispanic players as “español people.” “As Trump would say,” one broadcaster suggested, “go back where they came from.”

Both announcers were fired. After the volleyball incident in Kansas, though, the fallout was more muted. The opposing school district, Baldwin City, commissioned an investigation and subsequently asserted that there was “no evidence” of racist jeers. Administrators from Piper’s school system dismissed that claim and countered with a statement supporting their students.

An hour after the game, Jordyn fought to keep her eyes dry as she boarded the team bus home. When white players insisted that everything would be okay, she slipped in ear buds and selected “my mood playlist,” a collection of somber nighttime songs. She wiped her cheeks.

Jordyn had long ago concluded that Trump didn’t want her — or “anyone who is just not white” — in the United States. But hearing other students shout it was different.

Days later, her English teacher assigned an essay asking about “what’s right and what’s wrong.” At first, Jordyn thought she might write about the challenges transgender people face. Then she had another idea.

“The students were making fun of us because we were different, like our hair and skin tone,” Jordyn wrote. “How are you gonna be mad at me and my friends for being black. . . . I love myself and so should all of you.”

She read it aloud to the class. She finished, then looked up. Everyone began to applaud.

t's not just young Trump supporters who torment classmates because of who they are or what they believe. As one boy in North Carolina has come to understand, kids who oppose the president — kids like him — can be just as vicious.

By Gavin Trump’s estimation, nearly everyone at his middle school in Chapel Hill comes from a Democratic family. So when the kids insist on calling him by his last name — even after he demands that they stop — the 13-year-old knows they want to provoke him, by trying to link the boy to the president they despise.

In fifth grade, classmates would ask if he was related to the president, knowing he wasn’t. They would insinuate that Gavin agreed with the president on immigration and other polarizing issues.

“They saw my last name as Trump, and we all hate Trump, so it was like, ‘We all hate you,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Why are you teasing me? I have no relationship to Trump at all. We just ended up with the same last name.’ ”

Beyond kids like Gavin, the Post analysis also identified dozens of children across the country who were bullied, or even assaulted, because of their allegiance to the president.

School staff members in at least 18 states, from Washington to West Virginia, have picked on students for wearing Trump gear or voicing support for him. Among teenagers, the confrontations have at times turned physical. A high school student in Northern California said that after she celebrated the 2016 election results on social media, a classmate accused her of hating Mexicans and attacked her, leaving the girl with a bloodied nose. Last February, a teenager at an Oklahoma high school was caught on video ripping a Trump sign out of a student’s hands and knocking a red MAGA cap off his head.

And in the nation’s capital — where only 4 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — an outspoken conservative teenager said she had to leave her prestigious public school because she felt threatened.

In a YouTube video, Jayne Zirkle, a high school senior, said that the trouble started when classmates at the School Without Walls discovered an online photo of her campaigning for Trump. She said students circulated the photo, harassed her online and called her a white supremacist.

A D.C. school system official said they investigated the allegations and allowed Jayne to study from home to ensure she felt safe.

“A lot of people who I thought were my best friends just all of a sudden totally turned their backs on me,” Jayne said. “People wouldn’t even look at me or talk to me.”

For Gavin, the teasing began in fourth grade, soon after Trump announced his candidacy.

After more than a year of schoolyard taunts, Gavin decided to go by his mother’s last name, Mather, when he started middle school. The teenager has been proactive, requesting that teachers call him by the new name, but it gets trickier, and more stressful, when substitutes fill in. He didn’t legally change his last name, so “Trump” still appears on the roster.

The teasing has subsided, but the switch wasn’t easy. Gavin likes his real last name and feared that changing it would hurt his father’s feelings. His dad understood, but for Gavin, the guilt remains.

“This is my name,” he said. “And I am abandoning my name.”

Maritza Avalos knows what's coming. It's 2020. The next presidential election is nine months away. She remembers what happened during the last one, when she was just 11.

“Pack your bags,” kids told her. “You get a free trip to Mexico.”

She’s now a freshman at Kamiakin High, the same Washington state school where her older sister, Cielo, confronted the teenagers who chanted “Build the wall” at a football game in late 2018. Maritza, 14, assumes the taunts that accompanied Trump’s last campaign will intensify with this one, too.

“I try not to think about it,” she said, but for educators nationwide, the ongoing threat of politically charged harassment has been impossible to ignore.

In response, schools have canceled mock elections, banned political gear, trained teachers, increased security, formed student-led mediation groups and created committees to develop anti-discrimination policies.

In California, the staff at Riverside Polytechnic High School has been preparing for this year’s presidential election since the day after the last one. On Nov. 9, 2016, counselors held a workshop in the library for students to share their feelings. Trump supporters feared they would be singled out for their beliefs, while girls who had heard the president brag about sexually assaulting women worried that boys would be emboldened to do the same to them.

“We treated it almost like a crisis,” said Yuri Nava, a counselor who has since helped expand a student club devoted to improving the school’s culture and climate.

Riverside, which is 60 percent Hispanic, also offers three courses — African American, Chicano and ethnic studies — meant to help students better understand one another, Nava said. And instead of punishing students when they use race or politics to bully, counselors first try to bring them together with their victims to talk through what happened. Often, they leave as friends.

In Gambrills, Md., Arundel High School has taken a similar approach. Even before a student was caught scribbling the n-word in his notebook in early 2017, Gina Davenport, the principal, worried about the effect of the election’s rhetoric. At the school, where about half of the 2,200 students are minorities, she heard their concerns every day.

But the racist slur, discovered the same month as Trump’s inauguration, led to a concrete response.

A “Global Community Citizenship” class, now mandatory for all freshmen in the district, pushes students to explore their differences.

A recent lesson delved into Trump’s use of Twitter.

“The focus wasn’t Donald Trump, the focus was listening: How do we convey our ideas in order for someone to listen?” Davenport said. “We teach that we can disagree with each other without walking away being enemies — which we don’t see play out in the press, or in today’s political debates.”

Since the class debuted in fall 2017, disciplinary referrals for disruption and disrespect have decreased by 25 percent each school year, Davenport said. Membership in the school’s speech and debate team has doubled.

The course has eased Davenport’s anxiety heading into the next election. She doesn’t expect an uptick in racist bullying.

“Civil conversation,” she said. “The kids know what that means now.”

Many schools haven’t made such progress, and on those campuses, students are bracing for more abuse.

Maritza’s sister, Cielo, told her to stand up for herself if classmates use Trump’s words to harass her, but Maritza is quieter than her sibling. The freshman doesn’t like confrontation.

She knows, though, that eventually someone will say something — about the wall, maybe, or about how kids who look like her don’t belong in this country — and when that day comes, the girl hopes that she’ll be strong.

______

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

______

What is your school doing to stop politically charged bullying?

A Washington Post reporter may contact you with additional questions. We will not publish your name or what you submit below without first contacting you. We offer options to securely send information to our journalists using encrypted messaging services and email. To find out how, please go to website to fill out form.

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curriculumdesign-blog · 3 years ago

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Educational Change: A 12 year reflection

Montessori Education: Benefits, Blending and Balance - A 12-year reflection

The Beginning: 2009 - 2016

I began my training and career as an educator in 2009 shortly after the economic downturn in 2008. I graduated that year with a Master of Science degree in tourism studies focusing on sustainable development for cottage industries. My passion for supporting and finding solutions for those who were marginalized played itself out in finding ways through feasibility studies and hands on activities which would get those most affected involved to take hold of their agency. The downward shift in the economy caused me to pivot towards education because it was a sound profession where I could always find employment. I preferred higher education and began to pursue studies for professorship at my local university. The recession had also affected human resources in that institution and there was a hiring freeze. I thought for sure I would never teach in an institution other than at the collegiate level. Here I am 12 years later, teaching and learning as an elementary educator with all the joy that one can experience from leaning in, listening and learning from those who are truly enlightened and untainted, 6- to 12-year-olds. I became a Montessori elementary school guide.

In the Montessori environment we are not referred to as teachers but guides. In essence, we do as guides in any setting would do, we present, follow and guide. The Montessori environment is not unlike working in sustainable development for cottage industries. They are small and in need of development and guidance towards growth and independence so that they may be successful in the wider society in which the must function. My choice of Montessori education as opposed to a traditional setting had to do with my experience as a parent who worked with my child and his friends during their elementary years. There was a difference in how each child learned and the idea that they all had one content of knowledge with one way of expressing understanding was disheartening. I quickly realized that my own child was able to move with ease while others struggled greatly. I realized, also, that there were several factors to teaching and learning and now understand that social emotional learning made all the difference. How then can each child’s needs be met and they are all expected to function at the same level? As I sought out educational approaches, I came across the Montessori method which emphasized “following the child”.

Following the child according to Dr. Maria Montessori, founder of the method in the early 1800s, it means we follow the child to get too know how they learn – what their interests are and their general social, emotional and educational patterns are. This is done through observation of the child within their environment. The second of 3 main aspects of being a guide is preparing the environment as preparation, organization in an orderly environment allows the child to explore their interests. The third is presenting the world to the child by way of lessons without opinions or judgement and economical language. The environment is beautiful, and everything is presented at the child’s level of vision and understanding of an authentic world void of fantasy and mythical creatures – talking animals and the like, particularly in the early years of the child’s development.

Children are guided to work with manipulatives which are sensory and concrete to develop their understanding of the world. As the child passes through planes of development, their needs change and they are presented with more abstract concepts. Classrooms are multi-aged, based on these planes of development which provides the opportunity for children to model behaviors of leadership while allowing the child to work with complex concepts or revert to practicing foundational concepts through academic planes without restriction.

Initial Beliefs: 2016 - 2019

My own beliefs about this type of education were that this needed to be accessible to everyone. This way of learning, the constructivist, child centered pedagogy, which sought to identify the needs of the child and attend to those needs, brought about a more peaceful accomplished individual. There was a connectivity to self and the world they belonged to as well as who they were in the world at an early age. A sense of purpose begins to take shape as children learn about themselves in an environment which seeks to provide, by the nature of the curriculum designed over 100 years ago, a multi-cultural approach to teaching and learning. Dr. Montessori designed the curriculum for the underserved and marginalized population of Italy, orphaned children with learning disabilities. Who would have imagined that today this is a curriculum that is accessible to mainly the elite in private settings?

With a desire to ensure that every child have access to a Montessori education, I embarked on finding schools that had this offering in more diverse settings. My mindset was to “save the child” from route learning and introduce a new way of thinking, doing and being. My mindset was wrong. There was no saving the child as there was no one way of learning and being. My attitude was one of certainty with the absolutist mindset, that of “This IS the way the child SHOULD learn!”. Sleeter, Action in Teacher Education, (2009) shared of Shoomer (1990), of the certainty, source and structure of an educator’s beliefs – these all change over time as you move from the novice to the accomplished stage of your professional career.

I left the Montessori environment to join a group of educators in a somewhat blended environment. Their mission was to use the Montessori method to augment their curriculum as they found aspects of the curriculum to be beneficial to the socio-emotional development of the child. In theory, this model can work and takes time, talent and skill to develop a deep understanding and appreciation of what Dr. Montessori’s vision was for child development. It was not developed to prepare a child to take a test but to take the time to gain knowledge on their terms with guidance. The challenge of balance and who the authority was for the implementation and efficacy of the method lay in the hands of the leader. If the leader’s vision for the school was misaligned, then the mission would also be misaligned for those who where not in alignment with that vision or mission. I was not aligned. My ideals were challenged, and I moved on to something new.

For 3 years following, I spent time in quasi-traditional schools of choice. This deepened my understanding of traditional pedagogy and responsive teaching and learning environments. It was teacher centered, autocratic and regimented. There were many skills gained during that time and curricula and standards for learning that provided benchmarks for teaching and learning. There was exposure to and comparison of teaching styles and how technology could enhance delivery of instruction. There was new language and understanding of educational systems which I learned on the job. There was also a limit on the time students needed to process information and an unrealistic expectation for “mastery” of a topic even when the curriculum in a box required time. There was switching curriculum every few weeks of pre-tests like throwing putty at a wall to see which one would stick. There was confusion and a lack of direction at times as teachers had to take the lead and decide how best to serve the students. There was limited time for expression or agency for students and there was burnout for teachers. Sleeter (2009) “Developing curriculum that is intellectually rich and relevant to diverse students, in contexts already furnished with a fairly prescribed curriculum, requires teachers to judge what is most worth teaching and learning and to identify of space.”. We are a group were forced to question the direction we were being directed and dissect every aspect of the myriad curricula presented and establish one based on what would be best for our student’s needs.

The Shift: Balance - 2019 - Present

There is a moment of discomfort when change is about to occur. This discomfort is destabilizing as you release hard held beliefs of what you believed was true and what is the truth. Having been in several environments and served hundreds of children and families, I questioned whether any of this effort was worth it. Reldan Nalder, psychologist, addresses this in the Therapeutic Process of Change, that there is a moment of disequilibrium which occurs as a result of an awareness that “the previous way of processing information no longer applies to the new experience. It is a state of internal conflict that provides motivation for an individual to make personal changes.”(1993).

The constant shifting of goals and vison and mission led me to believe that there would never be an opportunity to enhance curriculum let alone effect any change. Who then directs the curriculum as teachers pursue their professional endeavors? When the questions are possessed by developing teachers in Sleeters study, “Who produced this document? How is it intended to be used? By whom? What is its purpose? And Whose knowledge does it ignore, undermine or ignore? I think of my current teaching environment. Have I become an accomplished educator who questions the validity and structure of curriculums in all forms? Whether Montessori’s or any other, the question surfaces, these questions arise from a diagnostic standpoint.

Having returned to the Montessori environment and had the unique opportunity to explore both the traditional and the non-traditional spaces, the idea of balance comes to mind as a theme going forward. While the Montessori approach has a sound educational approach which looks at the development of the whole child, how much authority do guides have to alter the curriculum to make it their own? Sleeter’s case study of “Ann”, a second-year teacher found that she experienced shifts in her epistemological beliefs over time. Inclusion and exposure to the world through a multicultural curriculum is the foundation of the Montessori approach yet the curriculum’s cultural studies lessons are limited to the history of Egypt’s contribution to modern civilization. There are few if any other specific mention of other African nations, however, the benefit of this curriculum is that you can make it your own and guide the child towards the same by presenting the world through ideas and discussion and clear objectives. A balanced approach which includes rigor, accountability, freedom, agency while acknowledging the social and emotional needs of the child, acceptance of learning differences and destigmatizing neurodiversity by ridding our language of labels such as “special education”, can create a more balanced environment of guiding and learning.

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msrheyrhey · 4 years ago

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Copying this here because its behind a ducking paywall!

This article found here talks about how Asian-Americans adopted into white families can’t take off their advocacy hat, even when they are at home because their families are often still “colorblind“ to their own POC struggles. Now I want this to stay as a topic for Asain struggles, but as BIPOC adopted into a white family myself, I super relate to this to this day.

“For the last year, and especially since the devastating Atlanta-area murders on March 16, many of my Asian American friends have been sharing deeply personal, painful stories of talking with their parents and elders, pleading with them to take care, being exhorted to be careful in turn. As an adoptee, I don’t really have Asian elders in my family—or many elders at all, since the deaths of my father, grandmother and mother. Yet I’ve found myself wondering: If my adoptive parents were alive, witnessing the spike in anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S. and around the world—with Asian women the most common targets—would they be concerned about me? Would they understand why I cried when I told my own Korean American daughters about the spa shootings? Would I have reached out to them during this past hard, heavy week, or held back, uncertain of how to share my fear and rage as the only Asian in my white family?

My parents loved and would have done anything within their power for me. But one thing they struggled to do, at least fully and consistently, was to see and understand me as a Korean American woman. Acknowledging it flew in the face of everything “experts” had told them when they adopted me in the early 1980s—the adoption agency, the social worker, the judge had all maintained that it wouldn’t, shouldn’t matter. So we never talked explicitly about race when I was younger, even though I was usually the only Asian kid in every room; the closest they came were statements such as “we would have adopted you if you were Black, white or polka-dotted” and “we’re all the same on the inside.” Even after I grew up, I cannot recall having a single conversation with them about anti-Asian racism specifically. Not the “model minority” myth. Not perpetual-foreigner syndrome. Not the exotification and fetishization of Asian women. Not the history of American imperialism that is partially responsible for my birth family’s and my presence in this country.

One of the manifestations of white privilege is not having to think about it.

Often, people who’ve read my memoir will note my white family’s “colorblind” approach and ask whether this led to me thinking of myself as white. My answer is always swift, unequivocal: No, I never thought I was white. I don’t think my adoptive parents thought of me as white either, nor do I believe they imagined their whiteness would extend to me through proxy or proximity, because they didn’t think much about their whiteness at all—one of the manifestations of white privilege is not having to think about it. But they did assume that I’d be protected from racism because the world would see me as they did—their child, no more, no less—and as my race was irrelevant to them, they could not imagine anyone else caring about it either.

I’ve lost track of how many times my relatives told me, “I just don’t think of you as Korean.” But from early childhood, I understood that other people certainly did: white adults called me an “Asian princess” or asked where I was from; white boys at school chanted racist songs at me; a white girl singled me out at recess and demanded to know whether my “Asian vagina” was different from hers. While my adoptive family saw me as almost raceless and therefore safe from racists, I lived every day from the age of 7, when I heard my first slur from a classmate, understanding that my Korean face made me hypervisible where we lived—and that it could also make me a target.

The truth is that it is entirely possible to love and care for one Asian American—"your" Asian American—and not see other Asians as equally, fully human.

Since the start of the pandemic and the racist scapegoating that has persisted throughout, I’ve often thought of the many thousands of Asian American kids currently growing up in white families and white spaces. Our experiences are of course not interchangeable, but I know it can feel like a unique burden when you witness or experience racism in a kind of isolation, unable to retreat and process your rage or sorrow with people who also know what it’s like to live in an Asian body. When the constant labor of pointing out or educating others about the racism you face doesn’t necessarily stop at home. When, even within your own family, you might hear people stereotype or mock Asians, use Asian slurs. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker, who stated that the Atlanta shooter was having “a really bad day” and was found to have promoted racist T-shirts that read “COVID 19 IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA” on his Facebook profile, has an adopted Vietnamese brother. The truth is that it is entirely possible to love and care for one Asian American—“your” Asian American—and not see other Asians as equally, fully human.

Before and after the 2016 election, I tried to explain to my parents how it felt to live and raise Korean American children, their grandchildren, in a country where so many racists seemed emboldened by Donald Trump’s lies and attacks. I remember pleading with them more than once: “I need you to hear me and believe that this racism is real, and that we experience it.” I cannot say we found precisely the common ground I wanted, but at times I felt we were moving closer to it. Over the years, I’ve talked with so many other transracial adoptees who, like me, have undertaken the task of asking, sometimes begging our adoptive relatives to acknowledge our experiences; to stand with us; to challenge the racism endemic in our society as well as our own families and communities. Now, in this moment, I hope that every white parent of an Asian child is paying attention to the rise in anti-Asian hate. I hope that white people with Asian family members recognize and internalize the fact that no amount of love, good intentions, assimilation or proximity to whiteness will protect their loved ones from racism. I hope that every parent is thinking about how they will talk about anti-Asian prejudice with their children.

It’s impossible to know what my own parents might have said about this wave of hatred and violence, part of a long history of anti-Asian racism. By the time the former president began calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus,” by the time racists began shouting and tweeting (and spray-painting) the term “Kung Flu,” my father was gone and my mother’s cancer had spread, and the difficult conversations left to us were about our grief and how much we loved and missed one another. Like most everyone who has lost one parent, let alone two, I’ve had to accept that there are questions I’ll never get answers to, things we’ll never be able to settle. That my parents didn’t entirely understand or accept my racial reality will always be with me, part of my adoption story—but it’s not the most important through line of our story as a family, nor does it typically ascend to the forefront of my memories of them. They were, perhaps, vindicated in this: our love for each other was what mattered most, in the end.

Because of that love, which I’ve never doubted, my best guess is that they would have tried to follow when I drew a connection between the cresting anti-Asian hatred and the steady churn of dread and anger I’ve known over the last year. I think that the people who long tried to keep me safe would have asked me to be careful now; that the parents who never stopped worrying about me would have at least tried to understand my worry as the mother of Asian American children. At the same time, when I hear my mother’s voice in my head—as I still do, and have, nearly every day since she died in May—she is forever reminding me to trust myself, to know my value, to focus on what feels most important and life-giving and fulfilling. I know that the last thing either of my parents would have wanted was for me to despair, or live my life in fear. And so, for their sake and my own, I won’t.”

#stopasianhate

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can2016 · 4 years ago

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7 steps to start real estate investment in turkey

Real estate investing in Turkey is a business that allows you to use your money or other people's money to help you move forward. But you don't have to count on building your entire business without losing money. Even if you use the highest financial scenarios, you will still want to save cash for reserves. In this article, we will discuss together the best steps to start real estate investment in Turkey

As you know, a lot of information can sometimes work against you as a beginner. Therefore, I hope the action steps in this article give you a framework to get started quickly. And if you start, you can avoid fatigue and overcome other annoying beginners’ challenges and rely on a real estate company like Elite Homes to give you much of the experience required for real estate investment in Turkey.

But you know, there is only the beginning. Real-life is fluid, and your best plans will be tested and challenged in crafting reality. So, keep flexibility, keep learning, and let us at Elite Homes know if we can help.

Determine your financial stage

Real estate investment in Turkey is just a way to improve your financial situation. So, before we get into the real estate investing details, let's think about your overall financial picture.

Most of the new investors ultimately want to achieve financial independence. You can think of this as a mountain top where all of your living expenses are covered by income coming from real estate investments.

The basics of climbing this mountain are the same whether you are investing in real estate or something else. To get to the top of the mountain faster, you simply have to increase the savings rate. You can then invest these savings in your chosen assets, such as real estate in Turkey.

I will suggest a few specific real estate strategies that aid with your savings rate in the next section. But for now, you have to determine your place on the Financial Mountain. Are you at the bottom (as if you were a beginner)? Halfway up? Or near the top?

You want to know your current stage because depending on where you are, some real estate strategies will make more sense than others. I'll explain some of these strategies in the next step.

So, after thinking for a moment, decide which stage works best for you. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be perfect.

A real estate investment strategy

At this point, you can create a 30-page business plan that even those with an MBA will be proud of. But remember, your goal is just to start. So, let's start with something faster. We can create a large, plan later if needed.

For now, you only need to choose one real estate strategy that will help you move from your current financial stage to the next.

Starting with one specific real estate strategy does not mean that you will not have turns or even a complete change of direction later. No, you have to be flexible. But starting with just one will help you focus. This will give you the confidence to get started.

Choose your target market

With prices rising in many countries, choosing a new market is very important. It's a good thing because the market you choose can make a big difference to your bottom line. Such as the huge change brought about by the real estate investment market in Istanbul.

The best investment in the country comes with strong economies and high population density, such as Turkey. Real estate investment in Turkey has proven successful in the past five years.

Therefore, I will start evaluating the Turkish markets. If prices seem too high in some Turkish states, explore some other ideas first before looking for other locations.

Take a real estate tour with a reputable company. The suburbs of major urban areas often become affordable and reasonable for investments.

Look for smaller niches in the market as a whole. In high-priced markets like Istanbul's real estate market, outlets like small apartments, tax concessions, and notes investing can sometimes remain profitable.

This is provided by most real estate companies in Turkey, such as Elite Homes.

Real estate investment criteria

Your real estate investment criteria and others tell you what it means to have a good real estate investment. I actually recommend creating a written investment profile that you can share with potential partners, investors, and lead sources such as real estate agents in Turkey.

Your written investment profile should include descriptions of two main categories:

The goal of real estate investment in Istanbul

Target price (also known as numbers)

Your target property will become more evident when you choose a suitable place in the real estate market in Turkey as a whole or the real estate market in Istanbul in particular. means you focus on one segment smaller than the entire market.

When you choose a niche your primary goal description might look like this:

Single-family homes with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

The full price range for the target market is between $ 120,000 to $ 199,000.

Ideal properties in quiet and safe streets suitable for schools and shopping, or within Istanbul's residential complexes.

Optimal features also include a garage or other storage and usable yard.

The second category on your investment profile is perfect terms (also known as numbers) for rental properties. This will show you how to quickly identify the real estate investment numbers that matter most to you. The ideal terminology that you choose will depend on the choices you've made up to this point, but could look something like this:

Target purchase price (including pre-repairs) must meet at least a 1% rule.

The net rental income after multi-unit financing must be at least $ 100 per month per unit,

Single-family homes must have a minimum income of $ 200 per month.

The cash return from real estate investment must be at least 5%

The deduction from the full value of the property must be at least 6%.

Your standards may change over time. But choose some basic investment property criteria that you can live with right now. Then move on to the next step. If you find later that you need to tweak your criteria, you can always come back.

Collect cash

How much money will you need? How do you collect it?

The amount of cash required depends on your strategy, prices in the target real estate market, and your property parameters.

How do you find this money? Here are some ideas:

I know this is clear. But sometimes, you just need to make real estate investing counts, work for extra income, reduce other expenses from your life, and be patient until you save money.

Sell - Can you sell your car and buy a less expensive one? Do you have expensive toys that you can sell until later in your life when you are in a better position financially? How about selling a big home with a lot of equity if you're willing to downsize? Selling is one of the safest and most logical ways to raise money.

Metaphor - this one that you need to be careful with. Personally, I feel comfortable borrowing safely against long-term assets like rental properties. But personal loans, credit cards, or lines of credit used for down payments can be dangerous if things go wrong. The problem is cash flow discipline. If you borrow $ 10,000 to invest in Turkey's real estate, will the real estate investment produce enough to pay the interest? Just make sure that you can handle the extra loan payment in a worst-case scenario.

Partner - Partnership is like sharing a delicious cake. What if someone offered me a rich chocolate cake (my favorite!) At 50% off? But what if I don't have the money to buy it? Wouldn't it make sense to find a friend who had that money and split the cake with them? Now we both won. This is a partnership in short. Just be sure to communicate clearly in advance (in writing), and only work with people you love and trust.

Create a plan to find a real estate investment opportunity

Istanbul real estate good deals do not get to your place easily. Finding deals in real estate investment in Turkey is like searching for treasure. You have to flip dozens and dozens of stones before you find a hidden gem.

Periods like 2008-2011 during the Great Recession are an exception to this rule. Treasure hunt for real estate deals was much easier at the time.

In his 2016 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett described this period well:

‘’Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold. When downpours of that sort occur, it's imperative that we rush outdoors carrying washtubs, not teaspoons.’’

We should always have our washbasins ready for periods of 'gold rain'. But what about the rest of the time? During normal economic times, you have to work hard and devise a plan to get good deals for yourself. You have to remain in line with your investment criteria so that you do not succumb to hot market conditions.

Schedule your time

You know your life and your schedule better than I do. But I assume you are as busy as most people. So, here's an important question for you:

How much time can you and/or your wife or business partner go each week to work on your real estate investment project?

be realistic. But if getting started with real estate investing is important to you, also be tough with your priorities. This isn't a project forever. You will spend more time for the next few months, but later on, as you gain momentum and buy real estate in Istanbul, you will consume much less time.

So, how much time can you take? Based on my past experience helping other investors individually, you need at least 10 hours per week to give yourself little chance of success. But the more time you can stick, such as 20-30 hours, the higher your chances.

Now look at your calendar and set specific times to work on your real estate investment in Turkey and contact Elite Homes, the best real estate agent in Turkey to provide your best opportunities for real estate investment in Turkey.

#turkey #Real Estate Investment in Turkey #istanbul

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idiosyncrasy-at-its-finest · 4 years ago

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get over it

Nov. 18, 2020. spent my study hall writing this– my new thing: not proofreading! enjoy. it’s long. five pages long in google docs. good luck!

I have a tendency to overthink, to force, to meddle. Can one meddle in their own life? Apparently.

Get over it, I tell myself constantly. It happened so long ago. Don’t get hung up over this; it’s been four years. Get over it.

No. Not that it was traumatic or anything, but it was a fairly big deal to me. Not a life “event” per se, as it was a collection of experiences that fused into one regret, but it’s left its impact on me. A big one, if the numerous pieces of writing inspired by it might show.

I had a best friend. We met in fourth grade, when his best friend bet me and my closest friend at the time five dollars we couldn’t tag him. He wasn’t the fastest runner, she was a lacrosse player, and I was still full of energy and excitement. And then another class was coming out to recess and he tapped in his friend, said we’d have to tag this kid. He was short, with a cute smile, and a small scar beside… I forget which eyebrow… left or right. I forget.

He was a fast runner, the kid who ran the pacer without breaking a sweat, his carefree smile growing sharper as each competitor dropped out. The PE teacher would always have to stop the recording when it was just him running back and forth. He’d keep running. We’d clap. He’d realize it was over. He’d run to us, not even grabbing a drink of water from the water fountain. His hair would be raised and pushed back, the wind styling it.

That day in recess, I didn’t tag him. Neither did my other friend. When we got called to go back in class, I tapped his shoulder. He said it didn’t count, which it didn’t, but what did count was that I’d made a new friend.

Fifth grade, we shared the same advanced math class. When I waited in the halls, he’d pass by. And then he’d stand near me. When I stood outside a classroom for a course we didn’t share, he’d smile. At some point, he began stopping slightly when he saw me. And then he was bringing lollipops to school and giving one to me when our eyes met, smiles exchanged, and hands brushed– an exchange sweeter than candy.

One time, during recess, the others went to the kickball field. I decided to hang around on the playground. He came to me, was a little less happy than he normally was– didn’t want to play sports with his friends. He was wearing a gray dri fit shirt, I remember, and a dark pair of basketball shorts. We laughed the whole recess, and when I stepped in line to go back in, my friends teased me about us. I’d brushed them off, grinning because we’d created an inside joke. One about baseball and how my athletically-challenged self would one day be the best player the world ever saw.

We started signing each other’s things. Autographing– so that when the other got famous we could sell it, of course. Preparing each other for financial pitfalls. How kind.

Sixth grade. Open house. We were in the same class. I was excited. He didn’t even spare me a glance. I didn’t call out to him; I didn’t want my mom to see me reach out to a boy.

We became best friends, though. Our class had a ship name for us. I hated it– outwardly. Actually, in the beginning it didn’t bother me. But then my friends would point out how he teased me, how he stared when I ran my fingers through my hair (I finger-brushed my hair rather than properly take care of it– still don’t properly brush it). They suspected he liked me. I proposed to him, one day. After a photo for spirit day, when I’d stayed kneeling since I was taller than him, I pulled his arm. I stared into his eyes. Will you marry me? He said yes. And then he gave me his cheese stick at lunch to seal the deal.

And then I grew uncomfortable, because after flaunting our “relationship”, the whole grade knew. They congratulated us, and asked us when the wedding would be. So I broke it off, told him in an over dramatic fashion, hand thrown over my forehead that it’s not you. It’s me. And then he didn’t talk to me for three days. Maybe he did like me. Up until then, whenever a boy liked me, I was suddenly disgusted. But this realization, that my best friend– short, sporty, caring, funny, amazingly sweet, smart– might like me… made me giddy. And then in March of 2016, I began to like him.

Uh oh.

You see, I was a pretty strange kid. I made funny faces, I told gross jokes, I was physically aggressive. And then… and then I liked someone. I didn’t want him to see how “weird” I could be. I started acting differently. Even though we were best friends and there was no way he hadn’t already realized what a lunatic I was.

Sixth grade was also when I began to read wattpad. I wanted a guy best friend. I wanted my parents to like him, for him to crawl into my bed during cold and scary nights without it being weird, for us to be elementary school best friends turning into something more… I forced him into a mold. For what?

Our relationship turned strained. Before I left, I made him promise to always be my best friend. A desperate attempt to keep him. He agreed.

I don’t have a best friend right now. I don’t like the term, I don’t use it. Because he’s my best friend. It’s like a dying wish, but a leaving wish. Equally as important. I made a leaving wish.

I’ve since come to realize– or since manipulated the situation into one to make myself feel better– that he’s the one who broke the promise. He changed. After I moved, replies got short. Conversations turned dry. He eventually unadded me on snapchat.

So… why dwell on these unfortunate elementary school events?

My mom started watching Dawson’s Creek recently and I’ve been tuning in. It hurts. To see on screen what I’ve longed for for so long. What I longed for that ruined a friendship.

Dawson and Joey, best friends. Grew up together, sleep in the same bed. I was a military brat; I never lived anywhere longer than three years consecutively. Now, I’ve been in the country I’m in for four years, this being my fifth. I’ll be here until I graduate, making the grand total six years. Too late to make an elementary school best friend, but a highschool best friend… a guy I can talk to about anything, even sexual things (though my experiences in this field have been slim to none… they’ve actually just been none). And I almost had it. And then I got too attached again. We haven’t talked in three weeks or so. I hope it doesn’t turn into three years like it did with…

It’s too late. I was watching the show, thinking about a guy who lives in my neighborhood. The guy that both my parents like, that my mom really likes because he walks me home at night after traditional biweekly movie nights, after long walks. It’s a comfortable group of three, me, him, and another girl. For a bit, she’d insist on how cute a couple we’d be. But I didn’t like him like that. I certainly could– it wouldn’t be hard. But he deserved better than to be someone’s second choice. Or third, I suppose, if the context is me trying to find a guy best friend to intertwine my life with.

I’m too easily manipulated. Teen writings made me yearn for a specific type of friendship; my friend could easily convince me to like the sweet boy next door (but not really next door, more like a few streets up). The boy a few streets up.

Watching Dawson’s Creek has made me realize it’s most definitely too late for me to develop a relationship where we can tease each other, where when I’m changing, he takes too long to turn around because “what? Not like I haven’t seen you naked before” because we’d bathed together as babies. Too late to begin to sleep in the same bed with a member of the opposite sex, a member of the sex I’m attracted to.

I can’t have that. I won’t ever have that. Even if, when I go to college, I make a great guy friend. It won’t be the same as the highschool relationship I’ve romanticized for years now.

I sat on the floor, bum resting on a soft blue cushion, tub of Magnum ice cream cradled in hands, spoon dangling from between parted lips. I’m not going to get that. Ever. So I need to stop pining for it. Because it’s not going to happen.

But I have a neighborhood gang. A group of friends who watches a movie every other Friday, who gets together at least once a week to sit in a field and talk about life. A friend to walk to school with and a guy who breezes past us on his bike, sending an easy smile. I already have a wonderful, beautiful trio. Outside of that, I have other friends. A friend who doesn’t live in the neighborhood but that I can call without hesitation, knowing she’ll pick up even if she’s in the shower, at dinner, with other people. I have good, reliable people in my life. I don’t need a boy next door, a boy a creek down best friend. I have a boy a few streets up. I have a girl a brisk walk close. I have a girl a call away.

I have my parents, not lax enough to let me walk out the house without providing a heads up, not chill enough to let a boy in my room, not absent enough for me to do whatever I want. True, I wish I had a few more freedoms, but… I should be content with my life. I have so much.

And it hurts– to have to let go of my fantasy. Of this dream I’ve clung onto for so long my knuckles have turned white, my nails have dug into the flesh of my palms, crusted over blood surrounding fresh pools. Of this idea I’ve fallen in love with, head over heels, straight into a beautiful, soft lie. An unattainable, unrealistic, unhealthy fantasy. It’s not something I can get. Wanting it will only continue to upset me.

And why should I be upset? When I’m a few strides away from a field, from a small playground, from a bubble tea store, from school, from my friends. I don’t have a creek, I don’t have a boy who can run the pacer without panting after, who only has a light smile I pretend is just for me on his face. I have something real, somethings. I have life. My life.

I’ve come to this realization recently, that I can’t get what I’ve always wanted. Maybe that’s why I keep clinging onto my youth, because I’m hoping to fulfill some pipedream. There’s a lot of things in my life that have been affected by this unhealthy obsession.

It still hurts, like a breakup, a fresh wound. Maybe the latter would be the better comparison– I’ve never been through a proper breakup. Things that have felt like it, maybe. But not a romantic one.

Oh wait. Too late now, but before the boy a few streets up (or at the same time I became friends with him), there was another one. The guy who texted, shared memes, called to study, manipulated, rejected on Valentine’s Day. A story for another day, I suppose. But you can bet that he was also ruined because of my dream.

It still hurts. But I’m happier now– or at least on the path to get there. Because I’ve pinned down a very big problem and am trying to put it behind.

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crimsonslytherin · 4 years ago

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I’ll Be Your Reason - Prologue

Genre: Romance, Friendship, Adventure

Pairing: Draco Malfoy x F!OC (Cis/Assigned Female at birth Original Character), Harry & F!OC

Fic Rated: T (could change)

Summary: It started when they were six; Fiona gave Harry her lunch when she saw he didn’t have one. From there their friendship only grew, no matter the obstacles trying to keep them apart. She was the little sister and best friend he’d never had. When she gets her letter from Hogwarts she can only hope that all the owls around his house means Harry got one too.

(Pro) (Ch 1) (Ch 2) (Ch 3) (Ch 4) (Ch 5) (Ch 6) (Ch 7) (Ch 8) (Ch 9) (Ch 10) (Ch 11) (Ch 12) (Ch 13) (Ch 14) (Ch 15) (Ch 16) (Ch 17) (Ch 18) (Ch 19) (Ch 20) (Ch 21) (Working on updating all of these so please be patient while I work on it. ^_^)

A/N: This original fic was written starting in 2016, as of 1/29/19 I’ve been rewriting it.

Words: 2044

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, its characters or anything else you recognize from the books/movies. I do however own my OC and anything you don’t recognize unless otherwise stated.

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Fiona didn’t like the next door neighbors they moved in next door to; they were evil. They weren’t really evil but, in the eyes of a child, they couldn’t be anything but.

To put it simply, they were mean, rude and just most intolerable people you could have the displeasure of knowing. The husband worked as a salesmen at a drill-making company while the wife stayed home with their son, who was as bad if not worse than his parents.

Fiona’s mother often came home and complained about the wife making some crude remarks at the store and her father often complained about the husband as well from their brief interactions; Fiona’s parents were never ones to be judgmental about anyone and they made sure to raise Fiona to not form opinions on people before she got to know them, but it was hard not to with that family.

The couple’s son, Dudley, went to the same school as Fiona, though he was a year above her. He would often pick on her for no reason, pulling her pigtails or tripping her on the playground then laughing with his friends while she cried.

The only one that was nothing like them was their nephew that they had adopted as a baby. It was obvious the couple didn’t even like him; he was skin and bones while their son was rather chubby. Their son always had the best clothes while the nephew always wore his cousin’s hand-me-down clothes that were too big for him; he had to use the last hole on an equally too-big-for-him belt and roll up the sleeves on most of his shirts. His shoes were scuffed up and had a few holes in them; he had to wear two pairs of socks, probably also full of holes, so they didn’t fall off his feet. His glasses were held together in the middle with tape from one of the many times his cousin had punched him in the nose. While Dudley’s hair was always combed and neat – at least when he arrived at school – his cousin’s stuck up in every direction.

Fiona met Harry on her first day of school when she was assigned the seat next to his. He was hesitant to try and make friends with her knowing that once Dudley got to her she would probably avoid him like the other children did. Instead she made the choice for him when she offered him her lunch later that same day. She saw that he didn’t have a lunch and didn’t hesitate to give him half her sandwich. Well, he had a bagged lunch but no one could call bread crusts and apple peels a proper lunch. Fiona sat down next to him and pushed half her ham sandwich to him without a word. He seemed genuinely shocked by the gesture and had to ask her if she really wanted him to have it. She seemed confused but nodded with a smile and he gave her the biggest smile back. Every day since then Fiona would ask her mom for two sandwiches and would share the rest of her other snacks with him until finally her mother just started packing Fiona two lunches.

Harry was always nice to Fiona and was always the one to bring Fiona to the nurse whenever she skinned her knee as a result of being tripped or pushed down by his cousin or his four friends that were equally as mean. Them being skinnier and faster than Dudley and his gang, they were able to climb up to the top of the monkey bars out of their reach and Harry knew the best hiding spaces.

…

Life with his aunt and uncle and their insufferable son was never easy. Sometimes Harry went without breakfast, lunch and supper as punishment for the smallest of mistakes. He endured constant belittlement from his aunt and uncle equally. His cousin gave him daily Indian-burns and noogies as well as just simple pushes to the floor or into the walls. He always gave him bruises and used Harry as his own personal punching bag whenever he felt like it, which was quite often. Harry was always on his best behavior, hoping for the smallest word of praise or even just a smile. They never came.

The other children at school ignored him because Dudley and his friends would bully anyone who tried to talk to him. He always sat alone during lunch and would sit on a stump outside during recess with a book if Dudley didn’t take it from him and throw it in the mud first.

It wasn’t until he met Fiona that he felt like he finally had a friend and life wasn’t that bad. She and her parents moved in next door during his second year of primary school (around age six) and Dudley hadn’t gotten the chance to threaten her. He already picked on her before class for no reason other than she was the new kid – neither of them knew she was their new neighbor as her mother had driven her to school late. Once Dudley found out she was giving Harry lunches he picked on her even more and said his usual spiel about not talking to his cousin. Harry was sure Fiona would stop bringing him lunches and he’d lose his first and only friend just so Dudley would leave her alone but she surprised both boys when she stood up to him.

Through her tears, as she lay on the ground where Dudley had pushed her, she gave him a sharp kick to the shin causing him to fall to the ground in pain. Harry stared in awe as she stood over the large boy and vowed to be Harry’s best friend no matter what Dudley did to her. Then she stuck out her tongue at him as she made a silly face before she took Harry’s hand and brought him away.

When Harry realized that she was also his new neighbor he felt like things were starting to change for the better. He had a new friend and he could see her whenever he wanted. They often played on the playground a few miles from their houses, Fiona’s mother would drive them; Harry was used to walking as his aunt and uncle didn’t really care where he went as long as he wasn’t bothering them when he didn’t have chores to do.

…

During summer vacations the two would see each other every day, after Harry had completed all his chores and more. When his aunt and uncle would send him outside in the blistering sun Fiona would just invite him inside her house so they could play there and he could enjoy her mother’s baking.

The two were grateful that the Dursley’s never wanted to bring Harry with them when they went out – whether it was just out for dinner or on vacation for a week or two – and had one of their other neighbors, Mrs. Figg, watch him. Fiona’s parents offered to watch him instead but the two knew he’d have too much fun. Mrs. Figg would always let Fiona come over so the three could play board games or play outside anyways. Though some days the two would be stuck on the couch as Mrs Figg showed them what seemed like endless pictures of her cats. They also had an understanding that Harry was never to mention any of the fun they had or that he saw Fiona there otherwise the Dursley’s wouldn’t let Mrs. Figg watch him anymore. He was to act as if he despised going to her house.

The two only grew closer over the years. Harry would stick up for Fiona whenever Dudley and his friends would bully her and Fiona would always bring Harry food and other things he needed. Fiona wasn’t opposed to giving Dudley a good kick before the two would run away from the bullies. She’d even convince her parents to buy Harry a few knight figurines for toys that she gave to him for his eighth birthday. He was only a month older than her and always felt bad not being able to get her anything for her birthdays but she said that she didn’t mind as long as they stayed friends forever.

It was five weeks before his tenth birthday, on Dudley’s birthday, when Harry was chased up a tree by his Aunt Marge’s dog Ripper after accidentally stepping on his paw. Aunt Marge didn’t call off the dog and Harry was left stuck up in the tree well after the party went inside. It was around seven pm when Harry heard a window open behind him. He turned to see Fiona in her room. There was a tree beside the one he was in that reached her window. He carefully made his way to the other tree, Ripper barking wildly all the while, before moving to her window. She helped him inside before they shut the window, deafening the sound of the noisy dog. The two giggled before sneaking downstairs to get Harry something to eat.

…

The summer of their eleventh birthday, Fiona was outside with her jump rope when the Dursley’s came out to their car. She saw Harry come out and waved to him. He was supposed to be watched by Mrs Figg while the Dursley’s went to the zoo for Dudley’s birthday but she’d broken her leg and was in the hospital. Harry smiled and waved back to Fiona but then his uncle pulled him to the side and out of her sight. As they pulled out of the driveway Harry gave her another wave and a small smile.

Fiona was looking out her bedroom window when they got home later that night. She saw Harry’s aunt leading a soaking wet Dudley to the house and Harry’s uncle pulling him by his hair after them. She wanted to go in and save him from that horrible family but she was only a kid.

…

When Fiona got her letter a week later she was overjoyed. Her father was a wizard and her mother was, what she learned to be, a muggle making her a half-blood. She had learned she was a witch when she was about seven and her parents made her swore never to tell anyone she didn’t know was also a witch or wizard, and that unfortunately included Harry. There were many times she wanted to help Harry but she didn’t know how to do any magic and her parents told her she wasn’t allowed to anyways. There were a few times if she concentrated hard enough she could make Dudley trip over nothing or make his pants rip.

Fiona was so excited to learn she would be going to a magic school until she realized that meant she wouldn’t see Harry at school ever again. She secretly hoped that maybe Harry would also get a letter but she couldn’t just go and ask him. Magic was supposed to be a secret kept from muggles and it’s not like she’d be able to get past his aunt and uncle to ask him anyways.

Then she started to notice the owls that started to cover the house. Each day a new owl showed up until the Dursley’s roof, car and lawn as well as the nearby telephone poles were covered in owls. Her father told her that owls were a wizard’s way of sending letters. That was how she’d gotten her letter and how other first years get theirs. Fiona knew then she wouldn’t be leaving Harry but she also knew his aunt and uncle would probably never allow him to go, hence why there were so many owls covering their property. She knew eventually Harry would get his letter and she’d be able to show him hers.

Then came the day they suddenly packed up and left on an impromptu vacation. She watched as they packed up their car before they all got in. Harry looked out the window and saw Fiona in hers. He gave her a sad smile as she waved to him. She saw Dudley hit Harry over the head before she watched the car drive away.

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A/N: If you want an actress to imagine Fiona as (how I see her in my head) I imagine a younger version of Katie McGrath (Morgana from Merlin)

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(Next Chapter)

#Harry Potter FanFiction #Draco Malfoy x OC #Fanfiction #Movie & Book Canon #Slight Canon Divergence #I'll Be Your Reason

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