#ignore the math I was studying for circuits

[no-13s-alt-account]

Some messy freehanded doodles of the design @/ask-a-hiding-jester made for me

Ktiy…

[zeroar]

Autism and Decisiveness

Pretty quickly, today's algorithm decided to put two posts about decision-making and autism in front of me, so here we go with that.

First, the two posts. One was a TikTok from @ morgaanfoley which I tangent'ed off with the very first example on "favorites"...

The second was a post compiling some responses to a tweet from @ BurleyMariah:

View on Twitter

Anyway, I've written about these things before in different contexts, so I'll post here to combine some points... Also, the following post got super long, so I'll put the TLDR up top:

Autism (and some other neurodivergencies) and Decision-Making

The slightest increase of selection-criteria and number of choices results in making it impossible to have a "best choice". This is a mathematical fact, thus true for any neurotype (though more likely to be ignored by allistics).

Neurodivergent memory (lethomathica) and monotropism means we are more likely to lack context we would want to have for decisions.

Neurodivergent persons are more likely punished by others for decisions they make (and have a history of being punished for decisions made in the past whenever they have not provided a choice acceptable to others). (With autism and trauma, this tends to lead to seeking the "best choice" because "surely they cannot argue with the best possible choice that is clearly the best" but (1) means there is rarely a best choice and never a consistent method of picking that best choice and (2) means we regularly overlook context and information we do not have access to and this ignores the fact that many frequently do have an issue with a choice even if it is better in every relevant way).

The answers people look for to questions (even seemingly simple ones) are not the literal answers to the questions but instead what they think the answer to the question means. This is true even for autistic questioners and answerers (especially any who mask) but reaches absurd levels of "subtext" when done by allistic individuals.

First!

There is a very relevant fact that I'll try to spare you from the intricacies of but it applies regardless of neurotype: Even if you are ranking objective qualities, if there are more than two things to rank, it is impossible to have a consistent "best choice" unless one quality is the only one that matters or one thing wins every quality.

(This is a consequence of something called "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" which you hopefully would learn about in a math or social studies units on election systems. More specifically, Arrow's states that there's no best method to make a choice, not that it's impossible a specific choice isn't the best choice in a particular instance).

Fun autistic tie-in: monotropism allows a lot of autistic people to actually have consistent "best choices" (best choice for us), presumably because there is a narrower range of qualities which are more important to us when judging a selection. This can help explain some of our sensibilities regarding autistic same foods and our common immersion into fandoms or rewatching or repeating similar experiences.

Second!

Neurodivergent memory is a thing. I refer to all neurodivergent memory under the umbrella of "lethomathica" (modeled after tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, "lethologica" but replacing words—"logica"—with knowledge—"mathica").

Although I developed the term lethomathica to refer to what I saw more as an AuDHD/ADHD thing, it wasn't long before I realized that PTSD and autism had their own memory issues that were pretty related. Namely, extremely vivid memories whose access is not always in control of the person with the memories.

Monotropism can partially explain the accuracy and detail of the memories for both autistic persons and trauma survivors (we know that knowledge circuits get reinforced with "deep learning" and both monotropism and trauma is "deep learning" on demand). The access to those circuits might be narrowly defined though. Sure, it's as deep as the ocean once you get to them, but you have to go through a wilderness trail to get to the shore in the first place.

Borrowing the language of PTSD, the "trigger" to access a knowledge circuit, the connection from everyday memories to the specific knowledge needed, isn't what was reinforced. The knowledge circuit is what was reinforced, so even if you are able to recall literally every detail of an event or topic or specific knowledge once you have access, the access may be hidden or obscured.

(I should mention, the relation between learning and trauma are my own theories. The theories on learning come from reading, research, and my experience as an educator, but connecting the theories on learning to trauma comes from me. I don't see how they aren't related looking at what we know about learning and what we know about trauma, but I've had people complain and I want to be clear where things come from. As with all information about neurotypes and mental health, if something is useful for your life, then I encourage you to use it, and if it isn't useful, then I encourage you to move to something that is useful. The important thing is your health and wellbeing.)

As an example, I recently rediscovered The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest via an offhand reference to shadow puppets, this then led to me not only re-remembering things like my crush on the character of Jessie Bannon and re-remembering specific episodes that made an impression on me, but also re-remembering more Toonami shows I had forgotten (or shows I associate with Toonami) like the show, ReBoot. Now, I maintain a pretty OK connection to Toonami shows in my brain, but this connection is primarily to anime like Dragon Ball Z and Cowboy Bebop. I needed the additional context of American-produced shows and bad (by modern standards) CGI to go down the rabbit hole of ReBoot.

Aside: Reading about the reaction of classic–Jonny Quest fans to the character of Jessie Bannon (spoiler: she's ostensibly a girl) in 1996 really gave me déjà vu to Star Wars reboot with Rey. Or I guess, déjà rêvé? Since the timing is backwards?

Additional aside: any other autistic persons used to experience déjà rêvé to the point they thought they had prophetic dreams? …There's a reason why autism is related to chuunibyou, but that's a different post.

None of these are my "favorite" animated show—though Real Adventures probably was at the time it aired for child-Me and Cowboy Bebop would rank high on any complete list of favorites even for present-Me—but both give me context into who I am as a "fan". Jonny Quest perfectly set me up for monster-of-the-week shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural and Cowboy Bebop is just a masterpiece that I'd be extremely disappointed to find out I excluded from a favorites list even if it wouldn't take the top spot (or maybe it would? I'm not going to do the analysis when I know that Arrow's is there to tell me there's no reliable way to select my favorite along with years of trying to rank things only to find out that my opinion was different from past-Me's opinion and I almost certainly would forget a show I shouldn't and wouldn't want to forget). Cowboy Bebop would have set me up to more enjoy Firefly if that particular IP wasn't so transient and ephemeral and did set me up to enjoy Serenity even without Firefly.

This restriction of available context—having relevant knowledge that could help us make better decisions—contributes to us encountering many scenarios where we make a decision and then get punished for that decision. These scenarios are all the more tragic because the relevant information was in our heads somewhere, we just didn't access it in time.

…end of example.

Third!

CPTSD (Complex PTSD), the neurodivergent accompaniment—though maybe obbligato is more accurate—colors our decision making in ways we commonly overlook. When I talk about being "punished" for a decision, sometimes I mean in the sense that we didn't make the ideal choice, but, all too frequently, we are literally punished for our choices. Maybe it's us being mocked or ostracized, or maybe it's outright rejection or denial of our choice. In those cases, hesitating to make a choice might be the safest choice of them all.

Any marginalized population gets repeatedly undermined merely as a function of living within a larger population. The popular ADHD number batted about is that by the age of 12, an ADHDer will receive 20,000 additional negative comments about themselves than a non-ADHDer will.

Based on that estimate, if a non-ADHDer receives one negative comment a day, an ADHDer receives six negative comments a day. How many of those are about decisions the ADHDer made where they were not expecting pushback?

(There are about 4,000 days a twelve-year-old has lived; 20 thousand additional negative comments / 4 thousand days = 5 additional negative comments per day).

If you give us a punishment when we do make a decision, that makes it that much more difficult to make a decision the next time. The question may be "What's your favorite movie?" but there are "safe" answers that we can get caught up trying to anticipate and provide. People like to say "honesty is the best policy" but, like most things allistic people say, that tends to just be lip service… but sometimes it's not lip service and either way they're going to make up their minds about who we are as a person regardless of the "truth" or accuracy of their judgements even when viewed from their own perspectives. Then they'll just get mad at us for presenting the way we did when it led them to believing something that wasn't true even if what we presented was truth and they interpreted it as lies.

I'm getting a little long-winded, so let's call it with the next one:

Fourth! Lastly! Everything must go? Questions are onions? Kind of?

Questions have layers. Even between autistic questioners, very rarely is the question simply, "What do you want to eat?"

Food has baggage, not just nutrition and taste—though both of those are relevant—but the baggage of prep, cost, time, and more. I may want to eat pizza or I may want to eat macaroni and cheese, but both of those are likely to make me sick in any substantial quantity so I definitely cannot have one for lunch and the other for dinner. Then there's the question of do we have clean dishes? Do we have ingredients? Do we need to brave the grocery store or a crowded restaurant? How consistent is the restaurant and what factors affect their consistency? Do they know what "extra hot" means or do they judge how hot my latte is by vibes alone? How nice are the people I have to navigate? Are there robot clerks? How accessible is everything? How noisy is everything? What sort of looks will I get if I go there? How safe is it? How likely am I to be pulled over by a police person for my existence on the way?

"Would you rather go to a party or a library?" Trick question punishment game! Library means you're autistic even if the last party you went to was at a bookshop and had fluffy, friendly cats to pet or the last library you went to was a raucous, sensory nightmare where no one followed the rules but somehow you still got people tsk'ing you and complaining.

Even less obvious trick questions result in punishing desirable qualities. "Gullible"? Oh, you meant "trusting one's friends"?

"Are you ticklish?" typically means, "I'm going to put my hands on you now no matter whether you reveal a 'weakness' or you claim otherwise."

So yeah.

Thanks for reading! I post my more off-the-cuff things I have to say here on Tumblr (since the last primarily-text-based social media site I enjoyed died) but follow me other places in case this particular site goes further down the tubes. Here's all of my sites probably:

LinkTr.ee/zeroar

[yoshimonster]

Blog #6: Nothing Happened & My Life Remains Exactly Where It Was

So yeah, this title is extremely disappointing and I feel like I’m logging on a bit late as well to tell you that this round of results was good and bad. It was good in that the first third-year subject I’ve taken I received over 75% for the exam I did! And then you have my failing maths and circuit grade, for which I do have a chance of doing my circuit exam again and I really need to bust my tail to make this happen. I also yet again will have to take maths in the foreseeable future (most likely next year) because that one was a bomb and half. I have no context of this situation and can only imagine that it will be absolutely horrible. Similar with circuit, but I did get somewhat of a breakdown at the very least so I’m thankful for this.

Otherwise, additional shows for Taylor Swift Eras Tour got added so there will be more chance tomorrow to get tickets and I am quite overwhelmed with just the rollercoaster of emotions I’m experiencing these days. It’s just sadness and happiness in some random package with a whole lot of making your nose bleed seasoning. I have no idea what this is right now – literally it’s miserable and magical type of a feeling this time. I’m also going to be waking up early and studying probably outside my room for this circuit exam, then going to spiderman tomorrow to maintain a semblance of normality/talk to friends I guess. I really don’t think I’m the best to socialise with right now – but it’s fake it till you make it type of an everyday routine.

Family are also in a very weird mood right now, they do have that base level of disappointment, which I can’t really blame them for, but they are also experiencing these mixed emotions to a lesser degree than me. They honestly are trying their best and I should definitely be more understanding/aware of everything. But I remember (and this is a bit of Devil’s Advocate just a disclaimer), when I went on an overseas trip earlier this year and I was also a bystander to someone much younger than me going through really rough times with their family trying to support them but not being fully able to, that cut really deep. I remember almost feeling a sense of out of body sadness on the behalf of another person and I could feel the palpable pain of people trying to help this person. It made me think of my family dynamics quite a lot. And also really acknowledge the fact that, when others experience really rough times it is extremely tough to sit through and support them but when you yourself go through pretty self-induced tough times … yeah there is nothing quite as soul-crushing as that. It is a really draining experience and honestly so hard to explain to those who haven’t gone through it with literal long-term negative consequences effecting pretty much all parts of life. I’ll give an example because perhaps the above is a bit vague, like someone who drinks alcohol to an unhealthy degree, eventually gets liver cancer in the late future and now has to pretty much change their entire lifestyle to accommodate for a problem that could have been quite highly potentially prevented. I believe that this all sort of happens during your elderly years, when literally all the health things you neglect when younger all catch up at the same time – potentially the same type of more (hopefully) accomplished self-regret, although I guess this is unavoidable at that stage in life though.

This whole post was existential and dark. Uh, hope it didn’t make you guys too depressed. I don’t think it’s the best time to elaborate on other random things cause that was just a huge paragraph to read – with a lot of content inside it. Hope you guys have/had a great day – we’ll also ignore the gifs this time around as well to honour this ramble just existing out there.

-yoshimonster-

[thewinedark]

Any suggestions/inspiration for a STEM-focused, dark academia aesthetic? I'm something of a reformed humanities student finishing an engineering degree this time around.

I think STEM in Dark Academia is an underappreciated aesthetic. The humanities seek to understand what it is to be human, and this is a complex venture indeed. But studying STEM means you seek to understand the world around you. And my God, are there mysteries to be uncovered. Let’s go down the list together, shall we?

SCIENCE.

Latin words fall from your lips as easily as a prayer, and isn’t there piety in this? Devotion, worship? There must be, for you to be able to dig your hands into the breathing body of the world around you and have it speak back. Messily scrawled chemical equations are practically tattooed onto your arms and hands, and sometimes you wake with the molecular structure of a human red blood cell drawn carefully on your heart with no memory of putting it there, but it moves with the pulse of your heart. Bubbling beakers and plumes of emerald, cobalt, violet flame. Faded lab coats. Hair cut short or pulled back neatly, not a single tendril hanging down. Dirt under fingernails, sleeves rolled up and out of the way. You know poisons, toxins, you know the pump of blood through arteries, you know how close we are to death, and you know how it feels to hold the hand of human long dead, still cold from the cooler. Death hates you, because you are helping humanity evade it.

TECHNOLOGY.

Lines and lines of code stare back at you from the over-bright screen of your monitor. You know, you know that we could be more, that the future is a few keystrokes away if only you can organize your tumbling thoughts and the wall of symbols in front of you. You like the way robots move; tiny, carefully planned, yet oh so jerky motions that can’t help but remind you of when a baby deer takes its first quivering steps. You think humans were like this once, in the beginning. You think the movement in a motor resembles the inner workings of a human heart. You imagine the veins that pump blood through your body as wires on a circuit board delivering electricity from one place to another. Leather shoes laced as tightly as possible, tiny blueprints doodled on the soles. Bronze bells hanging from a bedroom window, a crumbled silk shirt. How far can you push at the boundaries of what is possible before something breaks? Will it be you or reality that gives first?

ENGINEERING.

What is it about the smoothing of clay into shapes that makes humanity stop and say, “This must be what it feels like to be God”? How much more can you feel it, with the power in your fingertips and in the corners of your mind to make things humans could never do? To push civilization past its breaking point and remake it anew, better, stronger, more than God ever did? What is the difference between man and machine, and should you even care in the first place? You are like God alright, you are participating in something divine, something holy. You double check every equation and think about what it means to be alive. You decide that, in the ever moving cogs of this great clock, you will be the first piece that moves, the one that pushes the others to succeed. Pencils stabbed into messy buns, lipstick stains on pale coffee cup rims. Your eyes are sharp and focused, but your thoughts are ever moving and desperate with desire to create, to bound forward into the future you are oh so carefully envisioning, every piece laid out and pinned down within an inch of its life. Children are starving, the world is burning, and you can do something, you can fix this, because if you don't, who else can? Who else will?

MATHEMATICS.

What is math? A meaningless formal game. Above the door at Plato’s Academy were inscribed the words, “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” How can it be that both are true? A secret language exists that no one is born into, but is available to all willing to learn. Astronomy, the constant ever cycling of the universe around us, our own home a puzzle piece in a cosmic dance. Meandering lines of equations that are beautiful, beautiful, because you know what they mean and they speak to you, they sing. You write them with calligraphy pens and hang them above your desk, they are as much an expression of the human condition as a Picasso; show our creativity more than a Monet. Hands dirty from dragging them over cramped pages of numbers and graphite dust, equations traced into the foggy glass of your favorite coffee shop, messy hair and bitten down nails, math pun t-shirts under tweed blazers, the theory of relativity scrawled sloppily on your knee, the world around you the sum of shapes and numbers and you can see it, you can hear it.

STEM in Dark Academia is nonstop in its restlessness. There is always more to be discovered, further to push, limits that can and will be broken. There is a darkness to that beauty, a madness that permeates the cracks of every field. A historian could have told you not to make the atom bomb. A scientist can’t help themself from seeing how much destruction is possible.

[imaginetonyandbucky]

Keeping Me Alive

Chapter 9: Never Too Late

by @dracusfyre

The answer turned out to be six weeks. Six weeks of bluffing through phone calls, six weeks of faking it when Stane came by to check his progress, six weeks’ worth of “still trying to get the math to work out” and “unexpected difficulties.” He’d handed over the updated prototypes to the miniature arc reactor two weeks ago, though he’d made sure to transpose some numbers deep in the schematics to give them some trouble until they figured out the mistake. He could see the frustration growing on Stane’s face and in his voice, and each time it happened his stomach swooped with fear and he considered giving in. But each time he managed to kept his mouth shut; each time he told himself, maybe tomorrow, but not today. He knew he couldn't keep stalling forever though, and that knowledge was a lead weight in his stomach every time he woke up.

The night his time ran out, Tony was nursing a glass of whiskey and staring at the fire in the fireplace, thoughts far away. The sound of his door unlocking made him jump and his heart was still racing from adrenaline when he saw Stane open the door. It started beating double time when he saw that for the first time in weeks, Stane was in a good mood.

“Good evening, Tony,” Stane said cheerfully as he closed the door behind him.

Tony had to swallow twice before he could speak. “Stane,” he said, and set his whiskey down on the coffee table when he saw that his hands were shaking. Stane in a good mood was much more terrifying than Stane in a bad one.

“I just swung by to check in and see how you were doing,” Stane said, and Tony watched him warily as he approached, noticing that Stane hadn’t taken off his coat or his shoes, like he wasn’t planning to stay long. He had no idea what that meant, but a change in routine was never good.

“I sent an email update yesterday,” Tony said, and he had. He’d pointed out a lot of problems in the current suit design and had made suggestions while managing to not actually give any solutions. It had taken him hours to write something that spectacularly unhelpful and he had been perversely proud of it.

“Yeah, I saw that email,” Stane said, putting his hands in his pockets as he looked at the fire as well. He picked up the poker and moved some of the logs around and the fire flared, reflecting red and orange on Stane’s skin. “But you know, when I was reading it, I kept getting the feeling that you were holding out on me.”

“No,” Tony said automatically, palms starting to sweat. “I’m not. I – I wouldn’t.”

“You see, that’s what I keep telling myself,” Stane said. When he turned to face Tony, the iron poker was still in his hand. Tony’s eyes fell to it and he swallowed thickly. He wanted to run, but his limbs were frozen as Stane came closer. “But then I think, Tony miniaturized the arc reactor after six months in a cave, something Howard couldn’t do in forty years.” Stane lifted the poker and set the tip of it against the arc reactor, pressing Tony back against the couch. He gasped at the pain and pressure as Stane started to lean on him, feeling like the arc reactor casing was squeezing the air from his lungs. “And this, this mechanized suit thing, isn't half as complicated as that. So I have to ask. Are you holding out on me?”

Tony stared up at Stane, who was looking down at him with a sort of patient indifference while Tony struggled to breathe. His breaths were coming fast and quick as he started to panic, and he kicked out at Stane, trying to make him back off. He grabbed at the poker and tried to push it away from him but Stane just leaned harder, the tip of the poker screeching as it etched a line in the protective glass of the arc reactor. Tony knew in that moment that Stane was fully prepared to kill him if he didn’t get an answer he liked and with that knowledge, he suddenly realized that he didn’t care. So he tightened his jaw against the pain, met Stane’s eyes, and stopped struggling. Kill me, he dared Stane with his gaze, since he couldn’t breathe to speak. Fuck you. I'd rather die.

And that was when Stane took a step back and threw the poker to the side, the ring of it against the marble floor echoing loudly. “I was afraid of this,” he said with a sigh. “Get up.”

As soon as the pressure was gone, Tony sat forward and curled over his knees, raggedly sucking air into lungs that felt bruised, each breath like a knife in his chest. Pain radiated out from the arc reactor, pulsing in time with his heart. He was staring sightlessly at the rug at his feet, spots crossing his vision as the need for air fought with the tight bands constricting his chest, when he heard Stane make an impatient noise and felt him grab the back of Tony’s shirt.

“I said get up,” Stane said irritably, pulling him off the couch. Tony staggered to his feet, hand on the arm of the couch as he steadied himself. “Let’s go. You need to see something.” He shoved Tony towards the door and Tony stumbled, almost falling on the way to Stane’s car, the concrete of the driveway scraping his bare feet.

“Where are we going?” Tony finally managed as the pain in his chest subsided to a dull ache.

“You’ll see soon enough,” Stane said. Tony sat very still and quiet in the passenger seat for the rest of the ride, fear keeping his throat closed tight as he tried not to draw Stane’s attention. It felt like another blow to the arc reactor would break him in half, split him open right down the middle like a log, and he wouldn't be able to keep from spilling every secret he’d been trying to keep.

After a few minutes of driving, Stane turned on the radio. The sound of a conservative talk show filled the dense silence in the car, an incongruous counterpoint to the tension that had Tony’s hands clenched into fists in his lap. They drove for over an hour before Stane pulled off the highway, then they spent another hour on back roads before pulling up to a back entrance of the LA port facilities. Stane showed his drivers license to the guard at the gate, and after studying it for a moment the man saluted and said “Heil Hydra” before buzzing them through. They parked at one of the dozens if not hundreds of anonymous warehouses that lined the shipyard, with only a number on the side of the building to distinguish it from the others. A keycode and fingerprint scan opened the door, which led to a blank hallway with a concrete floor and corrugated metal walls. The place was almost ominous in its banality. At the far end was another door, and Tony knew that whatever was on the other side of this was what had Stane in such a good mood.

“Here we go,” Stane said as he opened it. Tony reluctantly followed him through it, warily studying the room as he stepped inside. One side of the room was lined with hooks where body armor, helmets, and other gear hung, with a wooden bench lined up in front of a wall of lockers. In the far corner was a large munitions locker filled with rifles, handguns, and ammo cans. On the back wall of the room was what looked like an ancient upright hyperbaric chamber, rounded glass and blackened steel with a variety of cords and hoses running to it. Computers filled up most of the space in the middle along with a large metal machine, and on the third wall crates with the Stark Industries logo were stacked up almost to the ceiling.

And in the center of the room, Tony finally realized, sat the Winter Soldier. Tony felt his face go slack with shock, because this was the Soldier as Tony had never seen him: stripped of his weapons and bare-chested, no face mask or goggles. If it wasn’t for the metal arm Tony wouldn’t have even known who he was looking at, and the surprise seemed to short-circuit Tony’s normal seething hatred. The Soldier was sitting in a heavy metal chair that was haloed with some sort of machinery, staring straight ahead while white-coated technicians moved around him, checking the device and looking at something on the computers that were hooked up to the chair.

“Come on,” Stane said, and started towards him. When Tony didn’t follow, feet rooted to the floor with dread, Stane grabbed his arm and dragged him forward. They stopped about ten feet away from the chair, just far enough away that they weren’t going to disturb the work of the technicians but close enough that Tony could almost count the stubble on the Soldier’s jaw.

“Get a good look,” Stane said. He put his heavy, meaty hand on the back of Tony’s neck, keeping his head facing the Soldier, as if Tony could drag his eyes away from the man in front of them. As they’d approached, the Soldier’s eyes had flickered towards them, studying them. They lingered on Tony’s face for a long moment, and a slight line appeared between his eyebrows before he looked away. Tony noticed, incongruously, that his eyes were an icy blue, almost gray, but were strangely vacant as he stared across the room and ignored the activity around him, just like he always did with Tony. Without his normal tac gear, Tony could see that the metal of the arm went well into his chest; ropy, thick keloid scars marked the boundary between skin and metal.

That was also when Tony noticed the restraints on the Soldier’s arms, binding him to the chair.

“What-“ Tony started, but Stane squeezed him by the nape of his neck and shook him slightly to silence him.

“See, you seem to think death is the worst thing we can do to you,” Stane said into his ear. “Or torture. Pain and death, that’s all you think we can do. Kill you, kill your friends, blah blah blah. Right?” When Tony didn’t move, too stiff with fear, Stane put his hand on the back of Tony’s head and forced it up and down in a parody of a nod. “But it’s not. You see, with this machine, we can take your mind, pour it into a blender and,” at this, Stane got close enough that Tony could feel his breath, making his skin crawl, “pour whatever we want back in.”  Stane straightened. “Watch.”

Stane went up the Soldier and took a chair from one of the technicians so that he could sit with his face level to the Soldier's. “What’s your name?” he asked him, and the man’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. After a moment he just shook his head. “It’s James,” Stane said. “Your name is James Barnes and you were born in Brooklyn, did you know that?” The Soldier shook his head again. Stane threw a smirk over his shoulder at Tony before turning back to the Soldier. “Mission report,” he ordered.

At this, the look of confusion cleared. “Level 9 target eliminated. All witnesses eliminated. Package retrieved. All combatants returned to extraction point with minimal injuries. No damage sustained to Hydra property,” the Soldier reported. His voice was softer than Tony expected, but gravelly with disuse.

Stane turned to Tony and said, “Did you want to ask him any questions?” When Tony only shook his head, Stane frowned. “Spoilsport,” he complained, but he stood and gestured for Tony to take his place in the chair. Tony stepped forward reluctantly, an awful sense of dread making his limbs heavy. It wasn’t cold in the room but Tony felt a chill anyway, almost deep enough to make him shiver.

“Stane, please,” Tony said, not even sure what he was pleading for. Stop. Don’t make me do this. He didn’t even know what was going on, but something was deeply wrong here and it was making Tony feel a bone-deep terror that he hadn’t felt since he’d woken up to see Stane at his kitchen table when he was 18 years old.

“Sit,” Stane ordered, and shoved Tony into the chair. Now Tony was close enough to see the darker line of blue that circled the Soldier’s irises and the chapped skin of his lips, the cleft in his chin and the straight line of his nose. The Soldier was staring at him, and once Tony met his eyes he couldn’t look away. “Do you know who this man is?” Stane asked him, and after a moment of hesitation, the Soldier shook his head. “This is Tony Stark,” Stane said. “Remember that.” As the Soldier nodded once, Tony heard Stane ask the technicians, “Is everything ready?”

“Yes, sir.” At that, one of them came forward and put a hand on the Soldier's shoulder, pushing him against the back of the chair. The machinery that surrounded the chair began to hum as it lowered into position. The whole time, the Soldier’s eyes never left Tony’s, which is why Tony could see the exact moment when the blankness sharpened and turned into fear as he realized what was happening. A bite guard was forced into his mouth, and Tony could see his hands clench into fists and strain against the clamps binding him to the chair. After a moment a headset came down to surround the Soldier’s head, forcing it back until he was looking at the ceiling. Until now, he had been almost completely silent, but as the machine whirred to life, Tony heard a strangled whimper and saw the Soldier try to flinch away from the metal that was covering his face.  Tony closed his eyes and tried to turn his face away but Stane was behind him and forced his head forward.

“Watch,” Stane said. “Or I’ll make you flip the switch.”

Tony opened his eyes. A technician glanced towards Stane and must have gotten the go-ahead because he looked down at the panel in front of him and activated the machine. There was the sound of electricity buzzing and the Soldier jerked, screaming. The tendons of his neck stood out from the strength of his screams and they echoed off the metal walls, burrowing deep into Tony’s ears until he thought he’d hear the ring of them for the rest of his life. He watched as the Soldier's back bowed and his body convulsed, feeling like he was going to throw up. The sound of electricity cycled louder and louder, and the Soldier kept screaming even as his voice grew ragged, until finally the machine stopped and the room fell silent. The Soldier went limp, panting, as the headset lifted off of him and he was allowed to sit up again. His face was pale and his hair soaked with sweat, and he shivered in the aftermath, still twitching slightly.

“Hey,” Stane said, snapping his fingers at the Soldier. After a second, the Soldier focused his gaze on Stane. “What’s your name?” The Soldier's brow furrowed as he thought, and after a moment he shook his head. “What’s his name?” he asked, gesturing to Tony. The Soldier glanced at Tony, features blank with unrecognition. He shook his head again, and Stane slapped him. The sudden sharp noise made Tony jump. “I told you to remember,” Stane said sternly, and the Soldier swallowed but still shook his head after a long minute. “Fine. Give me a mission report.” The Soldier's agitation just got worse, and he shook his head again.  “Release his restraints,” Stane told the technician, then took a pistol from the small of his back and handed it to the Soldier. “Now take this apart and put it back together.” Looking relieved to finally get an order he understood, the Soldier's hands flew over the gun, and in moments it was pieces, all the way to the hammer and slide release spring, then it was back together, locked and loaded. Stane smiled approvingly and said, “Now unless you can tell me what your name is, I want you to point the gun at your temple and-“

“Stane!” Tony shouted as the Soldier's hand started to move.

“Yeah, I think you get the point,” Stane said. He took the gun out of the Soldier's unresisting hands. “No use beating a dead horse.” With a painful grip under Tony’s arm, he pulled him out of the chair to stand facing him. “You do get the point, right?” Stane said, picking a piece of lint off Tony’s shirt and flicking it to the side. “If not, let me make it crystal fucking clear. If you think you can take your secrets to your grave, that you can defy Hydra and there’s nothing we can do about it, you’re wrong. All we gotta do is stick you in that chair, give you a few targeted pulses of electricity to your hippocampus and neo-cortex, among others, and you’ll do anything. I. Say," he said, finger tapping the arc reactor for emphasis after each word.

Tony stared at Stane and absolutely believed him. Whatever happened in that chair wasn’t just about pain, it was about erasing; whoever the Soldier was - James, if that was really his name and not just something Stane made up – had been before, Hydra had erased him so thoroughly that not even his name remained, just the Soldier. Tony tried to imagine the terror of that, of having his memories and his personality and his will taken from him, every bit of him laid bare while Hydra picked over what they wanted and discarded what they didn’t. “I understand,” Tony managed.

“Good!” Stane said with a smile. “So when I say, ‘design me a fucking mechanized suit, Tony,’ what are you going to do?”

“Design the suit.”    

“Right answer.” Stane put his arm around Tony’s shoulders and led him towards the exit. “Let’s get you home.”

Tony was silent the whole way. Stane, on the other hand, was still in a great mood, switching talk radio for golden oldies and drumming his hands on the steering wheel. Tony only spoke when spoken to, giving only one word answers as Stane came inside for a drink and rambled something about the SI board of directors. He felt numb inside but forced himself to nod and answer in all the right places, until finally Stane tired of whatever game he was playing and left.

When the door finally closed behind him, Tony stood and went to the windows that faced out onto the ocean. Save who you can. Mourn who you can’t. Never forget, never forgive, and if you get a chance to escape, don't look back. Tony could still hear the Soldier's screams and see Stane’s smile, and as he stared at his reflection in the dark glass, he knew he was going to do something very, very stupid.

[xxpadfootxx]

🐾Late Night Murmurs🐾

A/N: Hey everyone! I finally got around to starting up this Tumblr account! Welcome to my first post here! I will start to post more of my works here more often and I will be taking requests so if you like what you see and would like to see more then please let me know! My rules and regulations are posted on this account if you have any questions! Also, this was supposed to be just a short little one-shot/drabble and then it turned into this... oh well, sorry it’s so long 😂Now, on to the IzuOcha stuff!

~~~

Izuku knew it was late. His eyes stung and he felt as if his brain was constantly short-circuiting but he needed to keep going. Glancing up at the clock on his wall, Izuku groaned, his hands rising to rub at his sore eyes and run through his hair. It was nearly three in the morning, and although Izuku knew he needed the sleep, he just couldn’t. The stress of the upcoming exams gnawing at him like a dog with a bone, preventing him from sleeping and making it difficult to focus. He felt the anxiety wash over him and it took everything in his power to keep from wanting to vomit. Leaning back in his chair, Izuku closed his eyes, tears building up under the lids as he felt his eyes stinging in relief. He didn’t know what to do. He had been studying for hours and yet everything still felt so jumbled and confusing, it was making him lose his mind. Throwing his pencil down onto the desk, Izuku placed his face in his palms, relishing in the small break he was giving himself as the stress continued to wear him down.

A small snore jolted him from his scrambled thoughts, causing him to turn around and glance at the girl sitting behind him. A small smile made its way to his face as he peered at his friend’s prone form, her eyes closed peacefully and her mouth slightly open as she lay sprawled out across his second desk, fast asleep.

Ochako had come sprinting up to Izuku earlier that day, panting heavily with a bright red face and alarmed eyes, her arms filled with a ton of books and papers, asking him desperately to help her out. She had seemed almost feverish at the time, her mind swirling and her hair messy as she explained her predicament. Ochako was very smart when it came to a lot of different subjects but the one she genuinely struggled with above anything else, was math. She had tried and tried to study for the mathematical exams that were going to be a part of the final test but she just couldn’t get it right, her mind obsessing over the smallest things that would change her answer astronomically. She had been on the brink of tears when she had asked Izuku for help, knowing he actually enjoyed math and never struggled with numbers. Izuku had been a bit stunned to see her this way, the normally cheerful yet collected young woman acting as if she had just been chased all over Japan by a villain, but had immediately accepted her plea for help, taking her to his room to help her study.

He watched her sleep now as her gentle snores got a little louder. She looked so peaceful now, so different from the hot mess he had been confronted with that morning, her face relaxed and her breathing normal. She had calmed down when he brought her back to his room, helping her set up at his desk and pouring over her work to see what she was doing wrong, but she had remained tense the entire time, her body ramrod straight and her knuckles had turned white with her grip on her pencil. His council had helped her relax just a little and he knew she was immensely grateful for his assistance, but he could see now just how much stress she had been under as he eyed her fully relaxed form.

He hated seeing her so distraught, she was always so joyful and kind that the sudden change in her mood had set him off balance. He decided that he never wanted to see her like that again as he watched her, the gentle rise and fall of her shoulders soothing his own torrent of stressful thoughts. She had been with him through thick and thin, ever since their first year at U.A. They were adults now, making their way through their third year at the esteemed hero school, but she still stuck with him. She had been his rock ever since they had met, battling beside him, holding him when he felt lost, consoling him, allowing him to shed his status as one of the most quickly promoted young heroes in Japan and just be Izuku Midoriya around her. She let him cry on her shoulder and let down his walls, to just be human. He had always held feelings for her but held them back. He may be climbing through the ranks rather quickly but she was not too far behind. After their first year at U.A., Ochako had worked harder than anyone, fighting tooth and nail to the top so that she too could stand beside the best of the best, unwilling to back down from the daunting task of chasing her dreams. He admired her so much for that, how she had taken something she was doing just to make sure her parents lived a happy life and dialed it up to eleven, choosing to be the best hero she could possibly be rather than choosing to settle as a sidekick. Both jobs would get her the money she needed to support her family, but it was her fiery determination that made Izuku feel so inspired by her.

He understood why she had been so freaked out earlier, she wanted so desperately to pass these exams, make it through one of the final hurdles to achieving her dreams. He knew that she considered this test to be one of the most important moments in her life and it made his heart clench to know that she had panicked over her own skill, her mind filling her heart with doubts about her own capabilities until she broke down, desperate to prove herself wrong, to make it through and make all of her hard work worthwhile. He felt the same in a way, although he felt pressured less because he doubted himself and more because he didn’t want to let everyone who had helped him get this far down. Just like her, his whole career rested on the shoulders of this exam and he couldn’t help but feel the same rising panic in his gut when he thought of it. But just like always, being with Ochako had helped him get a grip on himself, helped him to focus on the problem just like he always did. He hated seeing her with that look of panicked despair in her eyes, but he was happy that he was finally able to return the favor of comforting her when she ran up to him. Pride flashed through his heart as he thought about it. They had been friends for years and yet it still made him beam with glee when she came to him with her problems, that she trusted him enough to spill her insecurities to him and vice versa.

It was something they had started to do half-way through their second year at U.A. when Izuku had come to Ochako randomly one night to cry to her about a battle he had had with a villain during one of his work studies where he couldn’t save the life of a man that had been targeted during the fight. He hadn’t wanted to burden anyone with his problems but had no other place to go, so he had forced down his pride and embarrassment and asked if they could talk. The night had ended with them holding each other, his face pressed into her neck as she cuddled him, just letting him cry and release everything he felt inside of himself. She had just listened and comforted him, only interjecting to calm him down and praise him softly. After that moment, the two had been inseparable (much to the enjoyment of their teasing friends), always looking after one another, and watching each other’s backs both in and out of battle. Izuku’s feelings for the gorgeous young woman had only grown as their bond strengthened, their increasing age making it more and more difficult to ignore his feelings around her, but he held back. He didn’t want to interfere with the dream Ochako had worked so damn hard for, and on top of that, he did not want to ruin their seamless friendship with something as stupid as romantic feelings.

She stirred slightly before settling again, making Izuku snap out of his reverie for the second time that night and debate whether he should wake her or not. On the one hand, he knew she would have the worst back pain in the morning and knew she would be much better off spending the night in her own bed. But on the other hand, a small, selfish part of him liked seeing her in his room, her body relaxed as she slept away her worries. It made him feel light that she was so comfortable being around him. He glanced at the clock again and realized it was probably time to wake her and send her back to her own dorm. She was obviously dead tired and he didn’t want her to be teased in the morning if she was seen leaving his room when everyone else woke. Leaning forward, Izuku reached out to gently shake her awake when she groaned slightly. The sound trailed off into a small, adorable whimper that made his heart clench.

“Mmmm,” Ochako mumbled making Izuku chuckle a little. A few more incomprehensible words then fell from her lips, her nose twitching slightly.

“Trying…,” Ochako said in her sleep. Izuku watched her silently, he didn’t know her to be a sleep talker, but here she was, starting to form words and small phrases as she slept soundly.

“Forward.”

“No, don’t go over there…”

“Wait, come back…”

“Come here, I want to tell you something.”

She was just so beautiful. He smiled as his eyes trailed over her, keeping his gaze modest as he just stared at her in wonder. He knew that what he was doing was a little strange and he had no idea what he would do if she woke up right now and demanded an explanation from him, but she was just so captivating, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her. She sighed and moved a little again, her fingers twitching slightly. It seemed like she was waking up, so Izuku backed away from where he had unknowingly leaned close to her face, and prepared to wake her up once more.

“Urm, I-Izuku?”

Izuku froze as his real name fell from her lips in a breathy tone. She never called him that, she had always reverted to using his nickname, Deku, when addressing him. He was almost disgusted with himself at how much his heart fluttered when she said his name.

“H-Hey Uraraka, are you awake? It’s really late, you should probably head back to your room.”

It took a while for her to respond, the silence seemed to almost pound on his ears. Izuku had no idea why he was so eager to hear her talk to him again, but he felt like he was going to explode if she didn’t say something soon. When the silence was finally too much for him, Izuku leaned over and placed a warm hand on her shoulder, his mouth opening to speak when she cut him off.

“Izuku, hmmm,” she moaned softly.

Izuku’s hand shot from her shoulder as if he had been burned, his cheeks burning a bright flaming crimson at her words. His mind struggled to grasp what was happening. He wasn’t naive or stupid when it came to women, he knew what those husky words meant despite never having heard them before, but he was struggling to get a grasp on his emotions. What the hell was he supposed to do!?

“I-Izuku,” her breath hitched slightly as she spoke. “I’m sorry.”

Izuku did a double-take, snapping out of his dazed mindset for a moment. He knew she wasn’t entirely awake and was probably in the middle of some dream but it still made him look at her incredulously at her words.

“What the hell do you have to be sorry for?” Izuku asked in a hushed whisper, leaning closer to her to hear her more clearly.

“I-I’ve failed you,” she muttered softly.

“What are you talking about!? You have not failed me! You will NEVER fail me, what is this?” Izuku said.

Ochako groaned again and shifted a little, her face scrunching up slightly, almost as if she were in pain.

“I’ve been holding you back.”

“What!? You have not been-”

“You’re so amazing, Izuku. I’ve always known that but what I haven’t known is how much you have been restraining yourself,” she mumbled.

“What’re you-?”

“You’ve been holding yourself back, all because of me. I have been keeping you from reaching your full potential. I didn’t see it before, how selfish I have been, keeping you for myself. But I see it now.”

“Uraraka-!”

“I’m so so sorry.”

“Stop apologizing!”

“You have such beautiful wings, Izuku. You don’t need me tying you down, you need to soar. You’re already such a fantastic hero, everyone loves you, and you need to be able to stay in that limelight,” Ochako said as she shifted again, her body curling into a ball slightly.

“Uraraka, you-!”

“I don’t deserve you. But I can’t live without you. All this time, I’ve been fighting and battling for the top spot without even realizing how much I was hindering your chances. You are the best hero and you deserve that spot. The last thing I want is to get in your way.”

Izuku opened his mouth to cut her off again but didn’t even get the first letter out before she spoke again, her voice choking up as a few small tears escaped from beneath her closed eyelids and ran down her cheeks. What he wouldn’t give to kiss those tears away.

“I-I want y-you to be free,” She whispered, more tears sliding down her face. “I want you to have a future and I know now that if you are to fully achieve your dreams, that future can’t have me in it.”

“No!” Izuku all but yelled. She still didn’t wake to his surprise, her nose merely scrunching up more and her eyes closing tighter, her whole body writhing in his desk chair.

“I will say this before we part though,” Ochako whimpered. “T-Thank you so much for being my best friend. My life would n-not have been the same without y-you.”

Tears streamed down his face as Izuku reached out to touch her shoulder again. He needed to wake her up now.

“I love you.”

Izuku’s whole body froze for the second time that night, a jolt of hot electric emotion skittering up his spine and biting at every nerve in his body. It honestly felt similar to when he would activate his quirk but multiplied times ten.

“I love you so damn much,” Ochako whispered, her face turning red even as she slept, her arms coming around to clutch at her knees. “I know it’s wrong of me to love you, and it’s probably even worse to tell you, but I can’t hold it in any longer, especially when I won’t get to see you very often anymore. I love you, and even though you don’t feel the same, I needed to tell you, otherwise I would regret it for the rest of my life.”

Izuku couldn’t move. His whole body was stock still, stuck in time, unable to break free of the vice-like grip her words had on his heart, mind, and body. Ochako chuckled a little, still lost in sleep.

“What do I love about you? Everything. Absolutely everything, Izuku. I love your personality, I love your looks, I love your courage and your determination and your strength. I love your weaknesses and your insecurities because to me, they are nothing more than more amazing parts of you in disguise. I love how smart you are, how loved you make me feel, how kind and loyal you are. You are very handsome, and, as a little secret between us, I almost cried when I saw you interacting with the children who have been affected by tragedy after our battles. You are so gentle and inspiring and loving, just like you are with me. I imagine that one day, you will make an excellent father.”

Izuku blushed somehow even deeper at her words, his eyes nearly bulging out of his skull.

“I just love you and everything about you,” Ochako said, her voice low and husky. She twitched and shifted in her seat again, her mind barely on the edge between her dream world and reality.

Izuku snapped then, his patience completely lost. Gripping her shoulders, he gently shook her awake, his fingers tightening slightly when he saw her gorgeous chocolate eyes flutter open to look up at him. His breathing was heavy and he knew the blush on his face was practically making him glow but he didn’t care at that moment. His hair had fallen to slightly cover his eyes but he ignored the strands in his face as Ochako finally made her way into full consciousness.

“Deku!!!” Ochako shouted in surprise, jumping away from him, her rolling chair sliding across the floor of his room until her back bumped against the wall. Her eyes were wide with shock and she held a hand up to her heart as she tried to calm her breathing. “Sorry Deku, you just scared me, what time is it?”

Izuku didn’t respond but instead shot up from his chair and marched over to her.

“Deku-!?” Ochako squealed when he grabbed her shoulders, hoisted her out of the chair, and pulled her into a tight hug. She hesitantly wrapped her arms around him, her eyes widening as she felt his whole body begin to tremble.

“Deku, what happened?” Ochako asked breathlessly, trying her hardest to shove down the feelings that reared up in her throat and chest when he embraced her.

“Ochako, I need to know, did you mean it?” Izuku asked, ignoring her other question as he buried his face in the crook of her neck, his body starting to shake even more as he awaited her answer.

The shock of him using her real name for the first time was bypassed by her shock at his question. She knew what he was asking, but how did he know? She only confessed her love for him in her dream! Unless…

“Fuck,” Ochako muttered to herself, causing Izuku to pull away from her to get a good look at her face.

“Ochako?”

“I was sleep talking wasn’t I?” Ochako asked, her large eyes meeting his gaze, several indistinguishable emotions swimming behind them.

Izuku nodded slowly and leaned back into her embrace, his eyes closed. Ochako sighed in response before nuzzling his hair, her arms clamping down on his back to bring him even closer to her, tightening their embrace. Izuku’s breath hitched at the feeling.

“Does that mean you-?”

Ochako nodded against his shoulder without hesitation, her eyes closed as she waited for the sound of his rejection. Damn her inability to keep her mouth shut. “I’m so sorry Deku, I didn’t mean to say anything, I don’t want to make things awkward between us and I just screwed everything up!” A few tears slid down her still damp cheeks. “I’m sorry, god, I know I should be dealing with this like the adult that I am but I just can’t…”

Izuku leaned back and looked into her face once more, his trembling subsiding a bit as he took in her beautiful features. She was so stunning, even with the tear tracks lining her skin, her eyes shining with emotion as she forced herself to meet his gaze.

“You didn’t screw up anything,” Izuku said, reaching a hand up to cup her cheek. His heart flipped in his chest when she leaned into his touch, her eyes closing. “I feel the same way about you.”

Ochako’s eyes flew open and she stepped away from him, shaking her head back and forth. Izuku frowned, concern and confusion washing through him in waves. Why was she rejecting him? He just confessed to her after hearing her true feelings for him, why wasn’t she embracing him again? Letting him kiss away her tears? Letting him hold her and whisper in her ear all of the loving things he has wanted to say since they met?

“Ochako-?”

“Don’t pity me, Deku. You have your own life to live, don’t change your feelings just because I’m your friend. You know as well as I do that being invested in a relationship that you aren’t fully interested in is unhealthy, even for a normal person. And you are trying to become the new number 1 hero! I will only be in your way,” Ochako sniffled and tried her hardest to hold back the rest of her tears, saving them for when she was alone in her own room. Standing up tall and holding her head up high, she managed to make eye contact with him, his wide green eyes making her smile sadly. “You are so kind Deku, but for once, you don’t have to save me. Please, be free.”

She looked down at her feet though, suddenly unable to hold his gaze any longer. The silence hung heavily between them as Izuku scrambled to think of something, anything to say back to her. He had so many thoughts jumbled up in his mind, his mouth couldn’t possibly form the correct words.

A heavy sigh from the amazing young woman in front of him dragged him away from his inner turmoil and his eyes widened as he watched her steel herself and turn away from him, her hand reaching for the doorknob.

“Goodbye Deku, thank you for being my friend, I’m sorry I had to ruin it for us,” Ochako said in a hushed whisper, her fingers wrapping around the handle in front of her.

Deku wasted no time in making his way to her. He had no idea what he was going to say or how he was going to say it but he had to do something before the best thing that had ever happened to his life walked out on him, her own self-doubts and insecurities clouding her judgment. Striding over to her, Izuku reached out and wrapped both of his arms around her torso, his hands clasping together on her stomach, his face burying in the back of her neck. A small smile made its way to his face when he heard her sharp intake of breath at the contact, her body freezing under his touch.

“Deku, please, let me go,” Ochako begged, her throat starting to choke up. Why did he have to make this so hard on her?

“No, please hear me out, I just have so many things I want to say. I can’t sort through them all fast enough. Just please wait, please, I need-” Izuku cut himself off as his own throat started to constrict. He swallowed hard, holding her tighter against him. Ochako didn’t move away but she didn’t hug him back either, her back remaining ramrod straight against his hold. Izuku gulped and took a deep breath. He needed to say something, now. Slowly releasing her, Izuku gripped her shoulders and spun her around to face him.

“Why do you think I’m not serious?”

Ochako frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what made you think I am not completely in love with you?”

Ochako gaped. He couldn’t be serious, he just couldn’t be! How could he love her? She wasn’t in some romantic movie or novel, in real life things like this just didn’t happen. Maybe she was still dreaming?

“I-I-I don’t know, I just feel like it’s impossible for you to love me back, not when I’ve loved you for so long, not when you’ve never been interested in a relationship before. There’s nothing special about me, there’s no reason for you to like me back.”

Izuku’s eyes flashed with disbelief and rage, an emotion she had never seen directed at her before. She shrank back slightly, scared she had upset him. He noticed her shift and calmed the harshness of his gaze a bit, but remained firm.

“What are you talking about?” Izuku asked incredulously. “You think I feel shackled to you? You think you are keeping me from being successful? You think I want nothing to do with you now that I’ve found out you are interested in me in a romantic way?”

Ochako swallowed before nodding slowly.

“God no, Ochako! I know you confessed by accident but you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to hear those words from you. Ever since I met you I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, but then I got to know you and I found out you were so much more. You were always so kind to me, so loving, so gentle, so amazing and talented. You inspired me to work harder for my dreams. I’ve never deserved you, Ochako, but I am so damn happy to have you in my life. You don’t shackle me to the ground, you are the one who built my wings! Without you, I’ll never be able to fly. Please, don’t go,” Izuku’s voice started to shake as he spoke. “Come on, you’re the smart one, open your eyes and see that I am telling nothing but the truth. I love you, more than anything.”

Ochako felt more tears stream down her face but for entirely different reasons than before. Her heart called out his name at his loving words, her mind racing, and her breathing hitching. She felt as if this was all some dream, but she knew it was real. She looked into his eyes and saw nothing but the honest truth swirling in them, his green hues shining brighter than ever before.

Izuku knew she believed him, but he also saw the hesitancy in her eyes, the doubt that she still wasn’t good enough and that this was all some elaborate illusion. Gathering the small strands of courage he had left, a shaky breath left his lips as he cupped her cheek again.

“Still think I’m not serious?”

Without waiting for a response, Izuku dove in to seal her lips with his own. Ochako gasped in surprise at the feeling of his warm and surprisingly soft lips on hers and instinctually pressed her hands into his wide shoulders for support. The kiss was gentle but persistent, encouraging her to give something back, to either push him away or pull him closer. It was only after a few more seconds of hesitation before she decided on the latter, linking her arms around his neck and pulling him close to her, their bodies pressing flush against each other.

Izuku groaned at the feeling of her against him. He had wanted this for so long, she was immediately intoxicating. Reaching down, Izuku gripped her thighs and scooped her up. He smiled when she squealed at the sudden movement, the joyful sound making his heart throb. Izuku carried her over to his bed and sat down, settling her down on his lap. They broke the kiss for air, the two young adults panting as they leaned their foreheads against one another.

“Ok, I believe you now,” Ochako said with a breathy chuckle.

Izuku beamed at her and brushed her hair back behind her ear, his heart leaping for joy. He had always found her hair to be absolutely stunning, but it had always bothered him when she would push it back, his fingers itching to do it instead.

“Good, I never want you to doubt me or yourself ever again, understand? I need you in my life, Ochako, more than anything. I don’t know what I would do if I lost you. You will never hold me back, because with you I am the best version of myself. Got it? I never ever want you to think your not good enough,” Izuku murmured.

Ochako felt like her heart was going to explode. He was being so kind and gentle, so loving. She still couldn’t believe this was happening. He loved her back, he really loved her. Izuku watched as the determined sparkle in her eyes returned, making him love her even more.

“Okay, I promise. Just so long as you make the same promise,” Ochako said softly.

“I will,” Izuku said, his eyes darting down to her lips and then back up to her eyes.

Smiling at his request for permission, Ochako nodded once and leaned in, meeting him for another kiss in the middle. She sighed as his lips acquainted themselves with her own, his eyes closing and his fingers moving to run through her hair. Ochako uncrossed her legs and wrapped them around his waist bringing them even closer together. She tensed, hoping she wasn’t pushing any boundaries, her cheeks on fire. Everything about this was new to her, but it felt right so she went with it.

To her relief, Izuku took it in stride, pulling her closer to him with a soft groan. The noise he made set her nerves on fire, her blood roaring in her veins. They eventually broke apart again, Izuku staring at her with a slightly glazed expression. Ochako giggled and reluctantly slid off his lap. Izuku’s gaze instantly cleared and he looked at her with a mix of confusion and longing, an expression that made Ochako want to laugh and leap right back into his lap but she held off.

“As much as I’m having fun, it is 4 AM and we have class tomorrow. Maybe we can continue this tomorrow though? Maybe go to a movie first?” Ochako asked, her eyes twinkling.

Izuku snapped his gaze to the clock on the wall and realized she was right. He had totally forgotten how late it was, his exhaustion chased away by his ability to finally hold the woman he had wanted for so long. He smiled and chuckled slightly, running a hand through his hair. His face was flushed but he managed to meet her gaze.

“I’d love that. Goodnight ‘Chako, I love you,” Izuku said.

Ochako seemed to almost glow at his words, her eyes twinkling and her teeth flashing as she smiled the widest she had ever grinned.

“I love you too ‘Zuku.”

Izuku melted into a pile of goo at the use of his first name in real life, something about the way she said it with such love and confidence making it much more significant than when she had called to him in her sleep.

“Thanks for helping me study,” Ochako said slyly with a wink as she made her way out the door, closing it behind her without waiting for a response. Izuku laughed quietly to himself and laid down on his pillow, waiting for sleep to overtake him. When he did finally fall asleep, he dreamed of the two of them, a small smile creeping onto his face as he slept peacefully, the beast in his heart finally satisfied after all these years. Finally, they were together, a closer team than they had ever been before, and Izuku wouldn’t have it any other way.

[chysgoda]

The Toolmaker

A tale in three parts

Cross Posted to Ao3

Calipers

A bell chimed above his head when the outlandish man opened the door to the shop in Ul’dah. It was a shop in both senses of the word. A counter separated the retail portion from the significantly larger workshop. In the front simple tools like hammers and screwdrivers hung from pegs on the walls. In the back things were in disarray, equipment being boxed up and more expensive tools being carefully packed for shipping. The proprietress straightened up from where she had been carefully packing aether crystals. “Good morning, what can I help you with?”

From behind a mask pale blue eyes scanned the walls and what he could see of the tools behind the counter. “I don’t suppose I’d be lucky enough to find a pair of micro ilum calipers worth the metal they’re made from.” 

The woman arched an eyebrow as she rested her weight on one leg and placed a fist on her cocked hip. “Not a great way to entice good customer service there Mr. Mysterious.” 

The masked man sauntered up to the counter. “Aren’t you supposed to fawn over your customers?” 

“Well Mr. Mysterious Garlean, if you’re coming to me for calipers, then you’re looking for metric calipers, and you want micrometer calipers. I’m the only one who makes those this side of a Garlean border. So I don’t really need to fall all over myself do I?” She walked up to the counter herself. “And before you ask, you cover your accent too well to be local.”

The man gave an exaggerated shrug and took off the mask which he set on the counter. “Well then, I guess I won’t have to bother with that bit of ridiculous play-acting for a bit. But the question remains, are your tools worth their reputation?” 

“If you’ve got the gil or barter for it.” She challenged him. The toolmaker stepped away from the counter. She went over to a set of crates and picked out a pair of boxes. She looked him over when she set them on the counter. “I’m thinking you haven’t got the gil, so we’ll be working on barter.”

She watched the man out of the corner of her eye as she opened the boxes to show the tools within. His shoulders rolled back and his lips pressed together clearly annoyed. “And clearly you don’t know who I am or you would not be so worried.”

“Gonna pay me in exposure Mr. Mysterious?” The toolmaker asked dryly. She motioned to the calipers on the counter. “The long one will measure up to fifty centimeters with resolution in millimeters and the small one will measure up to five centimeters with a resolution in micrometers. Both of them will be five thousand gil.”

The man did not quite hide his wince in time. She watched as he examined the tools as closely as possible without touching them. She gave him marks for that. He reached into his trench coat and pulled out a stack of coins. The toolmaker’s eyebrows raised in surprise. The outlandish mystery man smirked at her reaction. “Perhaps you can find a use for these?”

“Byregot’s hammer! Where exactly did you lay your hands on Allagan pieces Mr. Mysterious?” 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” The man smirked and set an assortment of silver and gold pieces down. 

The toolmaker counted out what the price would be in the ancient coins, “Well anything else you’d like to take a look at, Mr. Mysterious?”

“Just where you’re planning on relocating to.” 

“Mor Dohna. Got a big contract and rent is a hell of a lot cheaper.” She folded her arms over her chest. Shining peridot eyes looked him over again openly appreciative. “What’s your name Mr. Mysterious?” 

“Ah yes, how unforgivably rude of me. Nero Tol Scaeva at your service miss…” he paused in his dramatic introduction clearly expecting a name in return. 

“Gisela Alvey,” She smiled at Nero’s dramatics. “A Tol huh? No wonder you’re wearing that mask. Maybe I’ll see you around some time.” 

“Perhaps,” He closed the boxes of the tools. She was nearly tall enough to look him in the eye, it made a nice change from having to crane his neck to look at people that were only tall enough to stand as high as his elbow or hip. “if these suffice, then I just might.”

“Well, I’ll plan on seeing you there then, Nero Tol Scaeva.” Gisela grinned at him. 

Soldering Iron

 Nero glared at the ringing bell above his head when he stepped into the shop. It didn’t seem to matter though, the shop owner wasn’t visible. However, there were flashes of light coming from behind a heavy curtain in the corner. He let himself behind the counter and strolled over to the curtain. He kept back and made sure not to look directly at the two pieces of metal Gisela was working on joining. Even from the corner of his eye the blinding white light was painful. He turned to the desk at the back of the workshop to look at the disaster that Gisela’s designing space was. There was a journal filled with short hand he had not yet deciphered, Gisela had told him it was her notes from training in the Thaumaturge Guild. He arched an eyebrow seeing a pair of texts on theoretical mathematics. It occurred to him that he didn’t actually know what any of Eorzea’s schools of magic actually studied. He’d need to remedy that. 

Light stopped reflecting off the wall. He set the journal back down and turned to Gisela setting aside a mage’s scepter and pulling off the heavy gloves she’d been wearing. Sweat gleamed on the highlander woman’s dark arms and and soaked the neck line of the sleeveless green shirt she was wearing. He adjusted the yellow scarf around his neck feeling a bit over warm suddenly. He cleared his throat and approached the work area. “And what pray tell, has Garlond sweet talked you into beyond what you’re contracted for?” 

Gisela threw one of her gloves at him and he caught it absently. She removed the full face mask she had been wearing, he couldn’t see dark glass in the eye slots, she must have enchanted it then. He really did need to do some more research on what mages could do outside of the few combat soldiers he’d ignored in the legion. She set the mask next to the scepter and examined what she had been working on. “I get specs from Garlond. I do business with Jessie. Hand me the bottle of orange stuff on the desk please.” 

He stepped back and picked up the small as he walked back he opened it and carefully sniffed. The astringent scent wrinkled his nose. When he handed it to her, he expected her to pour it on the metal as part of some spell. When she threw her head back and downed it like a shot of cheap whiskey his lips curled in disgust. She laughed seeing his expression, “Aether potion, I ended up needing to channel earth aether as well as lightning aether. Which is exhausting.”

Nero snorted and leaned down to examine the weld, smooth, strong, and precise. Had this been in the legion he would have pestered Baelsar into making sure she was assigned as a worker on his projects rather than general repairs. “I’d wondered where Garlond had found himself a master welder.”

“Master my ass,” she gently shoved his shoulder, “I’ve seen some of the stuff that’s been hauled out of the ruins of the castrum. This is apprentice stuff. What’d ya come in for?” 

Nero straightened to see her rubbing at the back of her neck while she looked away from him clearly embarrassed. She stepped away to retrieve a water canteen from one of the many work benches. He smirked at her back debating about continuing to poke at her. “I find myself in need of a soldering iron to repair some of the circuits on my hammer. Your tools are... sufficient for my needs.” 

“Sufficient huh?” She motioned him to the front of the store while she went to a set of shelves to grab a box. She set the box on the counter and then turned to the cases he knew stored crystals. He looked over her wares at the front of the store and selected a set of precision screwdrivers. He walked up to the counter and set them on top of the box. She found what she was looking for and placed a handful of small orange crystals into a smaller case. She set it on the counter with the rest of his purchase. “Repairs to your hammer huh? Going to make it hit harder and last longer while you’re at it?”

“There's always room to improve on perfection Gisela.” He told her solemnly. 

“Don’t they make rings for that?” Gisela smiled sweetly as Nero blinked at her. Silence stretched between them and the smile broadened into a grin. “Garlond’s out in Ishgard somewhere playing hero with the Warrior of Light. Go ask Jessie, she’ll point you in the right direction for that kind of tool.” 

Nero gave her a suspicious look, “I do not trust that sticky sweet look.”

“Probably for the best sweetheart.” Gisela laughed. Her grin didn’t change as she watched a blush spread across his face. “Three thousand gil for this pile.”

Nero just thrust the bag of coins at her and looked away from the laughing yellow- green eyes. She handed him his change and he grabbed his set of screwdrivers still to flustered to attempt to speak. He nodded at her and made a tactical retreat. Gisela laced her fingers together and rested her chin on them watching the door. Silently she began counting down from ten, when he didn’t come back she shrugged and set the soldering iron aside to wait for him. 

The bell above the door didn’t ring again for two hours. When it did the new patron was not slow in making her presence known. “Alvey!”

Gisela had been reviewing one of the math texts and leaned her chair on to its back legs and dropped her head back. “Afternoon Jessie.”

“What the fuck did you do Scaeva?” Jessie let herself behind the counter and stomped up to the toolmaker. 

“Do? I just sold him a soldering iron to repair his hammer” Gisela’s grin did not match the innocent tone of voice or shrug. 

Jessie glared down at her. “You owe me.”

“Did he steal one of your soldering irons?”

“Yes!” 

“I’ve got his set aside. You can take that as a replacement.”  Gisela rocked her chair forward and stood. “And lunch is on me.” 

“You still owe me Alvey,” Jessie grumbled. “That was not a conversation I ever intended to have, especially with him!” 

Gisela laughed as she grabbed her jacket and ushered her friend out making sure to flip the sign from open to closed and lock the door before they began strolling to Rowena’s house of Splendors. 

Call Out

Gisela groaned when the ringing linkshell woke her. She slapped her hand down on her bedside table several times before finding the linkshell that was ringing. She was growling when she activated it, “This had better be really fucking good Jessie!”

“I need you at Rhalger’s Reach.”

“Is the Warrior of Light still hanging out there?”

“Yes.”

“You can fuck right off through all seven hells. I choose life.” 

“Nero’s hurt, I need you to babysit and make sure he doesn’t make it worse.” 

Gisela’s breath caught and she was silent for long enough that Jessie called her name. “What the fuck did he get himself into?”

“I can’t explain over the linkshell. I just need you here.”

“What the hell makes you think he’ll listen to me?” Gisela blinked when Jessie was silent for a beat longer than she should have been. “Jessie?”

“You are both idiots. There’s an Ironwork airship getting supplies in Gridania that will leave in three bells make sure your ass is on it.” 

———

Alpha shook himself to adjust his feathers under his uniform. He had just checked on his friends Wedge and Biggs and now he was not sure what to do in this place of rough stone and warm air. The other residents had gotten used to him now and he knew exactly who would cave and give him a treat for big eyes and an enthusiastic tail wiggle. The lady in the red dress with hair the color of his feathers was a good target for that. First, he did need to check on Nero. The little chocobo trotted over to the curtained off bed where the tall man had been bunked down. The curtain that served as a door had been left open. When Alpha peeked in, the engineer was sitting up but had the most bemused expression as he looked down at the woman who was asleep with her head on crossed arms that rested on the side of the bed. Hesitantly he reached out to lightly card his fingers through teal hair. He froze when the woman shifted in her sleep and sighed in relief when she didn’t wake.

Nero’s expression shifted from bemused to soft as he continued to run his fingers through hair that was long only on one side of her head. Alpha tilted his head trying to make sense of what he was seeing. When Alpha gave a soft ‘kweh’ of confusion Nero snatched his hand away like he’d been burned. The tall man glared, “Move along, you did not see anything.” 

Alpha tilted his head the other way and shrugged. The tall man often said things that were very different from how he acted. Turning he went to find the blonde in the red dress and convince her that he was in desperate need of sweets. 

Nero glared at the space where Alpha had been until he could no longer hear the bird’s talons on the stone. He looked down at Gisela, her dark brown skin contrasted starkly with the pale blanket on his sick bed. Jessie must have called her, but he knew that she did not have anyone to mind her shop in Mor Dohna if she had to leave. She’d grumbled loudly about it and tried to price her call out fees higher than anyone would want to pay. She was also working on her masterwork for the Thaumaturge’s Guild. There was no reason for her to be in Rhalgr's Reach. 

But here she was slumped in exhausted sleep at his sickbed. Hesitantly he ran his fingers through her hair again watching the dark and light strands of teal glide through his fingers. Weariness settled in his bones, his body had still not recovered enough even for this short bout of wakefulness to be anything but completely draining. He relaxed back into his pillows falling to sleep without realizing his hand still rested on Gisela’s head. 

[gayexistentialcrisis]

Tumblr Connections Ch.5

*thank you to my wonderful beta as always @judgemental-llama I hope you all enjoy this chapter and as always, it’s also on AO3 by the same name. Plus, I forgot to mention this (and made a tiny mistake last chapter) but they are in high school*

“So… TJ? Does that stand for anything?” TJ could tell it was supposed to be a casual question but looking at the boy in front of him, he could tell there was a purpose behind it.

“So, Jonah, why do you ask?” He asked, raising a brow. The frisbee player flushed, lifting his head to face the taller boy and gave him a sheepish grin.

“Just wondering?” He stated, though it sounded more like a question.

“Hey toe jam!” He heard a voice call out from behind him and he groaned, dropping his head forward against the table with a thud.

“Amber? You know TJ?” He hears Jonah ask, the confusion evident in his voice. That causes TJ to laugh. I guess no one really knows we are siblings.

“He’s my dumb twin brother who I just so happen to be older than.” TJ didn’t even have to look up to know she was smirking, he could hear it in her voice. He held up two fingers and lifted his head to look at her.

“Two damn minutes, that’s it. I swear to god you act like you’re years older than me when your maturity level is at a three.” TJ said, narrowing his eyes at her as she shrugged, sitting on the bench beside her brother and glancing across the table to her ex boyfriend.

“Don’t you just love how he argues the older part but not the dumb part? He knows it’s true. It’s why he got held back.” Amber said, lightly nudging her shoulder against her brothers. TJ frowned, closing the folder in front of him that contained homework before stuffing it into his backpack and standing up to walk away.

It’s not that this wasn’t normal talk he heard from his sister, it just hurt because she was now saying it in front of his friend. Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, he ignored his sister’s exasperated sigh followed by her calling out his name. He quickly shoved his hand over his shoulder, raising his middle finger towards her and kept on walking, his long strides quickly bringing him to the place where he didn’t even know he wanted to go.

Striding over to the swings he flung his backpack to the ground, plopping himself onto the swing and began pushing his legs back and forth while absentmindedly humming the song his best friend had taught him what felt like forever ago.

“Wow I thought you would’ve forgotten.” He heard a voice call out from behind him and he turned, seeing Cyrus behind him, smiling. Without speaking, TJ motioned to the swing beside him with his head, not once breaking his rhythm of swinging.

“Jonah told me you left upset. I figured I’d find you here.” Cyrus said softly as he sat down beside the basketball player. TJ sighed, dragging his feet through the wood chips to stop his swing.

“Did he tell you why?” TJ mumbled, looking at his feet rather than at Cyrus. He heard the swing next to him creaking, a hand entering his sight before lightly laying upon of one his own that was resting against his thigh. TJ sucked in a breath while waiting for the answer.

“He just mentioned something Amber said upset you and that I should be the one to check on you, which I had already planned. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I won’t push you.” The younger boy said softly, lightly squeezing TJ’s hand before going to pull his hand away. Without thinking TJ quickly reached over, grabbing Cyrus’ much smaller hand, lacing their fingers together and letting their hands dangle between them. TJ could feel his cheeks heating up with his blush but he didn’t dare to look over at the boy beside him.

“She told Jonah how I was held back. How I’m so stupid that I can’t pass a simple math class.” TJ huffed out, dropping Cyrus’ hand but immediately missing the warmth.

“You aren’t stupid Teej. It’s not your fault. Your brain is just wired a little differently. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you… Turtle John.” Cyrus giggled as he finished his statement, achieving his goal of making the older boy smile.

“Turtle John? Really Muffin? Couldn’t come up with anything else?” TJ teased as he arched a brow, smirking at Cyrus who blushed darkly.

“Okay you know what? Don’t mock my creativity. I just wanted to make my handsome best friend smile.” Cyrus said, not noticing how TJ’s smile faltered at the word friend. Right, that’s all we are and ever will be. Pulling out his phone quickly, he turned away so Cyrus couldn’t see the screen, pulling up the Tumblr app.

“Sorry, I should tell my mom where I am so she’s not worrying.” He said, his voice cracking a bit as he lied to his best friend.

Tristian: Cy… I’ve officially given up all hope on getting with Ducky, all my attention and affection is on you now.

TJ sighed while stuffing his phone back in his pocket, ignoring how as soon as he hit send, Cyrus’ phone went off. Probably one of his parents checking up on his. He noticed the way Cyrus blushed as he checked his phone, peeking his interest.

“Oh uh, sorry it’s just… Ander.” Cyrus said after a moment of silence while he was reading the message. TJ’s heart sank, taking in the information he just heard.

“Oh… um, why? What does he want?” TJ asked, hoping Cyrus doesn’t notice the disappointment in his voice. Thankfully, his eyes stay trained on the phone.

“N-nothing. Um, he was just saying hi.” Cyrus said, hastily taping out a text before putting his phone back in his jacket pocket. TJ could feel his phone vibrating against his leg but he ignored it, instead focusing on the painful feeling in his chest that he felt after learning someone, who was openly gay, was talking to his Underdog. At least they aren’t afraid to admit it and come out. TJ clenched his jaw, standing up quickly and turning to Cyrus.

“Cyrus, I need to tell you something.” TJ blurted out, hoping his confidence will catch up with his mouth. Cyrus furrowed his brows, confusion etched across his face.

“Okay, I’m listening.” Cyrus said encouragingly, tilting his head to the side as he studied the boy in front of him. TJ panicked and felt like his brain had short circuited.

“I swing!” He practically yelled at Cyrus, his face heating up in embarrassment at his words. TJ, you are a damn fool. Cyrus started giggling while nodding.

“Well… yeah. Obviously. We’ve been coming to this park together since I was 13. Three whole years Teej, I’ve noticed that you swing.” Cyrus said smiling widely, barely able to contain his laughter.

“No Cyrus. That came out wrong I mean… I swing for the same team as you. God I’m really bad at this. Oh fuck it… Underdog, I’m gay.” TJ kept his head up, watching Cyrus’ face for a reaction.

“Oh Teej… now I feel dumb for my reaction when I came out to you.” Cyrus said before standing up and leaning up on the tip of his toes to wrap his arms around TJ’s shoulders. “You are no different. You will find a great guy eventually.”

Yeah… except I only want you.

Taglist: @allicat-76 @sarcasticfirehazard @alyxandraz @unprofessionalart

[asharee-arie]

Falling Seems So Easy

Read here on Ao3.

"I'm going to murder you,” Alec hisses at Jace, stabbing his brother in the arm with the swizzle stick from his drink for good measure. “First you drag me out to the bar for this stupid group hang,” the sarcasm dripping off his tongue at the words group hang made his feelings about this particular endeavor crystal clear, “And then you let me get sucked into a thirty-minute conversation with Raj who apparently thinks we’re meant to be. I just had to break up with someone I wasn’t even dating!”

“Woah, buddy, calm down.” Jace pats his back in a way that is probably meant to be reassuring but only serves to further narrow Alec’s already annoyed gaze. 

Alec forces himself to take a deep breath and remember that Jace is his brother whom he loves. Of course, his attempts to calm his ire are shot to hell when Jace continues with, “Sounds like you were maybe giving out some mixed signals at work.”

“I bought him lunch. Once!” Alec cries, attempting to stab Jace with the swizzle stick again, missing as his brother recoiled on his bar stool. Normally, Alec likes to refrain from indulging in this type of childish behavior, but it has been a day and stabbing Jace feels vaguely therapeutic.

“Stop it!” his brother yelps attempting to swat the stir stick out of Alec’s vengeful hands. “Don’t blame me because you accidentally started dating someone without realizing it!”

Alec huffs in a few long breaths because otherwise he is going to shove the swizzle stick up Jace’s nose and attempt to lobotomize him which, on second thought, might actually improve Jace’s personality. Before his revenge plot can fully materialize, Izzy slides onto the stool next to him with a cheery grin.

“You look positively murderous, big brother.”

The obvious glee in her tone makes him shake his head in mild amusement. Only Izzy would think walking into the line of fire constituted a good time. 

Jace leans around him to fist bump Izzy in greeting, his words making Alec groan. “Alec is just feeling salty because he had to break up with his coworker.”

Izzy’s eyes go wide with disbelief as she slaps him on the shoulder, “You had a boyfriend and didn’t tell me?!”

“No,” Alec grinds out between clenched teeth, “We weren’t dating. My coworker is just delusional and thinks lending him a quarter for the vending machine is a step down the path of true love.”

“Been there, hermano.” Izzy puts a consoling arm around his waist and rests her head on his shoulder while flagging down the bartender for a drink. “We Lightwoods are irresistible.”

Alec can’t hold back his laugh as she gestures toward Jace and winks, “Well except him. I think everyone can resist Jace.”

“Not Clary,” the blonde proclaims proudly scanning the crowd for a glimpse of his red-haired lady love. Not, Alec acknowledges with an amused grin, that Clary seems aware of her status as Jace’s beloved.

The fiery redhead knocked Jace on his proverbial ass the moment she’d moved into the apartment across the hall from theirs. His usually charming, smooth brother had disappeared in the face of her blindingly wide smile and he hadn’t reappeared since. Between Jace’s unprecedented lack of game and Clary’s seeming obliviousness to his feelings, all his former attempts to ask her out had gone hilariously askew.

On one memorable occasion, Jace ended up on a dinner date with Clary’s best friend, Simon, after Jace went overboard in his attempt to woo her in the style of the Spice Girls. It’s time tested advice Jace had argued the next day If I want to be her lover, I need to get with her friends. Platonically.

Izzy inclines her head in thanks as the bartender delivers her glass of Cabernet before directing another smirk at Jace and moving in for the kill, “Aren’t we here because Clary didn’t realize that you were asking her on a date and thought it was a group thing?”

The reminder makes Jace frown slightly before he shrugs it off and resumes grinning with his normal sense of inflated self-confidence. “A minor setback,” he concedes stealing a sip of Izzy’s wine, “I’m planning to be so charming tonight that she’ll ask me out on a date herself. Problem solved.”

Alec feels his lingering irritation fade as he listens to his siblings bicker good-naturedly. The familiar back and forth is a welcome distraction after a truly terrible week of work, his second rum and Coke further helping to smooth out the rough edges of the night.

Beside him Jace suddenly lurches to his feet, his arms waving enthusiastically as he spots Clary weaving through the crowd toward them. The petite redhead is flanked by the ever-present Simon, whose presence makes Izzy sit up straighter on her stool and fluff her curls. 

Normally, Alec would take the opportunity to rib his self-possessed sister for her unusually obvious level of interest, but all coherent thoughts vanish as his eyes catch on the truly glorious man to Clary’s left. He is, well, perfect if Alec is being honest. He glitters all the way from his bedazzled high tops to his elegant cheekbones, his rainbow highlighter shimmering under the lights. 

“Izzy,” he hisses out of the corner of his mouth, “Who is that?”

“Magnus? He’s Clary’s co-worker. Hot, right?”

The distracted, off-hand way she relays the information makes Alec frown in betrayal. She’s been aware that this beautiful man exists and has never once attempted one of her ridiculous matchmaking schemes on his behalf. It is downright rude, he decides.

“You are unbelievable.”

The dramatic whispered accusation causes Izzy’s left eyebrow to arch as she drags her attention off the bespectacled nerd she seems to find attractive to look at her brother. “Excuse me?”

“You have tried to set me up with four different people this week alone and yet you’ve never even mentioned that Clary has him for a coworker?”

“I wasn’t sure he was your type.” A wide, pleased smile sweeps over her face, “Clearly, I was wrong.”

“He is everyone’s type.”

“My baby is growing up.”

Izzy’s teasing coo makes Alec cringe even as his eyes refuse to stop studying every inch of Magnus from the tips of his artfully-styled hair to his long, slim fingers to the somehow adorable hint of ankle peeking out above his shoes.  Alec is aware that he is being entirely too obvious about his interest, his siblings will never let him live this down, but it is hard to feel anything but warm as Magnus glides to a stop in front of him.

“And who might you be?”

The question is all but a purr, and Alec is embarrassed to find himself instinctively leaning closer.

Alec opens his mouth to say something, anything really, when Magnus unleashes a lethally bright smile, all sparkling eyes and full lips, effectively short-circuiting all of Alec’s remaining brain cells.

“How are you real?” he blurts out, his face scrunching up in abject embarrassment even as the words fly out of his mouth. “I mean, I’m, uh, Alec.”

A shocked giggle escapes Izzy. “Smooth, Alec, smooth.”

“Abort, buddy,” Jace coughs behind him.

“Biscuit,” Magnus drawls out without ever breaking eye contact with Alec, “I’m suddenly feeling a bit put out with you for not introducing us sooner.”

“Join the club.”

Alec’s cheeks heat as he realizes the words in his head are still managing to slip past his lips.

He’s doing the math on how quickly he can make a break for the exit because, really, Alec cannot be trusted to be in polite company right now, when Magnus throws back his head and lets out the most charming throaty chuckle. The sound slips over Alec’s senses like satin, smooth and inviting, enticing him to stay. 

His brain is still struggling to come back online when Magnus takes another step closer, forced to tilt his chin up marginally to maintain their eye contact, “Is Alec short for Alexander?”

“Yep, but nobody calls him that.”

Magnus ignores Jace completely and holds out a hand in invitation, “Buy me a drink, Alexander?”

Alec manages a jerky nod as he tangles their fingers together. Magnus pulls him forward with a teasing yank that brings them close enough for Alec to feel the warmth of the other man against his chest.

“Guys, this is like one step away from being inappropriate.” Jace’s complaint falls flat when he instantly follows it up with a lascivious wink and an all too unsubtle thumbs up in Alec’s direction.

Izzy elbows Jace, “Shut it, Jace. They’re sweet. This story is going to make my toast at their wedding so easy to write."

Alec sputters helplessly as his siblings ignore all social norms and launch into a heated debate regarding which of them most deserves to be Alec’s best man at his hypothetical wedding to the gorgeous, tanned man standing before him.

“I’m a man,” Jace argues with an edge of condescension that usually ends in bloodshed (by Izzy’s hand, of course). “It’s literally in the name - best man. Chicks not included.”

Izzy scoffs, her expression shifting into something that Alec can only describe as bloodthirsty, “I’m his favorite sibling.” 

She shrugs as if to say case closed.

Jace gasps in outrage. “Take that back,” he orders before turning to Alec. “Tell her that I’m your favorite.”

Clary and Simon watch the volley of words with matching wide-eyed delight as Alec wishes desperately for the Earth to swallow him whole.

“Guys,” Simon starts cautiously, obviously unsure if he should enter the fray, “Maybe, we should all get a drink?”

“Soon,” Izzy promises him with a sweet smile that turns sharp as she focuses her attention back on Jace. “There’s no way that Alec trusts you to give the best man speech. Your brain to mouth filter doesn’t exist.”

“Alec’s isn’t working so great right now either,” Jace shoots back belligerently.

“Kill me now,” Alec mutters under his breath, screwing his eyes shut. He feels the beginnings of a headache pounding behind his eyes. It is just his luck that not only does his brain seem incapable of forming complete sentences when it comes to Magnus but that his siblings have also gone full Lightwood.

A tender stroke across his palm makes Alec’s eyes fly back open to meet Magnus’ warm, amused expression. 

“I’m sorry about them,” Alec whispers desperately trying to convey with his eyes that his siblings’ insane behavior is unsanctioned, and he shouldn’t be held responsible for the tornado of insanity currently swirling around them.

The soft, teasing strokes don’t stop as Magnus’ lips twist up in a smirk, “Well, darling, it’s your choice of course, but the lovely Isabelle seems the obvious choice. She’d look amazing in a tux.”

Izzy’s triumphant yell and Jace’s indignant gasp are little more than white noise as Alec raises their interlaced hands to press an uncharacteristically bold kiss to Magnus’ knuckles. “Perhaps we should just elope,” he says under his breath.

Magnus' eyes glint with humor, and perhaps just a hint of something heavier, as he smiles up at Alec. "I have a feeling, Alexander, that I might take you up on that someday."

Something settles in Alec at the words. A warm possibility surging through his veins until it tumbles out of his mouth in a delighted laugh that only makes Magnus' eyes shine brighter.

"You guys, I ship this so hard."

Alec startles, his attention abruptly shifting off Magnus to their friends who are all watching him with various levels of disbelief plastered on their faces.  Simon is grinning like a dope, clearly proud of himself for his announcement, while Izzy beams proudly looking ready to start a slow clap in his honor at any moment.

"I think," Alec says slowly, well aware that his face is somewhere between besotted and adoring, "That we should go get that drink now. Alone."

Magnus' smile is bright, happy and wide as he allows Alec to tug him away from their friends. "You read my mind, darling."

And, if some day, Izzy does tell this story at their wedding, Alec finds that he doesn't mind. 

[a-sirens-melody]

Red Tulips Mean I Love You

Day 1: Flowers

Fem!Ishimondo oneshot. This does contain internalized homophobia, so just a heads up! Stay safe!

Maiko had been acting very strange today.

Kiyoko wasn't sure what the issue was. All day, her best friend had seemed nervous. Maiko wouldn't look her in the eye when they talked, yet whenever Kiyoko snuck a glance in class she could see her staring at her. When she caught Maiko (which was only twice, to be honest, as she was much more concerned with focusing on her studies), she would promptly turn away with pale pink flooding her cheeks.

The hall monitor had tried to ask her what was going on in the hallway during what time they had between their second and third classes that morning, but her attempt proved to be fruitless. That conversation had gone something like this:

“Maiko, are you alright? You seem very distressed today. Did I do something to alarm you, perhaps?” She asked, concerned.

Her friend's violet eyes widened and darted to the side. “W-what!? N-no ya idiot, ‘m fine! You didn't do nothin’ wrong okay!!?”

“So then what is wrong? You're being incredibly confusing and I just want to help-”

“Goddamnit, I'm FINE! DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT!!” And with a crimson face, the biker had turned on her heels and fled the scene, like a puppy with its tail tucked between its legs.

Kiyoko had yelled after her to not run in the hallway, but Maiko had gotten away before her mouth could cooperate with her brain.

She could not, for the life of herself, put her finger on it. Her friend had said she didn't do anything wrong, but Maiko’s accent had come out stronger and she'd raised her volume, which often happened when she was upset or flustered. But how would Kiyoko herself cause that to happen? All she did was ask how she felt!

For the rest of the day, pondering the answer to what seemed like a simple question made her mind spin. She didn't get to talk to Maiko in between any of her other classes either, which upset her deeply. Was Maiko lying? Did she not want to spend anymore time together? But they'd been soul sisters for months now! If anything, Kiyoko had hoped she would have trusted her enough to explain her reaction that morning!

Maybe I should've just kept my mouth shut, she thought glumly, standing at her locker and gathering her homework that afternoon. Classes had ended, and the biker girl still hadn't spoken another word to the disciplinarian. She must have gotten on one of Maiko's rather sensitive nerves.

She shut the locker door and turned to walk back to her dorm room, head bowed down and tears forming in her ruby red eyes. Usually, she and Maiko would head off to one of their rooms to study together or talk about their day, but that certainly wasn't going happen today.

“Kiyo, wait!”

Maiko…?

Kiyoko tilted her head back up only to be meet with several little red objects shoved into her face and Maiko talking a mile a minute.

“I’m sorry I didn't talk to you all day I've been a nervous fuckin’ wreck and please don't tell me I made you cry, I hate it when you cry and yeah I just wanted ta give these ta you so sorry if they're really shitty I had ‘em in my locker all day and uh well I really really like you so I'm gonna GO NOW YOU CAN JUST READ TH’ NOTE N TALK TO ME LATER OR WHATEVER OKAY BYE!!!”

Rushed footsteps faded away. Kiyoko didn't move for a few minutes, ignoring the few stragglers left in the hallway.

What was that all about? Why wouldn’t she like me? I thought we’d been best friends this whole time already!

Now she was even more confused. She certainly hadn't been expecting to get what she now identified to be a bouquet of flowers shoved in her face with Maiko speeding through an explanation so fast she could hardly understand her. Were these supposed to be friendship flowers? Was their friendship official now? Kiyoko had never had a friend before Maiko; she didn’t understand how this worked.

When she pulled the flowers away from her slightly teary face, she could properly see that they were blood-red tulips. She counted 10 of them, all bundled up with a white ribbon tied tightly around the light green stems. The aforementioned note was a small folded up piece of white notebook paper hanging from the ribbon, and Kiyoko carefully tore it off. As she walked to her room, she unfolded the note. Surely this would explain the strange events of today.

The handwriting was very neat and tiny, as if whoever had wrote the letter tried their very best to make it look presentable. If Maiko had written it, she definitely had taken her time because her handwriting was always sloppy and rushed, huge letters scrawled onto a report or a math worksheet. Kiyoko began to read.

Kiyo,

You’re probably wondering why these tulips were in front of your door or who they’re from. Unless I handed them to you in person. Then you know damn well who it is and I’m screwed.

Look, you know how much I suck at asking guys out. Every time I tried, I got so nervous that I started yelling and scared the shit out of the poor dude. It’s happened ten times now.

TEN.

You would think the the leader of the most badass biker gang in Japan had enough charm and confidence to win over any guy she wanted. But I haven’t succeeded once in getting a date, and that kinda losing streak does a shit ton of damage to a girl’s self esteem.

(Sorry for all the cussing by the way. I’m really really nervous about this, but if you were here as I write you’d probably scold me to “watch your profanity!!”)

Anyway, the point is I really suck at confessions. It's gotten hard to fall in love because I know I'll scare someone off of I try to admit it. But I don't want to lie to you anymore. Even before we were friends, you were never scared of me so hopefully this letter won't scare you either.

I'm in love with you.

God, Kiyo, I love you so much, it hurts.

You're so pretty, did you know that? You're too cute for your own good with your long shining black hair and your scarlet eyes that sparkle every time you talk about the future or something that excites you and you’re so smart and kind and beautiful and

The next paragraph was scribbled out and difficult to decipher. It seemed Maiko hadn’t meant to put her nervous rambling onto paper.

Fuck

FUCK

I said too much didn't I? This is way too much for a confession isn't it? Hell I don't even know if you swing that way. Oh god wait what if you hate me now? PLEASE DON'T HATE ME KIYO I CAN'T CONTROL THIS

Okay that's fine it's fine it doesn't matter if you don't love me back anyway I can deal with that! I've dealt with rejection 10 times before, so what's another one?

Um

So.

Yeah.

You can get back to me whenever I guess. Enjoy the flowers.

-Maiko

Oh.

Kiyoko had stopped in front of her door, silently reading the final paragraphs of the letter. She definitely hadn't been expecting a love confession.

She...loves me.

Maiko loved her. As more than a friend. Somehow that was not an unwelcome thought. It surprised her. Why did she feel absolutely ecstatic when that thought ran through her head? Her skin felt tingly and warm and she felt as though butterflies were fluttering in her stomach. And when she realized the reason for this, the weight hit her like a sack of bricks.

She loved Maiko back.

But if that was true...then why did she also feel so scared? Like feeling this way wasn't right? Was something wrong with her? Wasn't she straight? Every time she dreamed of becoming prime minister, she always had a husband, not a wife. Now she might not have imagined any specific quality she particularly wanted other than someone respectable, or found that relationship...desirable when she woke up and remembered her dream. She thought about being with Maiko more than any boy in their class, but that didn't mean some of them weren't good people!

But the more she thought about it, still standing straight as a rod outside her dorm, the more she began to realize she didn't want to be with a man. The only person she truly wanted a romantic relationship with was Maiko. She wanted to be by her side through thick and thin, to live with her when they graduated, to smile with her, cry with her, hold her hand, and…kiss her.

Oh God she was so deeply in love with Maiko!!

Her physical reaction was a bit delayed. First, she opened the door after what felt like hours, then closed and locked it. Then she slid down, put her head on her knees, and cried, the tulips loose in her grip.

She should've been happy. Her best friend-no, she was more than that now, her crush oh God- admitted to returning her affections. But all Kiyoko could think about was the fact that she was and would always be unable to love a man, to be normal. Never in the history of Japan had there been a female prime minister, which made her dream hard enough to achieve without a tainted and broken background, but now she'd have to run against straight candidates. Normal people whose hearts didn't flutter or brains short circuited when they thought about a person of the same sex.

She hated this. Sobbing on the floor for no one to hear, accusing herself of being broken and unworthy of anyone’s affection, male or female. She wanted to break this poisonous cycle of negativity but couldn't. Maiko didn't deserve her. She was a crybaby and much too strict and socially awkward and how could anyone love her when she was such a mess and couldn't even love herself?!!

She sat there and cried for so long that when she finally wiped her overflowing eyes and took a deep breath to recollect herself, it was an hour until curfew. She stood up and tilted her head back down to the bouquet on the ground. She bent over and picked it up, wondering all the while why Maiko had given her tulips instead of something typical for romantic gestures like roses.

I may as well ask her that when I go to her dorm, Kiyoko thought. As much as a part of her apparently wanted a romantic relationship, she needed to talk this out with Maiko. Maybe she had gone through this herself and knew what Kiyoko was dealing with. It would be nice to have someone reassure her that what she was feeling wasn't wrong or unnatural right now. Also, it would probably be best to give the other girl closure as soon as possible.

Brushing imaginary lint off of her perfectly clean skirt with tulips in hand, she opened her door and marched down the hall. Maiko’s dorm was only ten paces away, which wasn’t nearly enough time for Kiyoko to figure out what she was going to say. Perhaps it would be wise to start off with returning her feelings (something that still left her reeling) and ask about the flowers. By the time she approached her friend’s dorm, her heart was beating out of her chest and her grip on the tulips had tightened so much her knuckles had turned white.

However, she didn't have much time to be afraid. So she swallowed her fear, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell with shaky hands.

Silence.

Kiyoko started to wonder if Maiko had gone to sleep and began to consider returning the next day when the door creaked open.

All Kiyoko could see of the biker girl was one dark purple eye peeking out from the crack of the slightly open door. “Kiyo?” She called out timidly.

“Hello, Maiko,” she replied back, her voice shaking. The moral compass had never been so nervous in her life. She cleared her throat and continued, “I read your note.”

“S-so? Do you hate me now?”

Kiyoko met her gaze, determined. “Not at all! Even if I wasn't...homosexual myself, I would never judge you for the way you feel about anyone be they male or female!”

Maiko appeared to be thinking over this statement. “Oh...thanks, I guess.” But then her eyes widened at fully processing the sentence. “Wait...you said ‘even if I wasn't homosexual’...” She trailed off, glancing to the side and looked back up with hope glimmering within royal purple oceans. “So you are?”

The hall monitor flushed and began fiddling with the tulips to distract herself. “Y-yes. And I feel the same way about you, Maiko. I… I love you too. Although I have- ACK!”

The other girl had yanked open the door and pulled Kiyoko into a crushing hug before she could say anything else. She whispered in her ear, “God oh thank God, I was so scared you’d hate me or that I'd scare you off like all the others. Please don't leave me, I love you so much.” Her body was shaking badly, and Kiyoko could feel the other girl’s tears staining her blazer.

She hesitated, then wrapped her arms around her love. “I’ll never leave you, I promise,” she whispered back, tears pricking at the corners of her scarlet eyes. “Though I am afraid of what the future will bring.”

Maiko pulled back and looked at her, still a bit teary-eyed with concern now shining in her eyes. “What do you mean? You wanna go inside ‘n talk about it?”

Kiyoko sniffed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Yes, please.”

Maiko grabbed her hand that wasn’t holding the tulips and squeezed it reassuringly while reaching for the door and slowly turning the knob. They walked in hand in hand, and Kiyoko was relieved at a change in scenery. The girls had spent many afternoons in each other’s dorm, studying or just talking about whatever came to mind. She glanced at the Crazy Diamonds flags stacked up in the right corner of the room and the bike magazines spread out on the bed. This room was messy and laid back, a stark contrast to the hall monitor’s own calligraphy covered walls and tidy room.

It was one of her favorite things about Maiko, now that she thought about it. Her lifestyle and personality was so extravagantly different from her own, and yet they shared a friendship so deep they considered themselves soul sisters.

“Earth to Kiyo?”

The disciplinarian snapped back to the present to see that Maiko had brushed some of the magazines off of the bed to sit down on. Kiyoko set the bouquet down on the dresser behind the bed and joined her. Maiko’s arm came up to wrap around her and she leaned into the warmth, nuzzling the other girl’s shoulder.

“So what’s bothering you?” The biker asked. “You said something about the future?”

“Y-yes, actually,” she stuttered. “I didn't actually figure out that I liked you until I read your letter. A-and I was happy, don't get me wrong! But also…”

“This'll make it harder to become prime minister, won't it?” Maiko finished for her.

“Indeed.” Kiyoko nodded. “But that's not all! I didn't know I was a lesbian until a few hours ago! And it…” She choked up and tears flooded her vision. “It scared me. I thought something was wrong with me because I couldn't ever see myself wanting to be with a man.” Tears flowed freely down her face now. “And I think that feeling might return and I hate that and I just want to know that there's nothing wrong with me!”

She sobbed and shivered for a few minutes while Maiko rubbed her back in calm and comforting circles. “Shhh shh, it's okay. It's gonna be okay, Kiyo,” she murmured soothingly. “There's nothing wrong with you at all, you're not broken. You're a sweet, beautiful, confident girl that’ll be the best damn prime minister this country has ever seen.”

Kiyoko sniffed and looked back up at her. “R-really?”

“Hell yeah.” Maiko smiled. She brought her hand up to wipe away the tears. “I'll always be here to help you no matter what. We’re in this together, ok?”

“O-ok.”

“Besides,” Maiko continued, “I went through somethin’ similar. Thought I had to choose one gender to be attracted to.” She looked far off and smiled. “Actually, Fukawa helped me overcome that.”

“Did he really?”

“Yeah. It's kind of a miracle that he didn't get sick of my dumbass pining for you.”

“Language!” Kiyoko scolded and swatted the back of her head. “And you aren't dumb!”

Maiko hummed non committedly in response. Her other hand was in her lap, and Kiyoko picked it up and squeezed it. She beamed at her.

They stayed like that for a while, just smiling and knowing the other girl would always offer unending support and love. Then, Kiyoko realized she had one more question.

“Why tulips?”

“Hm?”

“The bouquet. You gave me tulips instead of typical roses. Not that I’m complaining by any means, but it did intrigue me.”

The gang leader blushed and avoided the other girl’s eyes to stare at the ground. “Well…’s like what you said. Roses are, like, the official flower of love, but they get used a ton ‘n I wanted something different. So I got ya tulips instead because…” She tilted her head back up, face entirely painted in rosy red and honesty and embarrassment glinting in eyes framed in eyeliner. “I thought they kinda symbolised you cause they’re simple but still really pretty ‘n not as appreciated as often…” Her voice trailed off, quieter than Kiyoko thought was possible.

She was stunned at how much thought and passion Maiko had put into the arrangement. Her girlfriend really was the sweetest thing. “I appreciate the effort you put into it,” she said. She leaned over and kissed her cheek and grinned when Maiko immediately began blushing even though she was as well. “They're beautiful flowers.”

Maiko squeaked and hid her face. “It's f-fine.”

The moral compass giggled. You're very cute when you blush, you know that?” At this, the other girl buried her face in her hands. Kiyoko grinned in success.

“Shut up,” came a muffled reply.

“Nope.” As much as it was to tease Maiko, she was going to have to get serious for a second. “But in all seriousness, thank you. For listening to my problems.”

Maiko finally stopped hiding her face and gave a shy smile back. “No problem. What kinda girlfriend would I be if I didn't listen to you?”

Kiyoko’s heart fluttered. She couldn't remember ever being this happy. The future looked brighter already, and the thought of the days to come excited her. “I have to get back to my dorm before curfew,” she said to Maiko, “but one more thing.” She let go of the biker’s hand and brought her own to her face, cradling it and looking straight into the amethyst eyes she loved so dearly.

“I love you. Have a good night, dear.”

Maiko's face turned cherry red again. “I l-love you too! GOODNIGHT!”

With that, Kiyoko picked up the tulips and left the room.

That night, she dreamed of her new girlfriend and was amazed as to how she earned such unyielding love.

[cyb-by-lang]

Shell Game (13/?)

Training begins.

During lunch on Monday, Kei stopped in with Principal Nezu to let him know about what had happened on Sunday. He could take it or leave it, but she was nonetheless slightly relieved to hear that the water villain would probably get his hearing back. Eventually. In prison.

She wouldn’t have been that happy if the jackass had actually managed to lay a finger on Hayate, but that was an alternate universe she hadn’t allowed to manifest.

After classes on Monday, Kei and Shinsō met for their mutual tutoring session in the school library. First of all came studying and, like the good student he was, Shinsō actually had all the notes from the classes Kei variously daydreamed through, missed, or simply didn’t understand. Though Kei did copy a fair portion of them and asked Shinsō for explanations for various topics, a fair chunk of the trouble came from not actually reading the coursework. She’d read more of the Modern Literature coursework in the past hour as a result than she had since the term started, with Shinsō outlining his note-taking strategy in between barely-hidden yawns. Sunday night clearly hadn’t treated him well, but he seemed game enough for their agreed-upon training.

And then, after the sky started to change color, it began.

It was…probably about the physical equivalent of what studying was for Kei. To wit: An embarrassing slog.

I didn’t realize it was this bad, Kei remarked to Isobu, while watching Shinsō get warmups out of the way. It’d been a long time since Kei had seen anybody huff and puff that hard after running a mile. Or its equivalent.

Training was all right in theory. Between Hayate’s pestering and Shinsō’s offer, Kei didn’t have much choice other than to study. She just hadn’t expected to have that kind of time while waiting for Shinsō to exercise.

Their route today was in Mustafu, solely because that was where UA was and it saved them train fare. Besides, studying after school meant there didn’t really seem like anyplace else to go that still felt like they’d be keeping momentum going. So, Mustafu it was.

By mutual agreement, neither of them were running anywhere near the bank from yesterday.

You may have forgotten that the majority of humans cannot keep up with a special jōnin in any capacity.

…Crap.

Shinsō managed to catch up to her, eventually. Checking her phone, she timed it out to about ten minutes. Unless the internet was lying to her, Shinsō was somewhat slower than average for a Japanese boy his age, and he was definitely not going to make the cut with the Hero course kids with a score like that.

Kei wasn’t even winded. She felt vaguely guilty about that, but figured Shinsō wouldn’t appreciate what’d look like pity coming from her.

Maybe she should have started him out with a kilometer run instead.

Once Shinsō got his breath back, he gasped, “Please… Just let me focus on Modern Literature.” Before Kei could pose a clarifying question, Shinsō went on, “If I have…to also tutor you in math…before doing this? I am going to die.”

Kei did her best to channel Gai. It was generally a safe bet. “Don’t give up yet, Shinsō-san!”

Shinso muttered something unintelligible, reaching up to adjust the sweatband around his head. He didn’t seem encouraged.

“Anyway, now it’s time for stretches and cooldown activities.”

Kei’s outlook didn’t really improve from that point onward, though she wasn’t nearly as frustrated as Shinsō was. He made it through most of the stretches fine, though he couldn’t touch his toes particularly well. At the end of it all, both of them were differing levels of annoyed, but at separate problems.

Are my standards completely broken?

Yes.

She didn’t even know where to start with katas. She needed more of an idea of his capabilities, even if his physical conditioning wasn’t filling her with confidence.

They went to a completely mundane non-beach park, which was conveniently free of witnesses on a Monday afternoon. There wasn’t exactly much to attract people besides the playground fixtures, and those were a little stooped and sad due to too many Quirk-blessed children attacking the structure over the years. And there was a water fountain, which Kei supposed was probably the only thing to recommend it.

Kei poked and prodded until Shinsō stood across from her on the grass, his feet shoulder-width apart. Given his expression, he was less enthusiastic than she’d been as a kid about the entire process. Then again, her mother had been using a shinai and had, perhaps with a bit too much faith in Kei’s impulse control, given her one to hold while the corrections went on. The trouble then had been keeping Kei still, not getting Shinsō to keep his muscles loose.

“Throw a punch, please,” Kei said, after she was almost happy with what she’d managed.

Shins�� blinked. “Right now?”

“No better time,” Kei said, and before she’d finished the last word, Shinsō had already thrown it at her face.

Kei caught his fist one-handed and said, “Gotta change a few things before you do it again.”

Shinsō huffed. “I’ve only thrown one.”

“And I’m here to make sure you don’t break your fingers on the second.” Kei turned his hand, saying, “Thumb on the outside. Otherwise you can hurt yourself more than the enemy.” She let go of him and reset their starting positions. “Again!”

A second punch.

“Don’t punch with the flats of your fingers. Knuckles first.”

A third.

“Stop aiming at my face. You’ll hurt your hand worse and just barely break my nose. Too many bones.”

A fourth.

“Keep your wrist straight. Good thinking, aiming for the throat.”

And on, and on, and on.

Shinsō switched arms before he could get tired, while Kei continued to correct him with the patience drilled into her by her mother and by trying to teach Hayate kenjutsu in their younger years. There was a different tempo to this kind of lesson, and Shinsō didn’t have the experience Kei relied on as a fighter to fall into step with the constant demand. Falling into a pattern in a real fight could be fatal, but here she just needed Shinsō to keep pace.

“Enough,” Kei said finally, while Shinsō shook out his wrists. His hands looked a little reddened by the constant impacts. Her own palms hardly tickled. “Take a break.”

Shinsō glared at her, but she ignored it. While he stalked toward the water fountain, Kei tried to think her way through the problem.

Would they get further with pure physical conditioning? The technical details were important, but Shinsō’s endurance wouldn’t really matter in a match with students who’d been training all along. Either he could grab someone with his Quirk and would win the match after essentially trash-talking someone into submission, or he’d be forced to rely on barely two weeks’ worth of training to rally after mind control failed.

Dammit, if only we had more time.

That is what everyone says, eventually. But you do not have that kind of time.

Kei pressed her thumb to her lower lip, trying to think.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a familiar flare of fiery chakra, and Obito stepped out from behind a cherry tree in his Tokyo clothes. Jeans and close-toed shoes had been a hard sell for him, but the medical eyepatch and long-sleeved shirts without the Uchiha high collar had been comparatively easy. He still wore gloves to hide his mismatched hands, but otherwise Obito was about as inconspicuous as he ever got.

He had a smiley face on the eyepatch. Because of course he did.

“Hiya, Kei,” Obito said brightly. “How’s life?”

“Kind of weird. Did Hayate tell you what happened yesterday?” Kei asked, hand on her hip.

“A bit. You really do run into a lot of trouble, don’t you?” Obito’s gaze focused on Shinsō, who was making his way back to them.

“Trouble finds me.” Kei gestured toward Obito. “Hey, Shinsō-san, this is a friend of mine. Dropping in to check on me, I guess.”

“Kei needs looking after sometimes. I’m Uchiha Obito.” He inclined his head just slightly. “Nice to meet you, Shinso-san.”

“Likewise, Uchiha-san.” Was it just Kei’s imagination, or did Shinsō give Obito a searching look after all that? “So, are you two close?”

Oh, great.

“Uh, we did grow up together.” Obito was oblivious, of course. “So, what’re you two up to today?”

“Training,” Kei said, before Shinsō could dig any further into that topic. “The Sports Festival is coming up, so we’re trying to get in shape.”

Obito brightened. “Can I help?”

“Mark out another…two kilometers,” Kei suggested. With a sweet smile that sat not-at-all on her face without a twist, she said to both boys, “We’ll finish with that!”

Shinsō looked like Kei had just signed his death warrant.

Obito trotted off, whistling.

“So, are you two—?” Shinsō began with the beginnings of a teasing smirk.

“He’s my best friend, not my boyfriend,” Kei corrected him immediately. With a stern expression, she indicated the direction Obito was traveling. “And we do have a beach. What do you think about running in sand, Shinsō-san?”

Shinsō, even despite his exercise flush, somehow managed to go pale. “I’m good.”

“Thought so. Now, I don’t have much else going on in the afternoons, but I don’t think it’s realistic to meet every day.” Mostly because having a purple duckling following her around would put a severe cramp in her ability to keep up the whole “shinobi” thing. She hadn’t done a proper perimeter circuit since the school year started. “Okay. How about I show you how to fall safely on Wednesday? And maybe throw people.”

“Why Wednesday? Why not today?”

“I can show you how to throw Obito today, but only because his Quirk means we don’t need mats,” Kei explained. She tapped her foot on the grass. “Softer than concrete, but I’ve had concussions that say otherwise. So has he. And he already knows how to fall, so there’s that too.”

Shinsō sighed. “At this point I’m not sure who got the better deal here.”

“I did say I was fine if you cut it down to just Modern Literature,” Kei responded. She checked her phone for a cheerful “Done! ᕦ( ᐛ )ᕤ” from Obito, then said, “Let’s go. We’re wasting daylight.”

“I hate you so much already.”

“Big words for day one! Come on, it’ll make you feel better to throw Obito around.”

Shinsō groaned aloud.  

[insightexploration]

Being Myself

Introduction

I am a story teller.  As a teacher, a therapist and friend I have always used stories to make a point, illustrate a principle or just to entertain. For the last 49 years people have been encouraging me to write them down. Here are some of them.  Make of them what you wish. After writing them I am filled with an overwhelming gratitude for the people who have crossed my path in this life. The most important is Susan Riley, my partner of 59 years to whom I dedicate this effort. None of this would have happened without her.  

How I found my calling

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.”  e.e. cummings

Doors

One of the most obvious truths I have encountered in my work with students and clients over the last fifty years is that many people are unhappy with who they are and how they are living life. Some have no idea of who they would like to be or they know who they want to be but the road to a meaningful and satisfying life is blocked by anxiety, fear, confusion or crippling depression.  Many times their ideas about who they should have become have come from their family and the disparity between this ideal and the reality of their lives is creating great sadness. I would like to posit that many times in life doors appear offering us a way out of this dilemma.  We then have a choice to ignore the door and continue on a less than satisfying path or we can walk through it onto the unknown path to a more fulfilling life. 

I would like to illustrate this by sharing a bit of my own story with you. Let’s start at the beginning. My parents gave me the name Lawrence because they thought it would look good with “Doctor” before it.  It does.  After my grandfather died during the depression, my father left premedical studies to support his mother and three siblings by doing physical labor.  In the 1930’s he began his own company and for fifty years was a successful, if not affluent, businessman.  It was my parents’ intention that I would be the first member of my family to finish college and that I would fulfill my father’s dream by becoming a physician.  Even though my “Doctor” looks good, I am not the right kind of doctor.  Unfortunately for them, I was a child of the sixties and “do your own thing” was our mantra.

Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.”  My journey to my bliss was not direct but was determined by several doors that at first were ignored and then recognized as messages from something larger than me.

After the Russians became the first country to send a satellite into space, I was seduced by the national passion and set my sights on becoming a scientist. This was a mistake but it was a mistake sanctioned by my family and the culture. Although it was not as good as becoming a physician, it was good enough for my parents.  

In my senior year of high school, with the idea of becoming a key player in the race to the moon, I visited a counselor at Pasadena City College and expressed my desire to become a nuclear physicist. She looked at my transcripts and shook her head.  I was not the most motivated student in high school but my dad said if I wanted the car (necessary for dating) and if I wanted to play sports (necessary for impressing potential dates), I had to maintain a B average.  Since grades were reported on my transcripts every semester, I knew I had to maintain a B average between two quarters.  So if I got an A in one quarter I would allow myself to get a C the next.  If I got a C, I would work to get an A the next quarter. Therefore, my high school transcripts show 6 semesters of 5 courses each, all of which are Bs. So, my counselor was looking at 30 Bs.  

Her response to me voicing my aspiration was, “You are not bright enough to be a nuclear physicist.”  “However,” she added, “you are not bad at anything.  Why don’t you become a teacher?”  Looking back, this was a door.  One I completely ignored and, in fact, felt angry about. 

So I gave up on PCC and began college as a physics student at Cal State, L.A. in 1960.  In retrospect, I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I had paid attention to her.  While science and math did not come easily to me, I did well enough to be able to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley, home of one of the world’s premier physics departments.  After two years there I received my degree with a major in physics and a minor in math.  When I showed my mother my diploma, her response was, “Take good care of that, it is worth just as much as the ones they gave the students who got good grades.”  Alas, I was well on the road to parental disappointment. 

Several things happened at Berkeley which were pivotal in guiding me to the path I still follow.  In my first semester at Cal, I was required to take a course in which we read several of Shakespeare’s plays.  Reading Shakespeare revealed a new world to me in which there was more to human behavior than met the eye.  I loved this course but could not afford to spend much time on it while taking advanced courses in physics and calculus as well as two other electives. If I had paid attention to the joy and excitement I felt reading and writing about the human psyche as Shakespeare saw it, I would have known where my life needed to go at that time. However, I was, as James Hollis says, in the midst of my first adulthood, an attempt to live out the life one is expected to live by one’s family and culture.  At the end of the Shakespeare course my instructor, a wonderful teacher, said, “You are the smartest C+ student I’ve ever had.”  I think it was a compliment.  But again, I had ignored an important sign.  After I finished my Ph.D. in child psychology I returned to thank him for opening the doors of the human psyche to me. Surprisingly, he remembered me.  I have contacted him again recently and he remembered my name and told me he has focused much of his work since then on children’s literature and fairy tales. 

In my second semester at Cal, I began volunteering at an elementary school in the West Berkeley ghetto where I tutored some of the worst students in the school.  For a middle-class white boy from the suburbs of Southern California this was a real awakening.  To my surprise, I found that individual attention could turn some of the worst students into academic successes.  Witnessing the wasted potential of children in the sixth grade already consigned to the garbage heap of American life changed me.  It was the sixties.  I was young and idealistic and it became my personal mission to save as many kids as I could.  I wanted to help children that others considered unreachable. A door had appeared.

Although I realized that my life was turning away from hard science, I found employment during the summer between my junior and senior years in the Apollo program at the Research & Development center at Aerojet General in Azusa, California.  My assignment was to design a monochromatic light source to simulate the effect of unfiltered sunlight on metal which would simulate the environment on the moon.  While this brief experience as an engineer was enjoyable, I realized that I was much more interested in pure theory than I was in the practical application of scientific principles.  Also I wasn’t a very good engineer.  I blew so many circuits they nicknamed me “Sparky.” I also realized that I was quite a few brain cells short of theoretical physicist material.  It occurred to me that I could combine my interests by becoming a teacher of physics, math and English literature in high school.

Being confused, I once again visited a guidance counselor when I returned to Berkeley in the fall.  After a battery of tests were scored and interpreted, I returned to find out just what I was supposed to do. I had spent an inordinate amount of energy purging my life of Christian Fundamentalism so imagine my surprise when I discovered that my number one, absolutely no fail, born to be occupation was “Minister.”  I was even further incensed when I found out “Psychologist” was a close second.  I happened to be taking Psych 1A as an elective in my senior year in order to graduate and had the book with me.  I raised it up and said defiantly, “You mean this bullshit?” and walked out of his office.  I finished my last year of university somewhat unenthusiastically, married my high school sweetheart (we are still married) and moved to San Francisco where she took a secretarial job and I enrolled in education classes at San Francisco State College.

It is with some humor that I reflect on my professional career and see that I have spent most of it teaching psychology and practicing as a therapist trying to bring spirituality and psychology together.  I should have listened to both of those counselors but knowing the expectations my parents and I both had of me, I did not.  Doors had appeared and I ignored them.

After four years of rigorous physics and math courses, the education courses at State left me nonplussed.  I lasted two weeks.  I started looking for work and fell into the most defining moment of my professional life.  You can call it grace, coincidence or synchronicity but it has happened so many times in my life, I know it is real.  This time I walked through the door.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so I looked for part time work.  I found three jobs: gardening for a psychologist, driving an autistic child to and from his psychiatrist and tutoring a supposedly “minimally brain damaged” eight-year-old boy whose mother was a psychologist.  In a matter of days, a whole new world opened up to me.  It was less exact and predictable than the world of formulae and numbers, but fascinating in its complexity and ambiguity.

Alan

The most important of these experiences was tutoring a boy I shall call Alan. His mother was desperate.  One after another, a series of tutors had failed miserably in their attempts to teach him to read. He was repeating third grade and his psychologist (who was very well known in his field) had told Alan’s mother that her son would be lucky to finish elementary school.  From the first moment I met him, I knew Alan was smart; he had a great vocabulary, a wonderful sense of humor and a keen interest in the world of science.  He just couldn’t read.

Rather than tackling his reading problems head on as his other tutors had done, I decided to approach them indirectly through a subject which interested him. We began to do chemistry and optical experiments under the suspicious eyes of his mother.  Alan really liked the experiments, especially the ones involving explosions or really bad smells.  Every so often I would be reading an experiment and I would ask him to read a short word.  After a while, he was reading more and more of the experiments and starting to read books with me.

Since Alan was Jewish, I thought it would be important for him to know some of the heroic stories of the holocaust.  I learned one of my first lessons on the workings of a child’s mind when we started to read a child’s version of The Diaries of Anne Frank.  When we had finished about three pages he said, “I don’t like girl stories.”  So we returned to science, where a 21-year-old WASP in an identity crisis and an eight-year old Jewish boy with a learning disability could find true happiness. 

My work with Alan encouraged me to start reading about psychology, learning disabilities and children in general.  Since I had very little experience in this area, I decided to visit his psychologist for direction.  His office was in a very posh area of San Francisco and filled with fine art and beautiful furnishings.  It effused monetary success.  He said that it was wonderful that Alan had a friend like me, but that I should give up hoping for a normal life for him.  I looked around his office at the plush furnishings and thought, “If someone this stupid can be this rich, this is the career for me.”  I re-entered San Francisco State where, with the financial and emotional support of my wonderful wife and the enthusiasm engendered by the discovery of my life’s work, I achieved a straight “A” average.

My wife, who had been interested in psychology long before me, also began taking psychology classes and realized it was her life’s passion too (second to her passion for me of course).  I was mentored by several members of the psychology department and, in 1966, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota in what may have been the best program in clinical child psychology in the United States.

Alan finished elementary school, junior high, high school and college, and is a happy husband and father who, along with his wife, runs his own very successful communications business.  He told me several years ago that he continued to be interested in science after I moved away but gave up chemistry when he realized he would never be able to use it for his true purpose, to blow up his school. 

Some important influences in my life

“If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.”  Muhammad Ali

My Last Name

Dettweiler is a fairly unusual name.  Things happen to me that wouldn’t happen if my name was Smith or Jones.  For example, upon meeting me for the first time, a person often will say, “I knew a Dettweiler (not necessarily spelled like this) in Pocatello.  Is that a relative?”.   “Probably,” I always answer.  My branch of the family settled in Ontario, Canada so when we moved to Victoria, British Columbia I was often asked about my family. The doctor who set up the British Columbia health plan was a Detweiler (different spelling) and people used to say things to me like, “If you are half the man your father was you will be a fine person.”  His son was a lawyer in Victoria who did a lot of pro bono work for legal aid.  I used to get calls in the middle of the night from guys proclaiming, “I was framed” or “You gotta help me.”  Very seldom does anyone spell it correctly and often people mispronounce it.  For reservations at restaurants I always use my wife’s name which is Irish and much easier to spell for the person taking the reservation.  There is some irony in this as I will explain later.  

The Dettweilers, who were Swiss German, came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1700s.  About 20 years ago when my son visited Switzerland, he found the Dettweiler homestead which, until recently, had remained in the family.  Over the fireplace were tiles inscribed with the words, “Detwiler, 1513.” My dad had recently died and he buried my dad’s favorite pipe behind this building.

It is thought that since they were Mennonites, they were escaping religious persecution in Europe and fled with other Mennonites to the community in Lancaster County.  My branch left Pennsylvania for Canada in 1810.  After arriving, the patriarch of the family lost his wife and remarried within the church but did not register the marriage with the government.  Eventually a huge tract of farm land near Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario was seized by the government since the children who inherited it were not legal heirs.  

When I first moved to Canada it was a fairly fractured country.  The French wanted out and the West felt like the neglected child in a large family.  So when people would refer to the government as “Those bastards in Ontario,” I thought maybe they were talking about my relatives.  

My name has caused me to have some interesting interactions.  One client came to me because he was Swiss and he knew my village. He said, “I used to drive through it every day on my way to the airport in Zurich.”  Once he said to me, “Larry, your ancestors may have come here 250 years ago but you are still very Swiss German.” Curiously, I asked what he meant by that.  “Well, the French and Italian Swiss work to live.  The Swiss Germans live to work.”  

I had another client come to me because he recognized the Mennonite name. He had left the Ontario community and was feeling lost.  They shunned him and he felt completely out of touch with mainstream Canadian culture.  He was neither here nor there and it was very difficult for him.  

I once went to a panel discussion about death and as I listened to Elizabeth Kubler Ross I grasped a whole new understanding of the meaning of life.  I was delighted by her statement, “But what do I know?  I am just a Swiss hillbilly who has sat with thousands of dying people.”  After the talk, I walked up to her and told her what an inspiration she had been to me.  She looked at my name tag and said, “Oh look!  You are a Swiss hillbilly too.  I know your village.”

One of my students, originally from Switzerland, asked me if I knew the difference between European heaven and European hell.  I said I did not. She said, “In European heaven, the cooks are all French, the lovers are all Italian, the cops are all British, the mechanics are all German and everything is organized by the Swiss.  In European hell, the cooks are all English, the lovers are all Swiss, the cops are all German, the mechanics are all French and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Back to the family history.  After losing the land my disenfranchised great grandfather moved the family to Michigan in the late 1800s where, during the First World War, the locals blew up their house because they spoke German. But they persevered and my Grandfather left the Mennonites and became a preacher in the Evangelical United Brethren church, eventually settling in L.A. where I was born and spent my early years.  Hollywood to be exact.  

I have always taken great pride in being the descendent of Swiss German Mennonites and my wife has felt the same about being Irish. All our lives we have chided each other on the stereotypical traits of these cultures.  Recently we did genetic testing and were shocked to find out that my proud European heritage accounts for only 9% of my genetics and her Irish heritage is about the same.  Surprisingly my number one heritage is Irish and hers is English/Scottish. No more Irish jokes for me and no more superior race jokes for her.  I now refer to her as the Limey oppressor and constantly ask her when she is going to let my people go.  I believe most of that Irish heritage comes from my Grandfather Mooney.  His family considered themselves Scottish but I think they originally came from Ireland.

My Grandfather

It is a sad truth that many of the men I have seen in my work have had very little contact with positive male role models while growing up. I was fortunate to have two. They were not perfect but they taught me about being a responsible husband and father and gave me the belief that I would be able to traverse this life successfully.

Soon after I was born my dad left to fight in the war in Europe.  My mother and I moved in with her parents, Nana and Grandad, who lived next door to our house in Hollywood. My father was gone for three years and during that time my grandfather was really the only father figure in my life.  The closeness of this relationship was reflected in an event that occurred three years after my father came home. At age 6 I was selected to be a participant on the Art Linkletter radio show, Kids Say the Darndest Things. When Art asked me if I looked like my father I replied, “NO, I look like my granddad.”  

He was a first-generation American son of Scottish grocers who settled in Danville Illinois.  He had three obsessions, money, religion and baseball.   When my cousin researched the family history she discovered that when his parents arrived at Ellis Island their name was Muney. The immigration officer said, “This is America. You can’t have the name Money.” So at that point their name was changed to Mooney. Apparently, the name went deeper than the spelling.  When my grandparents were in their 70s my grandfather would send my elderly grandmother back to the store if he thought she had been shortchanged by even a penny. I remember watching her leave the house in tears having to go back and haggle with the store manager.

The major accomplishment in his life had been to bring Fritos to Los Angeles. He worked for this company his entire life but was always quite happy to remain a salesman driving his truck around Southern California.  Although he was obsessed with money and loved to buy and sell property he never made a lot of money.  At one point in the 20s he owned a square block of Wilshire Boulevard but sold it shortly after he bought it because he said it would never amount to anything. 

Although my grandparents were very kind to me, shaming was definitely the response of choice to what they considered to be bad decisions about money. Once, when I was about ten, we were visiting them on a Saturday afternoon.  I had a crisp five dollar bill in my pocket and there was a corner store at the bottom of the hill on which they lived calling to me the whole afternoon.  I walked down to the store and bought a dollar toy for me and a little tin bank for my brother that cost four dollars.  Looking back, I think, what ten year old spends one dollar on himself and four dollars on his five year old brother?  It would seem to me that this act should have been seen as an act of generosity and commented on as such.  However, when I returned, my grandfather said, “You bought the bank for the wrong person.”  

He never wanted to waste anything.  When he and my grandmother were in their mid-nineties they lived in an assisted living/end-of-life care facility for members of the church. My grandmother had been taking hormones and stopped taking them because of problems with bleeding.  My grandfather decided that it would be a waste of money to just throw them out and since they were so helpful to her he would take them.  Several months later he asked my mother to take him to the doctor because he was suffering pain in his chest.  It turned out he was growing breasts. Later, my grandmother decided that she just didn’t want to live any longer and she stopped taking nitroglycerin for angina. Again my grandfather didn’t want to waste the money so he started taking the pills, passed out and suffered a concussion and went into a coma. While he was in the coma my grandmother died.

When he came to my mother played a recording of the funeral for him but he just couldn’t get it into his head that his wife had died. One day when my mother was visiting him he told her that Stella had left him and had run off with another man. My mother, after trying uselessly to convince him that she had died, asked him how he knew she had run off of another man.  He told her he had an invisible radio under his pillow and every night it played the Stella and Alan show and on this show Stella had run off with another man. He then told my mother, “I know why she left.”  My mother asked, “Why?”  He said, “I wasn’t giving her enough sex!”  This was too much for my mother, the daughter of these devoutly religious people, and she ran crying from the room.

I’m not sure how his obsession with religion began. I know he was raised in a severe Scottish Presbyterian household.  He told me once that his father had beaten him for whistling on Sunday. I do know that as a young man he smoked and drank and was not terribly religious. At some point he found Jesus, stopped smoking and drinking and joined the Evangelical United Brethren church. The minister in this church was my other grandfather, Elden Dettweiler.  

He was what we called in those days, a character.  Some of the funniest stories about my grandfather concern his poor vision. In his later life he developed cataracts and at that time cataract surgery was very serious.  When they removed the cataracts the patient had to stay in bed motionless for an extended period of time so often the surgery was postponed until it was absolutely necessary.  I remember that he would take me on his rounds in his Frito truck.  We would place a wooden chair in the stairwell on the right-hand side of the truck and I would ride around telling him when the lights turned green when the lights turned red, what lane to be in and generally help him complete his route. When I think back on this it is absolutely terrifying and I would never have allowed my children to do this.  But back then nobody thought twice about it.  On another occasion we were driving in the mountains and he pulled up behind a parked police car to ask directions.  He went up to the car window started asking the officer where we were only to get no response.  He soon was yelling at the officer demanding to know why he wouldn’t talk to him.  My grandmother got out of the car walked up to calm him down and realized that that the car was parked with a dummy in the front seat in order to slow people down as they traveled down this mountain.

Although he fancied himself somewhat of a handyman, his inability to negotiate the physical world was often a humorous topic of conversation when the family was together and he was out of earshot.  Even though we lived in Southern California, he would wear long underwear all winter long.  In the summer, when temperatures rose to the 80’s and 90’s, he would cut the sleeves off but still wear the underwear.  I remember one year I was staying at their house in Glendale when the annual cutting ritual was being performed.  He would fold the underwear in half and cut both sleeves at once.  On this occasion, I watched as he carefully folded the garment and proceeded to cut one arm and one leg off.  I could tell he was angry but he put it aside, carefully folded the next garment and again, cut off one leg and one sleeve.  Under his breath I heard him mutter, “Shit.”  It was the only time I ever heard him swear.

He was obsessed with baseball all his life.  I remember that we would go to games played by the L. A. Angels minor league team on a regular basis.  It was especially fun to go to the games when they played the hated Hollywood Stars, another minor league team. When the Dodgers moved to L. A. he would spend hours next to his radio or in front of the TV transfixed by the slow, deliberate pace of major league baseball.  Afterwards, if I was around, he would relate all the funny things Vin Scully had said and give me a summary of the game and the glorious or miserable play of the Dodgers.  

All in all, I feel very fortunate to have had a grandfather who was so present in my life and at one time told me, “You are going to be very special and make us all proud.”  Certainly in my early life my grandparents were as much my parents as my mother and father and as I grew older we remained close.  As different as they were from who I consider myself to be, the feeling of being cared for and nested in matrix of relatives who would be there if needed gave me a sense of security and well-being that has never left me.  For that I am grateful.  However, he was a character.

My Dad

When she was about 12, my mother was standing on the steps of her church in Los Angeles as a car driven by the new preacher’s son pulled up to the curb. Her brothers always teased and frightened her so when she saw the boy get out and run around to open the car door for his sister (my aunt Irene), she said to herself, “That’s the boy I am going to marry.”  She had never seen a boy act so politely with his sister so she figured he must be something special.  Later, on their first date, she waited anxiously when they pulled up to their destination.  “Don’t open that door,” he said, “It is broken and I have to come around and open it for you.”  Well, he wasn’t such a gentleman after all but she married him anyway.  She said my dad never opened another door for her, but I know he did because I learned to do that from him.

My dad had a hard life as a young man.  He was the son of a preacher during the depression and told tales of working the orchards of the California central valley, driving unsafe trucks and polishing cars at a parking lot. (When he answered the ad he did so even though he wasn’t from Poland.  The ad was for a polish boy). They lived off the hand me downs and food supplied by parishioners. There was no money.  He got his first pair of new shoes when he was in high school after his father had landed a fairly lucrative position at the church in downtown LA.  Just as it seemed they had turned a corner, his dad died suddenly and he and his sister had to quit college and get jobs to support his mother and two younger siblings.  

He managed, along with some partners, to start a wholesale florist business which did well, if not spectacularly, for 50 years until he retired.  He worked long hours six days a week but I think he loved it. My mother was not so crazy about it.  Shortly after I was born he was called up for WW2 and after my brother was born, he was called up to Korea for a year.  So between the wars and the long work hours I didn’t have a lot of contact with him. 

When my dad knew he was going to be drafted for WW2 he tried to enlist in the Navy.  He was told, “Mr. Dettweiler, you are almost legally blind, we can’t take you.”  So he tried the Air Force and they said the same.  Then the Army drafted him and made him an artillery spotter.  A clear example of military intelligence.

After the invasion of Germany he was driving a truck into a town one day and saw a big sign saying, “DITTWEILER” which was the name of the town.  He said to his friend beside him, “Hey, this is my town. Too bad they misspelled my name!”  They were laughing when around the corner came a German Panzer tank that began to shoot a machine gun at them.  They pulled a quick U turn and raced back to base camp, happy to be alive.  When they got out of the truck they noticed bullet holes in the back of the cab right above their heads. After a moment of shock and relief my dad said, “I guess they didn’t know who I was.” That’s the way he was.  No matter how bad things got in our house or with his business, my dad could always come up with a story or a joke that would get us all laughing.

After he returned from Korea he recognized my mother’s overprotective nature and thought I was becoming a “mommy’s boy.” So he started taking me to work with him on Saturdays when I was 11 and on the rest of the days during the summer when I was 12.   On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we would get up at 2am and get home about 4pm.  On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we would get up at 5am and get home about 2pm.  Since holidays were the busiest times for him, my friends would be spending their Easter and Christmas vacations at the beach while I was putting in 70 hour weeks with my dad.   I loved it.  Unlike my friends, I had money to spend and was learning about the world of men, a world I had been shielded from by my mother.  I learned the value of hard work and all the guys encouraged me to stay in school so I wouldn’t have to work like this for the rest of my life.  It was a valuable lesson.

When I was in Boy Scouts I asked my Dad why we never went camping.  He said son, “I camped all the way through France and Germany and up and down the Korean peninsula and I will never spend another night in a tent.”  Returning home after one campout I explained enthusiastically how we had eaten this great stuff called Spam and that we should get some for the house.  He looked at me disapprovingly and stated, “There will be no Spam in this house.”  I think his experience in the army really shaped his attitude toward life in other ways too and has helped me understand some of the reasons he and I differed so much as adults.  But he was a good man and a good father.

My dad was pretty tolerant but my grandfather was a confirmed anti-Semite.  We lived in Hollywood which was heavily populated by Jewish folks and he would often make denigrating remarks about them.  One day, at my dad’s workplace, I went to lunch but did not have enough money for the bill.  After a short conversation with the elderly Japanese owner, we settled on a price that equaled the money I had on hand. When I returned to the shop, my dad asked me if I had enough money for lunch. I said, “No, but I Jewed him down.”

This was a phrase I had heard my grandfather use on many occasions and had also heard my friends use.  He looked at me the way he always did when he was displeased, tilting his head down and looking over his glasses, and said, “I want to talk to you when we get home.”

When we got home he sat me down and brought out about twenty 8 by 10 glossies of pictures he took on the day his unit liberated Dachau.  He had me look through the sickening photos of nude, emaciated bodies stacked in huge piles, bodies hanging on barb wire, bodies in mass graves and then, the ovens.  

“This is where talk like that ends up.  I never want to hear you talk like that again.”  

My dad said that occasionally when he was directing the shelling of German positions he would realize that he was killing men who, had his ancestors not left Germany, might be friends or relatives.  After Dachau, he said he didn’t feel so bad about it.

I never did talk like that again and it is fitting that when I have been in really bad places in my life, it has almost always been Jewish men and women who have taken me under their wings.  At one point in my life I was so impressed by all the Jews I knew I considered converting which led to my brief flirtation with Judaism. Dettweiler, however, is not a great last name if you want to be Jewish.

My brief flirtation with Judaism

During my second year of grad school I got very interested in working with autistic kids.  A visiting expert put a Jewish family in touch with me regarding their 8 year old son who was autistic.  The father had been a lawyer in Romania before the war but when the Nazis came his gentile friends smuggled him and his wife into the Ukraine where they hid from the Nazis and their collaborators for the remainder of the war.  I never had the courage to ask them about that experience but from films I have seen and books I have read, it must have been horrific.

They were so grateful for the work I was doing with their son Sammy they sort of adopted us. They insisted on paying me and we occasionally were invited to the house for dinner.  I was doing behavior modification with Sammy and one of the things behaviorists are known for is keeping excellent records of time and behavior.  I would be in the middle of tracking Sammy’s behavior carefully when the door would fly open and Miriam would appear with a tray full of baked goods, coffee and sweets.  “Eat, Eat,” she would say.  “You are so skinny.  Your wife needs to feed you more.”  So much for that data collection.

Sammy made such great progress that his parents decided to enroll him in Hebrew school with the ultimate goal of a Bar Mitzvah.  I had him on a token economy in which he bought things with the chips he earned for speaking and reading.  One of the things he bought with his chips was a TV guide.  He would then memorize the whole thing and be able to tell you when and on what station every program was broadcast during the week.  I thought, “How hard can it be to memorize a little Hebrew?”

Well the Rabbi at the school thought different.  He said Sammy was retarded and couldn’t learn anything.  So I asked for the best student in the school to help me and by using M and Ms as rewards I taught Sammy the Hebrew alphabet in about 30 minutes.  The Rabbi was ecstatic.  He said I had performed a Mitzvah and asked me what my last name was.  Oh Lord, all my credibility was about to go out the window as I prepared to tell him my Teutonic title.  

Immediately Miriam said, “This is almost Doctor Dettweiler.”  “Ahhh,” said the Rabbi with a smile. Next week when I returned all the kids were getting M and Ms. Apparently the Rabbi thought that was why Sammy was learning so quickly. 

At one point, a young rabbi came to Victoria to take over the Synagogue and we ended up in the same tai chi class as Danny and his wife Hannah.  He took on the job of refurbishing the Synagogue which had fallen into disrepair.  As a fundraiser he invited Shlomo Karlbach, a singing Hassidic rabbi and a friend to Hanna’s family, to come and give a concert.  I had listened to Schlomo on the radio when I was a student in San Francisco so I was excited to attend.   “Bring your guitar,” Danny said, “we are going to get together and sing after the concert.”

I took my guitar and left it behind the coats in the cloak room before we entered the Synagogue proper.  Danny and Shlomo were working their way through the audience and when they came to me. Danny said to Shlomo, “This is the guy.”

Shlomo said, “Get your guitar you are going to accompany me.”  

A lump formed in my throat and I said, “But I don’t know your songs.”

“No matter,” he said, “God will help you.”

So I got my guitar and accompanied him all night long.  When it was over, people approached me and said things like, “I didn’t know you were Jewish” and “So now you are out of the closet.”

“I’m not Jewish,” I would say.

“How did you know the chords to the songs?”

“God helped me and he only plays three chords so it wasn’t that hard.”

One fellow actually asked me if I wanted to join his Jazz band.  I demurred saying I only played simple folksongs.

“Nonsense,” he said.  “I heard those arpeggios you were playing.”

I thought to myself, “What’s an arpeggio?”

After, a bunch of us went to a house where we sang Yiddish and Hebrew songs for a long time. Then the moment that I was dreading came.  He asked us our names.  As we went around the circle everyone gave their first and last names. When my turn came, I only gave my first name.  He asked me what my last name was.  When I told him he asked, “Dettweiler, what kind of name is that?”

“Swiss,” I answered.  “But my father fought the Germans and liberated Dachau,” I blurted out. This seemed to please him and we sang a few more songs on that most memorable night.

The next morning my wife and I went out to breakfast at a local restaurant and who should walk out the door as we are walking in? Shlomo.  Racing out he said, “Pray for me brother, I am late for the ferry!”

Later, telling Hannah how much I enjoyed the evening, I said I had been entertained and moved by his stories.  She replied, “Yes, and some of them may even be true.”

I told this story to a client recently and she told me a quote from Rabbi Akiva Tatz.  “All my stories are true.  Some happened and some did not, but they are all true.”  I love this quote. 

Perhaps the thing I love most about Jewish culture, aside from the philosophy of saving the world, is the humor.  

I had a colleague who had twin boys that were coming to the point in their lives when they should start studying for their Bar Mitzvahs.  He told me that he had no connection to the religion in which he was raised and his wife was not Jewish.  I said, “You know Jerry, it is a part of their heritage and they don’t have to do it if they don’t want to. Why not give it a shot?”

“Well,” he said, “I might but I really don’t like the rabbi here in Victoria.”

I took this problem to my friend Louis who was president of the Synagogue.  In typical fashion he told me a story.

Once there was a shipwrecked rabbi.  His parishioners looked for him long and hard and finally found him.  When they went on the island they saw a beautiful little structure made of driftwood and palm leaves.  He explained he had built a synagogue in which to worship. They looked up the beach and saw there was an identical building. “Is that a synagogue you built also?”  “Yes, and I wouldn’t set foot in it.”   I don’t think Jerry’s boys ever did their Bar Mitzvahs.  

I don’t know why Judaism has always fascinated and impressed me so but it probably had something to do with all that bible reading I did as a kid and the fact that Jewish people have played such a large and positive role in my life.  At one point I felt such an affinity for the culture and religion I considered converting but somehow it just didn’t seem right for me.  There was a culture and a history that I did not feel a part of.  When I was discussing this with my good friend Bernice who had been a great help in establishing my parenting courses, she said, “Larry you are welcome to become a member of our Synagogue and our religion, but really, you are such a Baptist. Why don’t you just stick with your roots?”  I am not sure what she meant but somehow it made complete sense to me.  So next I need to talk about my roots.

Jesus is Watching

At the time of my birth my parents were members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church.  This was an amalgamation of two churches that had spun off from the Mennonite Church. It was fundamentalist and during my early years our lives pretty much revolved around the church.  My dad’s father had been the minister before his untimely death.  My other grandfather was a deacon.  My grandmother played the organ.  My dad was the choir director.  My mom taught Sunday school and both she and my uncle were the soloists in the church choir. My cousin and I were the youth duet and we can still do a pretty mean “Old Rugged Cross.”

My first recollection of a reference to Jesus was when I was very young. I was in the back yard and apparently I had my hand down my pants because my mother said, “Don’t touch yourself there, Jesus is watching!”  Sage advice, no?  A couple of years ago my friend and fellow psychotherapist Ralph got very interested in men’s sexual health.  He wanted us to do a workshop on the topic. Ralph is a former Mennonite minister so I said we could do a short workshop entitled, “Don’t touch yourself there, Jesus is watching.”  Later he sent me a photo from Farmington, NM of a big porn warehouse and a billboard across the street with a picture of Jesus and the warning, “Jesus is watching.”  I didn’t know my mother had ever been to Farmington.  

I used to lie in my grandmother’s lap in church staring up and the glass skylight of Jesus carrying a lamb.  She would tickle me to keep me quiet and I thought this must me what heaven is like.  Those moments are stuck in my memory and the peace I felt is still salient in my mind.  Even after all these years and the rejection of fundamentalist Christianity if not Christianity in general, I love to sing along with the old gospel songs while speeding down the highway. Somehow it still touches me at a deep level.  

They tore that church down to make a freeway and moved it some distance away.  Eventually we moved so my parents started going to a Methodist church, primarily for the choir, I believe.  That ended my experience with the EUB church and ironically, they merged with the Methodists at some later date.

Although my mother remained religious all her life, I think my dad had lost his religious beliefs after fighting in Germany and Korea. The battle of the bulge and the liberation of Dachau caused him to seriously doubt the existence of a beneficent and loving God.

One experience that I remember clearly is an interchange between my father and my grandfather after my dad returned from fighting in the Korean War.  He was quite bitter about being called back to war after serving in Europe and I think what he saw in both conflicts led him to question all the beliefs that had been instilled in him as a child. We were sitting in my grandparents’ den and granddad asked my dad, “Art, when you were in the foxholes and the Koreans were shooting at you did you pray to God?”  My dad answered, “Mr. Mooney, I figured any God that would send me to the hell I experienced in Europe and then send me to Korea to experience it all over again at the ripe old age of 35 wasn’t worth praying to.”  All I remember after that was a deadly silence that settled over the room.

As they grew older, my grandparents could not travel to the new church so they started going to a store front mission EUB church nearer their house in Glendale.  As a young teenager I loved going to that church.  It was fire and brimstone and stand on the third verse. Every week the minister would ask for people to come forward and testify.  I remember one ancient old man who stood up on his canes and said, “I used to be a Lutheran but now I am a Christian!”  

I started having my doubts in college and attending UC Berkeley in the early 60s put an end to any religious aspirations I might have had. Also, the rigorous scientific training I received while completing my degree in physics caused me to doubt anything one could not see or validate scientifically.  

As I said earlier, between my third and fourth year I worked on the Apollo program for NASA at Aerojet General.  There was another intern from Cal Tech and we were talking about religion and discussing the fact that in those days they made you fill out a form designating a religious preference when you registered for classes. He was from Idaho and lived in a town with a lot of Mormons.  He stated that Mormon girls would go to great lengths to convince you to convert to Mormonism.  I doubt this was true but when asked for a religious preference he answered jokingly, “Mormons.”  But the joke was on him. For four years he was bombarded by letters, calls and visits from Mormon missionaries trying to convince him to rejoin the flock. 

My wife and I married in 1964 in a high episcopal church that her mother attended.  Before the wedding with had to meet with the priest and he asked us, “What do you think makes a good marriage?”

Being fresh out of Berkeley and full of myself I answered, “Intellectual compatibility.” 

He frowned and said, “I was thinking more of the love of Christ.”

“Oh yeah, that too.”  I said.

During the rehearsal, we were told we could not have the wedding march because it was from A Midsummer Night’s dream and celebrated the marriage of Titania to an ass.

Susan said, “If the shoe fits….”

Also, two of my best friends, Iranian Jewish brothers, wanted to throw rice and the priest said no because it was a Pagan ritual.  Really?  Sometimes religion just seems so silly. 

When I was working at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C., the departmental secretary was a born again Christian.  I made the mistake of sharing my childhood history with her and she assumed we were cut from the same cloth.  One day I could not get the duplicating machine to work and I asked her for help.  She came over and laid her hands on the machine, closed her eyes and intoned, “Lord Jesus, help Larry to do his work and repair this machine.”

Somewhat stunned, I pushed the start button and, you guessed it, it worked. She winked at me and said, “You and I know the power of prayer, don’t we?”

My last experience with Jesus came in 1986 when my wife asked me if I remembered the last time we had spent more than a weekend alone without our kids.  “Well,” she said, “it was in 1967, before our oldest was born.”

“Ok,” I said, knowing something was coming.

“We are going to take a two week trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico.” Our oldest was to stay at home and the younger was to go to a basketball camp.

“Why Santa Fe?” I asked.

“I don’t know, we just are.”

When we were first married I used to scoff at these decisions based on her intuitions but over the years I have learned that she is almost always right about what we need to do.  She has said on the ship of life she is the rudder and I am the motor although I sometimes feel like the bilge pump.  So we flew to Albuquerque and landed at night. The next morning I got up and looked out on the west mesa and thought, “My God, this is where I belong.”

As we drove north toward Santa Fe the feeling got stronger.  The next day we were downtown when my back started to hurt. I had injured my back seriously playing Rugby in College and every so often it would flare up and I would be incapacitated.  As the pain intensified I told my wife, “I am going back to the motel to lie down. Call me when you want to come back.”

On the way to the car I passed the Cathedral of St. Francis.  I don’t know what came over me but I said to myself, “You are 43 and you have never sat in a Catholic church.” 

Growing up in the Evangelical United Brethren church we were taught that these were havens of evil and not places to enter so deciding to challenge this absurdity, I went in and sat in a pew.  As I sat there I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the saints, the architecture and the knowledge that this lineage had been around for almost 2000 years.  I sat there and soaked it up for about 30 minutes and when I stood up the pain was gone.  And I never even saw the Devil – disappointing.

The next day we went to the Sanctuario in Chimayo and the same thing happened.  Afterword we went to a small shop where my wife bought me a small milagro shaped in the form of a human back.  I have never had a serious problem with my back since that trip.  

We had been trying to buy the house we were renting for years but the landlady kept changing her mind and we had given up.  My wife suggested we also buy a house milagro to help us find another house to buy.  

When we returned to Canada I immediately went to the local bank and was getting cash out of the machine when I heard a familiar voice call my name.  It was the landlady.  Nervously I touched the house milagro in my pocket.

“Larry, I want to sell you the house.”

I said, “I don’t think I have enough money for a decent down payment.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

So we bought it.

At that point we decided, “Someday we are going to move to Santa Fe.  We are both going to be in private practice in a little adobe office with a portal out front.”

We started going to Seattle for Jungian training and analysis in the early 90s.  At some point we decided we wanted to live there and my wife moved to Seattle in 1995.  I spent 3 more years at the College where I was teaching until I was ready for early retirement.  We tried to get things moving in Seattle but it never really came together.  So we said, “Let’s just go to Santa Fe. That is where we belong.”  

It was very interesting to watch the responses of our friends and colleagues.  Most could not understand why I would leave a secure teaching position with a good salary and great benefits as well as a nice little private practice for a place with no prospects in sight.  I would reply, “I don’t know.  I just have to.”

I added one caveat.  “We have to begin in Albuquerque because that is where the jobs are.”  She agreed, sort of.  She went down and found us a great place up in the hills outside of Albuquerque. Then, because fate likes to play tricks, I got a job in Santa Fe and had to commute every day.  A little over a year later we moved to Santa Fe.

I eventually quit that job and we are both in private practice in a little adobe with a portal out front.  I guess Jesus was watching on that first trip.

The last remnant of my Christian heritage sits in my garage covered by a blue tarp.  On one of my aunt’s trips to visit relatives in Michigan, a cousin took her to a vacated church where her father had preached.  As she looked around, her cousin said, “That is the pulpit from which your father preached his first sermon.” Overcome with emotion she asked if he would ship it to her.  When she moved from her home she gave it to me.  My wife does not want it inside the house but I told her we’d better not get rid of it because, you guessed it, Jesus is watching.

As I left Christianity behind I longed for some philosophy that would fill the need I had for something bigger than myself.  The first was Yoga.

A Hopeless Case

In the early 70’s I was working as the treatment director of a small residential center for preadolescent children on Vancouver Island. I had recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Child Psychology and was a firm believer in the behaviorist school of psychology.  As you may know, behaviorism holds that we are shaped by our environment and anything invisible to the human eye is not worth talking about.  My wife, Susan Riley, who had a great respect for the mysteries of life, would sometimes recount tales of extraordinary events to me and my favorite response was, “That’s not physically possible.”

In addition to working at the center, I was teaching at the University of Victoria and running around North America giving talks and doing my best to become well known in the behaviorist community.  Fueled by copious amounts of caffeine and putting work before my family, my health and the activities that brought me joy, I seemed to be achieving my goal. I felt quite full of myself.  

The first warning I received regarding the folly of this adventure came from the nurse at the center who said to me, “If you don’t slow down, you will be dead by the time you are forty.”  I was thirty at the time.  I remember one of the teachers at the center giving her class the assignment of writing a short book in the form of “Dick and Jane.” One of the kids entitled his, “See Larry Run.”  In the book were several pages of stick figures. One was pictured with a coffee cup in his hand and the words at the bottom of the page said, “See Larry Drink Coffee. See Larry Run.  Run Larry, Run.”

One morning while I was sitting at home grading papers, drinking coffee and preparing to dash off to work, I was instantly incapacitated by a blinding pain in my chest.  I crawled to the phone, contacted my doctor’s office and was told to immediately drive to the hospital which was about a half-mile away.  When I got there I was put in a bed and connected to a heart monitor.  I, as well as everyone else, thought I was having a heart attack.  As I lay there suffering from excruciating pain, I had a thought that I previously would not have believed I was capable of considering.  I thought, “If I am going to be in this kind of pain for very long, I want to die.”  At the moment I finished this thought, a voice inside my head said, “Stop drinking coffee, spend more time with your family and study Jung, Yoga and mysticism.”  

“Of course,” I answered.

After numerous tests, it was discovered that I did not have a heart condition but that I was suffering from gallstones and a jaundiced gall bladder.  Rather than a traditionally masculine condition caused by overwork, dedication to achievement and general disregard for my own body in service of some greater calling, I was suffering from a condition, according to my nurse, that usually was associated with the words fat, forty, fertile and female.  

Being the rational, masculine achiever that I was, I soon dismissed the voice inside my head as part of a delusional thought process caused by the pain.  The next evening I was again visited by the excruciating pain associated with a stone passing through the bile duct. Uncharacteristically, and with great prodding from Susan, I decided this was a sign and that I needed to pay attention.  In this experience, as in many other significant changes in my life, she has had the wisdom to know what was best for me when I did not.

So I gave up coffee, stopped traveling and began to study Jung and Yoga.  After surgery to remove the gall bladder I also began to experience extraordinary events.  I began to practice astral traveling, experienced precognitive dreaming and generally saw myself as a rather extraordinary fellow.  

One my favorite things to do was to attend yoga workshops on Saltspring Island led by John Robbins.  John was a great hatha yoga teacher and had spent some time at Yashodhara Ashram studying with Swami Radha.  I always left these workshops feeling very healthy, happy and centered.  This feeling would usually last until I had to face the realities of marriage, children, work or a ride back to Victoria on the B.C. Ferries.  

It was at one of these weekends that I had an experience that would change my life.  John asked us to sit in a meditative pose and then played a record of a woman chanting.  I later learned the woman was Swami Radha.  As she chanted, I began to see myself sitting on a large round circle on top of a hill overlooking a lake.  Across the lake was a snow covered mountain.  Later, I was transported to the other side of the lake and looking back, saw a beach with an A frame and other smaller buildings.  When I recounted this vision to Susan she gasped and said, “I had a dream about that same place!”  

Wanting to make sense of this, we discussed our respective experiences with Elaine Griff, our hatha yoga teacher in Victoria.  We drew a picture for her and as she examined it she began to smile and said, “That’s Yasodhara Ashram. The circle is the foundation for the temple.”  Knowing that this was an important sign in our lives we decided to attend an upcoming workshop with Swami Radha, Life Seals.  Little did I know what was in store for me.  

We arrived at the workshop and at some level I knew that something big was going to happen for me.  In a nutshell, Swami Radha cut right to the quick.  What was exposed would be called, in psychoanalytic terms, a raging phallic narcissist.  I won’t go into the details, but the key words here would be, “It’s all about me.”  At the end of the workshop, I approached Swami Radha and asked her, “Would you work with me?”  Her response was one of the most painful but truthful pieces of information I have ever received. 

In her lovely German accent she said to me, “I think you have been lying for so long, you no longer know the truth.  I think perhaps you are a hopeless case.” These words were not music to a narcissistic ear.  I was shattered.  I lost about ten pounds over the next two weeks and began the process of manufacturing all the rationale necessary to convince myself, and anyone else who would listen, that she was a charlatan.  In retrospect, everything I have accomplished in my life since then probably began at that moment. Most importantly, I believe my 60 year relationship with Susan would have never survived me had Swami Radha not uttered those words.  

One of my favorite concepts from Jungian psychology is the “wisdom of the psyche.”  Over the next year my psyche worked overtime and forced me to see more and more how correct her assessment of me had been.  At the end of that year Susan and I went to the ashram for a visit and all I could say to Swami Radha when I met her was, “We’re doing really well.”  It was as though I had to make a report to my probation officer before I could even say hello or offer up the customary box of Black Magic Chocolates.   

In the following years I had many experiences with Swami Radha but I feel it is only now as I am in my eighth decade on the planet that I grasp their significance.  Looking back, I think I wasn’t ready for her teachings the way Susan was.  I believe that following a spiritual path requires complete surrender. I was not ready to surrender.  I still needed to hold onto the illusion that I was in charge of my life.  Even though my experiences with her were limited, I would like to share some of them with you.  They were profound for me, have influenced me greatly and, I hope, exemplify her ability to be amazingly insightful, brutally honest, incredibly caring and delightfully funny, sometimes all in the same moment.  

I remember being at a Straight Walk workshop listening to Swami Radha when she looked into my eyes.  At that moment I felt an incredible stirring in my heart and a wonderful feeling of well-being.  I asked her if she had done that to me. She replied, “Ja, I give you a little light.  Most times people don’t notice it.  You know, the only things that are really important here are the light and the mantra.”

Stunned, I asked, “But what about all the stǖrm und drang, the tears, the confessions and so on?”

“Oh Ja,” she said.  “That is the entertainment. If I don’t do that, you don’t come and pay the money for the workshop.”  

I never really knew if she meant it or was just having some fun with us. 

On another occasion I decided to ask her about the experiences I was having. As I told her about astral traveling, visiting other people’s dreams, precognitions and other paranormal events, she listened attentively and then asked, “Do you ever forget to take out the garbage?”

Taken aback, I responded, “Uh….yes.”

“Are you ever unpleasant with your children?”

“Yes,” I replied sheepishly.

“Do you ever fight with your wife?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “Why don’t you work on those things and let these other things go?  Anyone can do those things you talk about but very few can be really good husbands and fathers.”

So I did.  I have never missed a garbage day since.  As for my relationships with my wife and children, it has taken a lot longer to reach the point where I believe I have successfully integrated Swami Radha’s advice.  

From the beginning, I noticed that she treated people differently.  In workshops I sometimes felt like she had it in for me.  Other people who would whine, complain and generally demonstrate what I, in my wisdom, considered a low level of consciousness were not confronted at all.  After one particularly painful encounter I was feeling aggrieved so I decided to ask her about this.   “Swami Radha,” I asked, “why are you so tough on me while at the same time you let some people in the group off easy?”  

“Ja, I only give you what you can take.”

The incredible gift behind this statement only became clear to me later in my studies of Aikido. My instructor, after being asked why he never praised us but only approached us to correct, replied that in the East, to be corrected by one’s teacher is a great honor.  If the teacher does not think you are worthy, you will be ignored.  When Swami Radha said she gave me only what I could take, she was paying me a great compliment, offering me a great gift and, I hope, was telling me that I was not such a hopeless case after all.  

After fifty years of working in the helping profession, the value of this gift has become clear.  As a helper, I must have a high standard of self-awareness or else I will project my own unconscious complexes and insecurities onto those who I am supposed to be helping.  I must be willing to take all that is given me by my teachers. In essence, those of us who consider ourselves “helpers” must first clear our own psyches before meddling in the psyches of others.  Leo Buscaglia captured this concept perfectly in one of his videos by quoting a Zen monk who said to him, “Don’t walk through my mind with your dirty feet.”  Those of us who want to help others walk through this world with joy and purpose must first cleanse our own feet.  

Swami Radha loved to point out the symbolic meaning of one’s actions and appearance.  Once, when giving a talk with David Bohm at the Victoria YMCA, she was talking about the ways in which we communicate who we are without even knowing.  She was talking about clothes and asked, “What is the symbolic meaning, for example, of someone whose clothes are all brown?” Pondering this, I casually looked down and saw brown shoes, brown socks, brown pants, brown belt and a brown shirt.  I don’t know if she meant this for me but it certainly had an effect and perhaps explains my annual purchase of at least one Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt.  

On another occasion Susan and I were sitting in the ashram dining room eating with her and a friend of ours.  At the end of the meal, our friend casually cupped his hand and collected the crumbs on the table in front of him and brushed them onto the floor. 

“Look!” she exclaimed.  “Look how you have just created work for someone else with your thoughtlessness.”  She never pulled punches if she thought you could take it.

I think it was very hard for her to carry all the projections and expectations that were laid upon her by all of us.  She once told me this was the hardest part of her work and actually revealed that she wasn’t sure how long she could continue to do her work since it took such a toll on her.  I remember one particularly frustrating moment at a workshop when she sighed and said, “When are you boys going to stop projecting your mother complexes all over me?”

I think this burden weighed heavily upon her and at one point she told Susan, who was planning to go to graduate school in order to become a counselor, “Do you really want to spend your life sitting in a room with someone who is projecting all over you?” 

Fortunately, Susan’s answer was yes and she has had a very successful career and has many grateful clients to show for it. This question reveals the difficulty Swami Radha experienced while helping us travel further down the road of awareness and enlightenment. 

On another occasion she talked about the ridiculous expectations of many of her followers and students.  It was particularly curious to her that many could not reconcile the fact that an enlightened being could have a jones for Black Magic chocolates.  It also baffled her that people in workshops would be upset by the fact that this guru would have to take breaks in order to attend to bodily functions. Apparently she should have been above such mundane needs.   Fortunately for us, she never stopped her work and, I believe, is working still, even after her passing.

I can give one example of this.  Over the 80s and 90s our contact with the Ashram diminished but our appreciation for Swami Radha and the Ashram did not.  After Swami Radha passed and in the year of the Ashram’s 40th Anniversary, we returned.  I decided to do a weekend program at the Ashram which I translated as “What am I going to do with the rest of my life.”  At the time I was working at a job I did not particularly like and wanted a change but was unclear what that change should be.  

Although we were in a location where cell phones should not have worked, on the day before I was to begin the workshop I received a hostile, angry message from one of the administrators at my work. So I began my workshop at this peaceful, loving Ashram with hatred and anger in my heart. 

We began on Friday night and I hardly slept.  In the morning I went to the temple and sat in seiza as we began to chant.  About ten minutes into the chanting, with my thoughts churning about the phone call, I started to heat up.  Soon I was sweating profusely and feeling light headed.  At some point I lost consciousness and my head fell to floor. I awoke suddenly to Swami Radha’s voice saying loudly, “You can’t evolve spiritually and change your life while you are angry at the same time!”  Stunned, I moved to a chair and recovered my senses and began chanting again.  

When the chanting was finished I approached the leader and recounted my experiences.  He advised me to do the workshop but let the focus be finding the meaning of that experience.  So I did and the workshop changed from “What am I going to do” to “Who am I going to be” for the rest of my life.  Many changes came about as a result of that workshop and, once again, they began on the foundation of the Temple.

When the temple that Swami Radha worked so hard to build burned to the ground a few years ago, I was struck with horror but also realized that nothing is permanent and the experiences I had involving the temple are still with me.  All of us who have been blessed by Swami Radha and the Ashram now have to help in our own way to rebuild the temple.  Swami Radha always trusted the divine to provide for her in times of need and it never failed her.  I trust that the same will be true for the temple rebuild and for all of us who have been touched by her. 

Swami Radha is gone now and I regret that I was not more mature when I knew her.  I am sorry that in many ways I was a little boy and not the man I am today. Looking back, I believe she was the most enlightened person I have ever met and she may have saved my life both figuratively and actually.  In the years I knew her, I heard many of her students referring to her respectfully and endearingly as Mataji.  I never used this term because I never really felt I deserved to use it.  I had never really surrendered to her. 

I don’t know what happens after death.  Are we are reborn?  Do we move to another plane?  Does Saint Peter meet us at the Pearly Gates?  All I know is that I want to meet her again.  I will be ready this time.  Thank you Mataji.  

During the time we were involved with Swami Radha, we were so enthralled by the practice of Yoga we began to train as yoga instructors at the local YMCA.  I felt somewhat out of place in this endeavor as I was the only man in the training program and I am very inflexible (in so many ways).  On one occasion we were doing a posture and the instructor said, “Where do you feel the effect of this posture?”  No one answered and she said, “In your ovaries.” I said, “I don’t feel a thing.” She said, “I have a special asana for you.  It is called the Steer.”  If you know how a bull becomes a steer, you know the meaning of this communication. No more funny comments from me.

But I persevered and one day I was approached by the program director.  She said that there was a class, Yoga for Teenage Girls that needed an instructor. Apparently several teachers had tried to lead this class but had become so frustrated by the girls they had left in tears.  The director said she had heard I was a child psychologist and would really appreciate it if I would try to teach it. So I did.

The course was taught in the small chapel and the first day I walked in I was greeted by six very attractive young women who probably saw me as their next victim.  As I began teaching the class they would talk to each other and generally act out.  After the second class I was so frustrated I sat down and said, “I am volunteering to teach this class.  I am not getting paid.  Do you want to do Yoga or not?”

In Aikido we talk about and practice getting into harmony with your attacker.  I had not experienced Aikido yet but I decided to follow this path with the girls. They said they wanted to do Yoga so I told them to bring their favorite music the next week and we would do Yoga to the music.  So the next week we did Yoga to heavy metal, Jesus music and crappy pop. They loved it.  They started to warm up to me and fortunately whenever I started to feel sexually attracted to one of them I could look up to the picture on the wall and be reminded that Jesus was watching, even in the Yoga class.

Eventually we started having a little discussion group at the end of the class and they would share hopes and fears and problems they were having.  All in all it was a wonderful experience and for years after, some of the girls would come to my office at the College just to talk.

Japanese Culture and Aikido

At some point I realized that Yoga was not the path for me.  I was drawn to Japanese culture and began to investigate Zen.  My first encounter with Japanese culture came when I was 11 years old and I started working for my father.  My father was a wholesale florist whose business was located in the middle of two square blocks known as the L.A. Flower market.  As I said earlier, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday he would get up at about 2 in the morning, eat breakfast and go to work.  On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday he would not get up until 5.  I would go with him and work at the shop doing menial tasks on Saturdays. Later, during holidays and summer vacation I would work full time at the shop. The main thoroughfare was Wall St so I can say I grew up working on Wall St.!

There were many other wholesale florists on the street as well as two large open markets where wholesalers and growers would bring their flowers to sell to retailers and route runners who would call on retailers who did not come in to the markets.  About half of the wholesalers and a lot of growers were Japanese Americans.  My dad was very highly respected by them.  During the war, when the Japanese were moved off the coast into internment camps, his company took over the running of the Japanese American flower market.  Many Japanese Americans were robbed of their businesses and possessions during the war by unscrupulous individuals and companies but when the Japanese Americans returned, my father’s company returned all property and material to them.  

After the war there were two Markets, one almost completely peopled by Japanese Americans and one almost completely peopled by European Americans.  When they amalgamated, the Japanese would only accept one person as the director, my father.  So I had a lot of contact with people of Japanese ancestry and came to love the culture and the food.  However, when I went away to University, I lost touch with that culture.  

In the early 70s while still involved in Yoga, I realized that I really wanted to learn a martial art.  I had been a pretty wimpy kid and relied mostly on my wits to avoid fights with other kids.  I also made sure that every year I had a really big, tough kid as a friend.  Heaven help the kid that picked on me. So I figured it was time to get a handle on male violence and to be able to fight my own battles.  At one point in this search I had a dream that seemed really strange to me.  I was in a basement fighting the guys who had picked on me in high school.  For some reason I was wearing a black skirt, which seemed very strange.

I visited many martial arts schools and dojos but it seemed to me there was a lot of ego involved and that a lot of the people teaching were pretty nasty guys obsessed with competition and bravado.  In 1975 I attended the Transpersonal Psychology conference in Asilomar and saw that there was a morning workshop in Aikido, a martial art I had never heard of.  The instructor was Bob Frager, a psychologist and head of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. I later learned he had studied Aikido in Japan with the founder himself.  He has written humorously and informatively about this experience.  And, he was wearing a black skirt.

After two mornings of practice, I was hooked.  I returned to Victoria and at my first day back at the University of Victoria, I opened the campus newspaper and was surprised to see an article about a young man from Hawaii who was going to begin teaching Aikido on the following Monday.  This could be seen as an occurrence of what Carl Jung refers to as “Synchronicity,” two or more seemingly unrelated events that occur simultaneously and are perceived by the observer as carrying a message that would only have meaning in the psyche of that person.

I began studying with Gary Mols Sensei and he did a great job of teaching us physical Aikido as well as presenting Aikido philosophy in an understandable and useful manner.  I had been practicing Aikido for about a year when Gary Sensei announced that we were going to Vancouver to participate in a demonstration that the new Japanese sensei there was giving.  We arrived at the gym and all went into the change room together.  After changing into our dogis we proceeded upstairs and the demonstration began.  We all demonstrated but Kawahara sensei’s demonstration was the most amazing and terrifying.  I had never seen such power and precision. After the demonstration we went back to the change room, changed into our street clothes and were preparing to leave for lunch together. As Kawahara sensei was getting dressed I noticed he was looking around and saying something in Japanese to one of his students.  I realized that he was looking for his socks and I looked down to my feet I realized I had put on his black socks and not my own. Terrified, I left the gym and even after many years together as student and teacher, never told him about this.

Kawahara sensei made many visits to Victoria and I consider him one of my best teachers ever.  I wanted so much to learn from him that I even studied Japanese so I would better understand him.  On one occasion, he, my friend Gary Anderson and I sat in the wheelhouse of Gary’s fishing boat drinking scotch and carrying on a conversation about life itself.  At one point I asked, “Sensei, you drink, you smoke and you like to consort with women. Is this good for you?”

He replied, “Not good for body, but good for spirit!” Gary and I both erupted in raucous laughter.

After our first summer camp with Kawahara sensei he gave a little speech. As we were sitting in seiza completely exhausted but filled with the joy seven days of intense practice had brought us, Kawahara sensei began to speak in Japanese. Ishiyama Sensei translated.

“You Canadians are the worst Aikido students I’ve ever seen in the world. I thought Americans were bad but you are worse.”  Imagine the shock we all felt as we were being ruthlessly criticized after a long week of intense practice. What we didn’t realize was that this is a traditional Asian practice used when training students.  It keeps one from becoming inflated and in fact is a compliment.  If he did not have hope for us as students he would not criticize us.  So every year after practice Kawahara sensei would rip us up one side and down the other and we got used to it. In fact, we sort of looked forward to it.  So imagine our surprise when after four or five years we sat down at the end of the practice and waited for Kawahara sensei to tell us how terrible we were.  On this occasion all he said was, “Your Aikido is getting better.”  It was like the heavens had opened up and God himself had blessed our Aikido.

Aikido has given me many gifts. One of these is body awareness. One form is awareness of my own body and a sense of where it is in space and perhaps more importantly, where it is in relation to others and the effect my presence has on others.  The lack of this ability in others is painfully obvious every time I am negotiating the aisles at Whole Foods.  Another important lesson is that my Ki, or life energy, must flow out ahead of me, even if I am moving backwards.  This is true in both a physical and psychological sense.

The most dangerous person in an Aikido dojo is a beginner. There are two reasons this is true. First, a beginner is often so determined to do a technique correctly and with force that they may ignore the limitations of a partner who will be injured if a technique is applied too forcefully or rapidly.  One of the major lessons in Aikido is to be aware of partner’s ability.   Secondly, beginners are so focused on technique that they lose awareness of their own body and bang into others and also sometimes throw partner into other practitioners. According to Ishiyama sensei, this is not a problem in Japan.  Even beginners have the well-being of those around them in mind when practicing.  Growing up in close proximity to others and in a culture that stresses awareness of how one’s behavior affects others leads to a sensitivity many of us here in North America lack. 

Ishiyama sensei, a practitioner and teacher of Morita therapy, says this also has its disadvantages. While we are focused on self-development and individuation but often fall short in our assessment of our effect on others, according to him, the Japanese are likely to avoid individual achievement and individuation in favor of conformity and group identification.  In his mind, the middle path involves development of self and a development of our recognition of our effect on others.  This is very similar to the basic tenets of Naikan, a school of Japanese psychology.

One of the most difficult aspects of aging is the limitations that my body is experiencing.  I gave up physical Aikido several years ago when my arthritic joints just refused to cooperate.  I notice that I sometimes lose balance or bump into doors, something I never would have done in the past.  I hope I am still doing mental and spiritual Aikido in spite of my body limitations.  What good is a martial practice if it does not transfer to daily life?  Really, how many times in a day is someone with a wooden sword going to attack me?  And yet I can be sure that every day will bring interpersonal and psychological challenges.

When I was first studying Aikido, I began to look into the martial philosophy of Budo.  I realized that for the Samurai, an honorable life meant serving one’s lord faithfully and without question. Dying in the service of the lord in battle was the most honorable act one could perform.  As a young professional with a wife and two children in modern Canadian culture, this didn’t seem very practical so I set about trying to translate this philosophy of ancient Japan into a way of life that was applicable to me, now.  I realized that if I considered integrity and truth as my “lord” then my ego, not me, would have serve those concepts and, in fact, may have to die in their service. This approach to life turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined but I hope it still guides my behavior today.

One of the greatest gifts I was given in Aikido was the opportunity to confront my own fear and to finish something to which I had committed myself regardless of my fear.  On one occasion a Japanese Zen monk stopped by our dojo in Victoria and gave a talk after practice.  He asked the question, “What are the three things you must do to become proficient in Aikido?”  Some of us answered, “Practice.”   He said, “Yes, that is one.”  Students then offered numerous other suggestions to which he answered “No” repeatedly. When no more answers were forthcoming he said, “The answers are practice, practice, practice.”

I did not always want to go to practice and sometimes I would have to drag myself to the dojo. Sometimes fear and anxiety would stalk me as I stepped onto the mats and I would want to make an excuse and leave.  But I almost always went and I always stayed.  Five minutes into practice my spirit would be soaring and often at the end of class, soaking wet with sweat and joints aching I would think, “My God, it is good to be alive!”

I used to be a very anxious person.  I think I come by it naturally since my mother, Virginia, was extremely anxious.  I think her philosophy was that if you worry about it enough it won’t happen or if does you will be ready.  Since most of what she worried about didn’t happen she was reinforced for her worry.  See, it works.  I worry and it doesn’t happen.  

I once asked my supervisor why I was seeing so many clients with anxiety.  He answered, "The world is a scary place.”  I said, “For this I am paying $170.00/hr?”  I remember hearing Chuck Yeager being interviewed about a scene in the movie “The Right Stuff.”  He was asked if he was afraid when the plane he was testing went into a death spiral.  He answered, “No, fear just gets in the way of the job to be done.”  

Once, when I was feeling anxious about a high-school math test I asked my dad the same question about the battles he fought in Germany and Korea.  He had a similar response.  He said that no anxiety means you are not paying attention, too much anxiety is crippling but some anxiety is good because it forces you to focus on the job to be done.  Although, he did say that the one thing that really scared him was seeing the Germans advancing across snow covered fields in their white camouflage outfits.  He said on one occasion he thought he was watching ghosts advance against his position.  

I knew I finally had a pretty good handle on anxiety and fear after an experience I had a few years ago at the local hospital.  I started feeling a pain in my chest one evening and after it became quite intense I drove to the hospital and was admitted to the ER immediately.  I was given an EKG, administered nitroglycerine and put through the tests given to heart attack victims.  I was informed I had suffered a heart attack and my life was going to change.

Everyone left the room eventually except one male nurse.  We began to talk and he said he and his wife, also a nurse, wanted to move to Vancouver, Canada.  I proceeded to tell him the best way to do that and we had a long discussion about the Canadian medical system. At some point he asked, “Do you have a spiritual practice?” Surprised, I said, “Sort of.  I have studied Aikido for many years and it is the basis of how I live my life.  Why do you ask?”

He replied, “this is not how people who have suffered a heart attack usually behave.  You are not depressed, not upset, not angry and you don’t even seem worried.”  I answered, “What good would that do?”  

Eventually, after three days of tests it was discovered that my heart was perfectly healthy but had somewhat of an unusual but not dangerous rhythm.  My favorite experience was the treadmill.  As we reached the final stages and I was gasping for breath wondering if I would be able to finish it, the tech said, “Keep going Larry.  Keep going.”  The she exclaimed, “Don’t follow the light, don’t follow the light Larry.”  After, she said, “You have the most boring normal heart I have ever seen.”

Pondering what the nurse had said, I tried to understand why anxiety no longer seemed to be a real issue for me.  I decided it was Aikido that had helped me lose that burden.  A side effect of this experience was that it brought my mortality to the forefront and I had to decide what I needed to complete before I leave the planet.  This book is one of those things.  

I believe the discipline required for conscientious practice taught me to face my fears, overcome my own laziness and anxiety and complete tasks because I had committed to completing them.  Striving to live with integrity was the greatest gift Aikido gave to me.  It has become the foundation of how I try to respond to every challenge I face in life.  I do not always succeed and fear, laziness and negativity are always lurking.

A funny example of the difficulty of translating ideas across cultures was told to my wife by Dr. Hugh Keenleyside who was a member of the Canadian delegation to Japan before WW2 began. Apparently the Japanese had just begun to celebrate Christmas and as Dr. K. entered a Japanese department store he beheld a large, beautifully decorated Christmas tree.  At the top was a large replica of Santa - nailed to a cross.

I studied Japanese for two years at the University of Victoria.  The two people I practiced with most often were my sensei and friend, Ishu Ishiyama and my colleague, Michiko. Japanese is very different from English and I remember some humorous experiences.

Michiko told me she was once discussing American politics with a class when she first began teaching in Canada.  At some point the class broke into raucous laughter and she asked them why.  They told her she had just said she wanted to discuss the difference between Canadian parliamentary elections and the American plesidential erection.  I will forever be grateful to her for teaching me a response to, “O genki deska?” a greeting roughly translated as, “How are you?” She told me a good response would be, “O kage sama de.”  “Fine, because of you.”  How much richer than, “OK”.

On another occasion I climbed the stairs to Ishu’s house and asked politely, “May I come up into your house?”  He laughed and said, “You just asked if you could throw up in my house.”  He once told me that I could study for years and I would never completely understand Japanese.  One reason is that they leave a lot out that you have to fill in with cultural content, much of which is unknown to westerners. Sometimes the subject or object is left out of a sentence.  Verbs are sometimes omitted and can be negated at the end of a sentence if the speaker senses discomfort in the listener regarding the content of the sentence.  So a sentence might be, “As for Johnny, a good boy he is….not.”  The other reason Ishu said it would be difficult to ever understand Japanese completely is that the language, by its very structure, serves the purpose of hiding meaning from foreigners. There is also the problem that there are really two Japanese languages, one for men and one for women.

The importance of syllabic stress and context in the language was demonstrated by one of my teachers who gave this example.  Mr. Yamada visits Mr. Tanaka.  Ms. Tanaka answers the door and says, “Mr. Tanaka is not home. Would you like to come in and wait for him?”   He said this in three ways, all of which sounded exactly the same to me.  Apparently the first phrasing meant indeed he would be home soon.  The second meant he was away and you shouldn’t really come in but politeness requires me to ask you to come in.  The third meant either he was dead or was never coming back. Japanese people interpret these differences with ease. We, of the literal English language, do not.

This teacher also told a story about arriving in San Diego from Japan.  He said that in Japan when you are first asked if you want something to eat or drink you refuse it and say something to the effect of, “No I couldn’t possibly eat a bite.” You refuse a second time then grudgingly accept and eat every morsel or you insult your host. So, arriving at his host residence looking haggard and thirsty in the California heat, he was asked, “Would you like a drink?”  “No thank you,” he said.  His host said “Ok” and began to orient him to his new home.  He thought, “What is wrong with this person?  Why does he not ask me again?  Who are these impolite barbarians?”

This penchant for politeness and indirectness often confuses us westerners and our missing the hidden meaning in the communication makes us seem stupid or rude.  Soon after Ishiyama Sensei began teaching Aikido he realized we did not have the same standard of cleanliness that he did.  One night after class he asked us, “Would you like to wash the mats now?”  We had already opened the fridge in the dojo and started to drink beer so we decided we wanted to do it at another time.  He later told me he was astounded at this response as it was not a request but a command.  A Japanese person would know that.  We did not.  When I arrived for the next practice, the fridge was gone and buckets and rags were set out so we could clean the mats before practice.  He never had to ask again.

All in all, the influence of Aikido, Japanese culture and Japanese people in my life cannot be overestimated and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to experience the insights and kindness those experiences afforded me.  Domo Arigato. 

Ishiyama Sensei, Kawawara Sensei and Me

Buddhism

Our annual Aikido summer camp would start on Saturday and by Wednesday we were so exhausted we would only practice for half a day. Full-time practice would resume on Thursday.  One year we were told that a Zen monk from Japan was present in the camp and would lead a meditation at noon on Wednesday.  Those of us who were interested arrived and lined up in two rows kneeling in seiza while Kongo Sensei began the meditation with a loud cry of “Mokso!” which can be roughly translated as “clear your mind.”  He would then walk up and down the lines carrying a large stick (Jo) and if you felt you needed to focus your attention you could bend forward crossing your arms and he would give you a good whack on the shoulders. Kongo sensei, his head shaved and dressed in the flowing robes of the Zen priest was most impressive.

After the meditation we all made our traditional journey to the local pub for lunch, beer and perhaps some pool. When I walked in the door Kongo sensei was bent over the pool table, cigarette hanging from his mouth, pool cue in hand, whiskey glass on the edge of the pool table and a tall blonde hanging from his arm.  I thought, “Now this is a religion I can get into.”

When we returned to Victoria Kongo sensei moved into the home of the Tibetan Lama who lived two houses away from our house. Unfortunately, the Tibetans ate almost all meat and he was getting sick because he was a strict vegetarian. Seeing this, we gave him a portion of our garden and in that small portion he raised the most amazing vegetables in precise lines and perfect symmetry that made our gardening attempts look haphazard and amateurish.  Our neighbors were a bit upset, however, as he liked to fertilize the garden by urinating on it.

Kongo sensei further demolished my preconceived notions about Buddhist priests by showing up one day at our front door in a white leisure suit and a white hat that made him look like the Japanese version of Roddy McDowell’s character in A Clockwork Orange. Susan said, “Kongo sensei, you like Canada don’t you?”  He replied, “I like Canadian women. I have date at disco.”

Kongo sensei gave many lectures in Victoria, usually translated by my friend and Aikido teacher Ishu Ishiyama.  On one occasion he gave a lecture on the Buddhist approach to anger at the University of Victoria.  At the time, my wife and I were separated and I was very angry so I decided to go to the talk to see if the Buddhist approach to anger management could help me. After the two hour talk I was quite sure my anger was under control and I walked peacefully across the campus to my car.  On the way home I started thinking about my situation, conveniently overlooking the fact that I was the person most responsible for being in this place, and started to become angry.  Eventually, I became furious, drove home in a rage and spent an hour yelling and pounding my boken (wooden sword) into my mattress.  It appeared that I hadn’t quite integrated the Buddhist approach to anger management at that time.

My most interesting conversation with Kongo sensei was regarding reincarnation and the effect it had on one’s life. It was a very interesting conversation conducted in his halting English and my halting Japanese.  He maintained that believing in reincarnation very much changed how you lived your life.  His main point was that if one believes that the results of one’s behavior in this life will be carried forward into the next life, one will be more careful and more considerate of others.  Although I’m not convinced reincarnation exists, this still seems like a pretty good way to live.

My wife and I were quite involved in Jungian studies and analysis in Seattle in the 90s.  On one occasion we went to a panel discussion by several practitioners who described how they worked from a Jungian perspective.  The panel included a minister, a catholic priest, a counselor, a Jungian analyst and a Buddhist teacher who was also a psychotherapist. Each of the panelists spoke for about ten minutes describing their work.  The last teacher was the Buddhist and all he said was, “Yes, all of that is true. But in Buddhism we just call it paying attention.” I was smitten and soon began to explore Buddhist philosophy and practices.

I have always been drawn to Zen Buddhism because of its simplicity and its similarity to the philosophy of Aikido. I think I dabble in Buddhism but do not really practice it.  By the end of my life I would like to become a more serious student.  It just seems to be so practical and clean.  My one concern with Buddhism is that I am not sure it deals with what Jung would call the human shadow, our dark side. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  Perhaps my thought that this is somewhat contradictory to many of the forms of mindfulness is due to my own lack of understanding but I have had experiences with practitioners of Buddhism who seem to not have a very clear view of their own dark side.  However, it is a wonderful philosophy and a very useful tool.  I wonder why I still cringe when someone tells me their approach to therapy focuses on mindfulness.  I need to look at this. 

One of my most entertaining experiences with Buddhists took place many years ago. When my wife finished her MA we decided to celebrate by spending a week at Rio Caliente outside of Guadalajara.  It was a great place with pools of varying warmth for soaking. The water sprang from underground and at the source was so hot you could burn yourself seriously if you were to step into it. One day a few of the guys decided to hike through the desert and over a hill to a town known as Tala.

We set off early in the morning following the river until, we were told, would see a path that would lead up into the hills and eventually to Tala.  As we trekked on, occasionally we would run into a vaquero on a horse and I, being the only person who spoke Spanish, would ask directions.  After about three hours we were hopelessly lost and one of the guys, a serious student of Buddhism and somewhat of a proselytizer asked me, “Do you really speak Spanish?”  I said that I did but that I had forgotten so much that I could only speak in the present tense.  He said, “In Buddhism we call that enlightenment.”  Unfortunately, when we moved to New Mexico I took courses in Spanish and now I can use the past tenses.  I guess I am no longer enlightened in English or Spanish. 

We finally came upon a huge house in the middle of the desert surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by unsavory looking men with automatic weapons. From a great distance I yelled, “Donde esta Tala?” to one of them.  He raised his hand and pointed in the very direction from which we had come.  "Aya!“ he yelled (There). So we followed the river until we came to a park and I asked a nice young man in Spanish if he would give us a ride in the back of his pickup to Tala.  He said, “Sure man.  I am from San Francisco. No need to speak Spanish.” 

We ate in Tala and then took a taxi back to Rio Caliente.  It was a great day but they never let me forget my inability go get us to Tala.  At the restaurant the Buddhist kept trying to find out what was in the food because he was worried that there might be lard or some other meat product.  Lard in Mexican food?  Are you kidding me?  I was embarrassed that this rich guy from New York was grilling the waitress from a poor Mexican village about her food.  It seemed to me that true mindfulness and loving kindness would require one to eat the food no matter what was in it.  Is it going to kill you to eat some lard and treat the Mexicans with respect rather than grilling them on the purity of their food?  It seemed very insulting to me.

The food at the spa was good but all vegetarian and a lot of the people there were pretty sanctimonious about what they ate.  About 5 days into our stay the Feral Cats were looking pretty tasty so my wife and I jumped into a taxi and rode to Tlaquepaque, an artists’ center not far from Guadalajara.  There we feasted on chicken and beer for lunch and steak and wine for dinner before returning late at night and stumbling to our room.  The next morning the breakfast room was surprisingly empty and the soaking pools were unusually vacant.  We later found out that something had gone wrong with the food and everybody had food poisoning and all were sick in their cabins with the full range of glorious symptoms associated with this disorder.

When people recovered, they asked how we had managed to avoid the plague. I responded, “When you have reached the level of spiritual enlightenment we have, bacteria have no effect on your body.”

Actually it was a wonderful place and the staff were magnificent. One of the visitors who was an English Prof at UBC said he was going to write a novel, “One Hundred Years of Massage.”  I suggested he follow it up with a sequel, “One Hundred Years of Diarrhea.”

A lot of the visitors were Texans and their unabashed extroversion and outspoken manner prompted my wife, a true introvert, to say, “In my next life I am going to be a Texan.” 

It is a sad fact that Guadalajara has become a major battleground for drug cartels and I believe the Spa has now closed.  I hope the wonderful people who worked there are surviving and that perhaps it will open again.  We loved it.

Buddhism still interests me and perhaps I will get off my Butt (or onto it) and find the deeper meaning in this wonderful tradition.

My first great therapy experience

When my wife and I reunited after a 4 month separation in the early eighties I was quite confused. I wanted to see a therapist but being really well known in town I didn’t know who I trusted enough to see. She suggested Alice, a woman she had met in a women’s consciousness raising group.  Alice was sort of the Grand Dame of the lesbian community in town and practiced psychotherapy even though she had very little formal education.  My wife said she was brilliant and that I would like her for that and her keen sense of irreverence.  So I went to see Alice.  Here is our first conversation:

A: Hello Larry.  I must ask you why you came to see me.  I don’t see many men in my practice. Actually, none.

L.  Well, I know every therapist in town and quite frankly I think I could bullshit them all.  My wife doesn’t think I can bullshit you.  

A. Ah.  Tell me, what is your worst fear?

L.  My worst fear is that I might be ordinary.

A.  I have bad news for you.  

We worked together and she was wonderful.  Even though she became a close friend of my wife, she was always objective and helped me realize many insights.  After I stopped seeing her we became friends and colleagues and eventually shared an office. We are still good friends and my wife always stays with her when we are in Victoria.  I am so grateful to have had her in my life.  

Forever Jung

When I was teaching at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C. I was head of the union negotiating committee for one year.  I typed up a proposal for the administration concerning Professional Development.  Not being a good speller I ran a spell check on it. However, in the early days of computers, spell check would run from your cursor forward to the end of the document and my cursor was sitting in front of the first word in the paper.  When we met, the president said he liked the proposal but that for my professional development I would have to go to spelling class.  I had not spell checked the title of the paper and had misspelled “Proffessional.”

But all ended well as I myself was eventually awarded a large PD grant in the early 90s which allowed me to travel to Seattle where I studied Jungian psychology and underwent 5 years of Jungian analysis.  It changed my life forever and I will always be grateful for that grant that had resulted from a paper with a misspelled title. 

My wife, who is a psychotherapist, has always been interested in the ideas of C.G. Jung.  In 1990 when I was looking for a new direction in my life she invited me to accompany her to a program at the University of British Columbia built around a series of 20 half-hour filmed interviews with mythologist Joseph Campbell done by Fraser Boa, a Toronto analyst.  Campbell discussed the meaning of the great myths within Jung’s theoretical formulation.  I was smitten.  At the conclusion of the films I told my wife, “I want to spend the rest of my life doing this work.”  I wasn’t sure what I meant by this comment but I felt something powerful was stirring within me.

The introduction and end of each film was accompanied by a Bach Concerto. So I must have heard the beginning of this piece about 40 times.  After leaving the auditorium, we got into our car, turned on the classical station and lo and behold, the Bach concerto began.  I knew this was a sign that my life was to change forever.

I began a search for mentors which ultimately led me to Seattle where I found a wonderful Jungian analyst, Ladson Hinton.  My wife and I joined an association of Jungian oriented therapists and traveled to Seattle for therapy, supervision and study groups.  All of my work with clients today has its roots in those years in Seattle.  

My therapist and my supervisor in Seattle probably taught me more about doing therapy than any other person, book or course I have ever taken.  One of the best sessions I ever had with Ladson (I still talk to him once each month) involved my guilt about not committing myself to my full time job at the college in Victoria.  I was heading toward early retirement and I was trying to establish myself as a therapist in Seattle.  I was in transition.  

I told my therapist I was feeling guilty about not putting in my hours at the college and the following conversation occurred.

LD:  I am feeling guilty about not spending the whole week at the college during this attempted transition.

T: Do your students mind?

LD:  No, they are fine with it and can get me on the phone or by email.

T:  Do your colleagues mind?

LD:  No, my department operates on a system of seniority and since I am the most senior member, they will all move up when I leave.

T:  What about your dean?

LD:  She is completely supportive.  She is happy that I am following my true calling.

T:  So what you are telling me is that no one really cares about the issue about which you feel guilty.

LD:  Yes.

T:  That is Completely F***ing Nuts!

LD:  I have just finished studying the DSM and I had never seen that diagnosis.

T:  Well there is a new version coming out and they have included this diagnosis.  There is a page just for you.

When I was trying to formulate my future I kept vacillating between moving into adventure and what I considered to be my true calling on the one hand and security and stability on the other.  I had a dream that I was in the Safeway store near our house and the hands on the clock on the wall were spinning madly.  We worked on the dream and the next week he brought in a quote from Jung in German. I read it and it translated to, “Whoever takes the safe way is as good as dead.”  After that I set about changing the direction of my life.  I would not be here doing what I do if it were not for him.

My other mentor in Seattle taught me so many things about therapy it would be hard to put them all down here. The most important was the idea of induction. He said that intuitive, empathic people often experience strong feelings when encountering another person.  He maintained that a field exists between two people and that the unconscious emotions in one person can induce the same feelings in the other person’s unconscious. Therapists can use this tool to notice what they are feeling and use it as an insight into the unconscious feelings of the client.  I find this concept really helpful to clients that are empathic and often have strong feelings they don’t understand when they are around certain people. They are feeling what the other does not or cannot bring up from the unconscious.

On another occasion he drove home the importance of relying on one’s intuition when practicing as a psychotherapist.  He described an experience he had had years earlier.  As he was sitting listening to a young women talk about her difficulties with her father, he became aware of a presence in the corner of the room.  Eventually he realized it was a native American beating on a drum.  Out of nowhere he asked her, “Tell me about the drum.”

Shocked at first, she related a story about her favorite toy as a child, a drum.  At one point her father became enraged and destroyed her drum.  This conversation evolved into a search for the meaning of the drum and eventually led to her becoming an ethnologist who roamed around North America recording the drum songs of different tribes.   

All in all, these two men radically altered my life and the wonderful life I live now is in many ways, a testimony to their skill and caring.  

My Work

“Life is change, how it differs from the rocks.”  The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

My First Real Job

In 1966 I entered graduate school at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota as a student in the Clinical Child Psychology program. This program was primarily test oriented and this did not seem right to me.  I was less interested in how a child was performing or acting and more interested in why. One event in particular sealed my fate in this program.

I was asked to go to a school in Minneapolis to administer a Wechsler Intelligence test.  I arrived at the school and found most of the students were black and poor.  The teacher involved told me the child I was to test had scored below normal on the intelligence tests administered by the school but that she thought the girl was more intelligent than the scores indicated.  

I sat down with Felicia and began to ask her the questions on the exam.  One of the cardinal rules of this sort of testing is that you don’t ask a child why she answered as she did, you just record the answer.  Some questions have general answers that give you full marks.  If you offer a specific answer, you lose points. So when I asked “Where do you get groceries?” and she answered, “Albertsons,” she lost a point.  I couldn’t help myself.  I broke the rule.

“Why Albertson’s?”

“That’s where they take the food stamps.”

Poverty had just lost this girl IQ points.

Then when I showed her a picture of a coat, she identified it as a sweater.  More lost IQ points.  Again, I broke the rule.  We were in the beginning of a Minnesota winter and this little girl was wearing a tattered sweater.  So I asked, “Do you have a coat?”

“No,” she replied looking down.  

When I tallied up the points she indeed had an IQ below normal. When I told the teacher, she said, “I guess I was wrong.”  She put more faith in the test than her own judgement.  Discrimination and poverty had consigned this girl to a limited future and I really wanted no part of this.  

As much as I wanted to work with children, I did not want to do it this way.  I drove back to the Institute and found Harold Stevenson, the chair of the department, and told him I wanted to change programs from Child Clinical to Child Development, a research based program, a program focused on “Why?” Fortunately, there was another student who wanted to move in the other direction so we swapped fellowships and I became a student of developmental psychology and he became a student in the clinical program.  We also became good friends.  

I am particularly thankful to Harold because without his prodding, I would never have heard many of these stories.  At the end of four years of graduate school and after 10 years of university studies I was sick of it all.  I told him I would do my research and finish my Ph.D. after I left Minnesota.  He reached into his drawer and pulled out a sheet with the names of every one of the students who had left without finishing. Next to those who did finish later was a check.  It was a paltry number.  

“But I don’t have time,” I said.

He said, “There are two kinds of theses.  There is the Magnum Opus, a masterpiece of research and a real contribution to the field.  Then there is the kind you are going to do.”  I will ever be grateful for that. That degree opened many doors for me and allowed me the privilege of being a part of so many lives and to have had such rich and instructive experiences.

As I recount the stories I am writing here I feel such gratitude to the students, clients, teachers and children who have shared their lives with me in such a rich manner and to all the people who said to me, “You have got to write these stories down.”  The first time this happened was in 1970.  I had returned to Minneapolis to take my final Ph.D. orals.  We never even talked about the thesis. They just asked to hear more stories about the wild kids at the treatment center where I was serving as treatment director.  Harold, a prolific writer himself said, “You have got to get these stories recorded."  That same year my sister-in-law, Melba Riley told me the same thing on several occasions.  If two people from such different backgrounds found my stories interesting and funny, I thought they must be worth writing down. So here I am all these years later finally getting it together.    

As my graduate school days came to an end, I began to receive inquiries from a number of prestigious universities in the United States, Canada and Europe.  In those heady days of unfettered expansion, graduation from a first class program in child development ensured numerous offers from departments desperate for qualified people.  I had over a dozen offers of employment, but I wanted to work with children as well as teach at a university. Unfortunately, by switching from clinical to developmental psychology, I had eliminated my chances of achieving certification in most states.

Through a series of coincidences, word about my search reached a psychiatrist in Victoria, B.C., Canada who invited me to visit him at the Pacific Centre for Human Development, a residential school for "emotionally disturbed” children. He offered me a job as treatment director and put me in contact with the chair of the University of Victoria Psychology Department who was delighted to have someone from the Minnesota Institute of Child Development in his department as a part-time instructor.  I took the jobs, flew home to finish my degree, and in the fall of 1970 my wife, my two-year-old son and I emigrated to Canada with plans to stay for two years, gather some experience and then return to California.

What I found when I arrived at the Centre was shocking.  The kids were running the place and the staff was barely surviving in an environment of fear and chaos. Bribery and physical force were the two main methods of control.  I wanted to establish a very tight program of behavior modification with strong incentives for academic success and reasonable conduct.  The staff were very resistant and undermining of this program and something drastic had to happen. So one morning I came in and I told the staff, “I am going to demonstrate that this program will work.  I want you to all take the day off and come back at three.”  

They were shocked and I could tell they were expecting to find the building burned down and me dead when they did return.  But I had a devious plan that had nothing to do with Behavior Modification.  After they left I found the two most violent and powerful kids in the school and offered them a deal.  I pulled out two twenty dollar bills and said, “If there are no incidents at the school today, each of you will get one of these at three o’clock.  The kids can do anything they want but there can be no destruction or violence and you can’t tell anyone about this.” 

They agreed and we had a peaceful day.  No other child at that facility would dare to challenge these two.  When the teachers arrived they were stunned to find a school functioning quite well with no violence or destruction.  They bought in and we began a behavior modification program immediately.

It took about six months, but the place began to run smoothly.  It also became evident to me that, while we could affect major change in some children, we were sending them back into the same environment which had produced their behavior in the first place.  I initiated a parent training program and found that education and some introspection helped many of them to become adequate, if not perfect, parents.  I will never forget the gratitude of some of the parents when they were finally able to take their children home.  It was working with the staff and parents that led me to the conclusion that I liked teaching adults as much as working with children.  

After two years at the Centre I was asked to be the Canadian representative at the First International Conference on Behavior Modification in Minneapolis.  In preparation, I distilled all the data we had collected over the previous two years and wrote it up in a report which was eventually published as a chapter in a book summarizing the proceedings.  Among the many fascinating aspects of the data was the fact that children who had been considered unteachable had covered two or three years of math and English in the space of one year.  

How were we able to do this?  As Jean Piaget has said, learning is a fundamental human drive.  If you create an environment in which inquisitiveness is nurtured and rewarded, learning is inevitable. We made education a positive experience for these children by allowing them to work at the level at which they were competent and we rewarded progress, no matter how small.  We also focused considerable attention on their interests.  Every person alive, unless he or she has been completely beaten down in life, has a passion for something.  If you can discover that passion, you can unlock the motivation for learning.  For Alan it was science.  For many of my adult students it has been the desire to raise healthy, happy children, or perhaps to understand their own childhood.  

At the end of my three-year tenure at the Pacific Centre, I had the background I needed to become licensed as a Clinical Psychologist and did so.  I left the Centre, opened a private practice and eventually was offered a job at Camosun College where I taught for 23 years while continuing to carry a light load of clients in private practice.  The two-year commitment became a 28 year commitment until my wife and I moved to Santa Fe, NM in 1998.

I learned so much at the Centre and I realized that a true understanding of developmental psychology can be a powerful clinical tool.  I also had a lot of humorous experiences, some of which I would like to share.

Shortly after I arrived one of the teachers told me the five boys she had in her class were paying no attention to her, physically assaulting her and that she was going to quit if things didn’t change. I had not implemented the program yet so I tried something desperate.  I hauled the kids out about 15 minutes before lunch one day and took them to the activity room.  I said, “We have about 10 minutes before lunch and I am going to challenge you. I am going to take on all five of you and if I am still standing at the end of 10 minutes I want you to promise not to bother your teacher anymore and to be good students.”  

Their eyes widened as they relished the thought of pummeling a senior staff member to death and were a little disappointed when I told them there would be no punches, no nasty stuff below the belt and no biting.  But they agreed.  So I said, “Go!” and they did.  

We went at it for ten minutes and at the end I was still standing, barely.  They were elated and promised to behave as agreed and they did.  I made five good friends that day and we never told anyone.    

The nurse at the school was a wonderful Scottish woman who had seen it all. She had learned her nursing skills in the worst neighborhoods of Glasgow and described herself as a spinster.  She told me that if she was going to have to take care of someone she wanted to get paid for it and marriage salaries were not that great. She was a prankster of the highest order.  I remember showing up to camp and her approaching me with a “special sandwich I made just for you.”  Peanut Butter and cotton balls.  Yuk.  

She used to put pills out on the kitchen counter in the morning and one morning she was going to do a dental inspection so she laid out about 30 pink pills that were intended to highlight dental issues when chewed.  There was one incredibly difficult boy at the center at that time, Donny, and as he entered the kitchen he gathered up all the pills and downed them.  She went ballistic.  She often lectured the kids on the dangers of taking drugs so this was a major affront to her warnings. She grabbed him, hauled him up the stairs, castigating him all the way and then locked him in his room and screamed, “You could die from doing that.”

He took full advantage of this opportunity, yelling, “Helen put me in here to die, Helen put me in here to die!”  

She paid no attention and her parting shot was, “Don’t be surprised if your urine is red!”

The next morning she was doing bed checks and when she came to his bed he smiled and proclaimed, “It was pink!  And, I am not dead!”

She replied, “How do you know you are not in heaven?”

Stunned, he blurted out, “You’re here!”  

She relished talking about one experience she had with Donny who had an undescended testicle. She maintained that was why he was so ornery.  She was examining him one morning and asked him to move his penis to a position that would not hinder her from examining the offending testicle.  

He said, “It doesn’t move that way.”

“Yes it does,” she replied.

“Helen,” he proclaimed, “You know a lot about pills but you don’t know anything about penises.”

On another occasion we took the children from the treatment center to a beach campground for a summer camp experience.  One of the boys in my tent was wetting his sleeping bag every night and we were pretty sure he was doing it on purpose.  So I told him, “If you pee in your sleeping bag again, we will take you home to the Centre.”

That night I was awakened by the sensation of warm liquid spreading in my sleeping bag.  Startled I awoke to find him urinating into my bag.  “What are you doing?”

“You told me you would take me home if I peed in my bag so I decided to pee in yours.”

He had me.  

Another child taught me that using power over a child can often lead to resentment and retaliation on the part of the child.  This boy had a terrible learning disability which caused him to see written material backwards.  He wanted to go home to Yellowknife for Christmas so I told him he had to learn five letters before December if he wanted to go home.  When the time came to show me his work he said, “I actually learned six.”  He then wrote the following message for me.

U O Y K C U F.  

This was a powerful lesson for me about the misuse of power and authority.  I sent him home for Christmas, a trip he deserved just for being a child, regardless of his disability.

I got into another bad situation with ultimatums when I was showing a new boy around the school.  He was yelling and cursing me, the school and his parents and said he would never stay at this “F…ing S…hole of a school.”  Exhausted and fed up, I turned to him and said, “You can stay here or go to jail!”

“I’ll take jail,” he replied.  

Once again I had backed myself into a corner.  Just then I remembered a story a professor of mine had told me.  At the end of the war he was drafted and asked, “Europe or Asia?”  Since the war was over in Europe he answered enthusiastically, “Europe.”

“Europe’s full,” the officer replied.  And he was off to Asia.

So I said, “Jail’s full.”

Although he was one of the most difficult kids to deal with, he eventually came around and became a model for other boys to emulate.  When it was time for him to leave we gave him the choice of returning to his dysfunctional family or a foster home.  He chose the foster home.

Bobby was a developmentally disabled boy who had suffered some kind of abuse as a young child and had formed an attachment to Dinky Toy cars and would walk around for hours making car noises as he pushed the cars through the air.  At one point a new boy, Alex, arrived.  Alex claimed to be a vampire and after a few weeks I was convinced he was right.  More than one staff member had bite marks on their necks.  He took a fancy to Bobby and manipulated him into a very exploitative homosexual relationship.  We decided to use behavior modification to try and convince Bobby to avoid Alex.

My friend Barney and I brought Bobby into Barney’s office and explained a program in which Bobby could earn points by staying away from Alex.  When Barney asked him “What do you like that you could earn with these points?”

Bobby replied, “Well, I really like it when Alex sticks his tongue in my mouth and goes lubalubado.”

Barney calmly replied, “That is not on the list.”

Having worked with several autistic children I considered myself somewhat of an expert in behavior modification with this challenging group.  So when a young autistic girl showed up at the center I decided to record a teaching video for staff to watch in order to learn how to use such skills as shaping and prompting to teach behavior.  One of the things that made Jeanne special was that she had an ileostomy collection bag on her side.  It would fill with urine and have to be emptied often.  What I didn’t know was that when angry, she would pull the bag off and empty it on the floor.  

I sat down with a simple reader and her lunch.  I would point to letters and prompt her to repeat them as I was being filmed through a one-way mirror.  She began to get agitated as she did not like her lunch to be contingent on completing the tasks I set out for her and when I turned to look at the clock, she whipped off the bag and emptied it on my head.  This video became extremely popular and was hauled out every time there was a staff party.  

Several years later, after Jeanne was released, I went to visit her in Vancouver. When she came to the door, she gave me a big hug and said, “Remember Larry. You teach me to read.  I dump PeePee bag on your head.”  Then she laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes.

I had many other memorable experiences but these are some of my favorites. 

Some stories about change

I am in the business of change.  People generally want their lives to change and are looking to me for help.  Ironically, I find change difficult.

My wife likes to ask, how many Dettweilers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer 1:  Change?  Change? Answer 2:  1 but I liked the old one better. Answer 3:  2.  One to change the bulb and one to administer CPR after he accidentally electrocutes himself.  

Often change occurs slowly in incremental steps.  Sometimes it is rapid.  Here are some stories about change.

In the spring of 1968 I was sitting on the lawn in front of the athletic center at the University of Minnesota with my friend Tom after an enthusiastic afternoon of handball.  Tom’s dad was head of the Presbyterian Church in the US.  He had told Tom that he and other religious leaders in the US were trying to convince Dr. King to cancel his tour of the South as they felt his life was in danger.  Between the war in Vietnam, the killing of the Kennedys, the civil rights killings, the assassination of Malcolm X and the specter of Richard Nixon on the horizon, I said, “If he is killed I am going to Canada.” Dr. King went on the tour and was assassinated in April in Memphis.  My wife and I, not wanting to raise our children in a country so racked with hate and violence moved to Victoria, B. C. Canada after I finished my Ph.D. in 1970.

Like many Americans I think I assumed Canadians were a lot more like Americans than they really were.  Also we were not prepared for the hostility toward Americans that many Canadians felt.  I began to get an inkling of this when I was told a joke by a co-worker during my first week as treatment director at the Pacific Centre for Human Development.  It went like this.

There were three Canadian surgeons who each went to study in different countries.  When they returned they sat down over coffee to compare notes. The first said that in Japan all internal organs are color coded so to do a replacement you just replaced yellow with yellow and so on. The second said that in Germany all organs were numbered so you just replaced a one with a one and so on.  The third said surgery in the US was really simple. American bodies only have two moving parts, a mouth and an asshole and they were interchangeable.  

I don’t think a day ever went by when I didn’t hear what was wrong with America from a person, the radio or a newspaper. This didn’t bother me too much since I probably agreed with their assessment of American foreign policy. What did bother me was the way in which the anger and hostility was directed not so much at the politics and government but rather at the American people.  

And with my loud, extraverted personality and American accent I was often targeted as a typical American.  And, like most stereotypes, there is some truth there.  Canadians often describe Americans as brash, rude and arrogant.  When I first went to Canada in 1970, I think I was living proof of this stereotype. Here is an example.

In the early seventies I was teaching at the University of Victoria and they were putting on Saturday courses at a College up-island.  I was asked to teach one and the University thought it would be easier to send the three of us who were doing this up in a limo rather than pay for us to drive up individually.

So the first day the three of us met.  Here is the conversation I had with Cary, one of the other teachers.

L: Hi, I am Larry.

C: Hi I am Cary.  What department do you teach in?

L: Education this year.  But I hate that department.  It is terrible. What about you?

C: Education.  (Dead Silence)

L: Boy I am tired.  My son plays hockey on Saturday at 5 in the morning.  What a stupid sport.

C: I coach youth Hockey.

I had dug a deep hole but if there is one way to connect with a Canadian it is to criticize America or Americans.  It is the second most enjoyed sport by Canadians after Hockey and it runs all year.  Not to mention that there is an endless supply of material for them to work with. 

L: I came here from Minnesota but I really was glad to leave.  The weather was horrible and I didn’t like the people very much.

C: My mother is from Minnesota. 

Sometimes I shudder when I look back at the person I was then, a truly ugly American, but Cary was extremely forgiving and we became close friends on those rides up and down the Island.  He and Judy and I, a Canadian, a Brit and an American, were a bit embarrassed by the fact that we were riding in a limo on that first day.  The next week it was a little easier and on the third Saturday we asked him to wash it during the time we were teaching because we thought it was dirty.  Eventually we began bringing wine and food and we would eat, drink, tell stories and laugh all the way home.  And, more importantly, I began to realize that the Canadian character, emphasizing self-effacement, politeness and interpersonal restraint (a lot like Minnesotans actually) might be something I would want to emulate, eh.  

I soon took it upon myself to be a little less outgoing and developed a Canadian accent, dropped “huh”, added “eh” and began to try to assimilate.  This must have happened somewhat unconsciously because I took my kids to Disneyland in the early 80s and after talking to a woman in line for a few minutes she asked me, “Where in Canada are you from?”  

This led to a lot of funny situations, especially in my private practice. I had become Canadian enough that people couldn’t tell I was a Yank. So clients would come in and rant and rave about Americans and at some point I would have to say, “You know, I am an American.” Often they were shocked as I had become so good at passing as a Canadian.

The truth is that Canada did change me.  It was there that I learned so much about myself from many wonderful friends, teachers and students.  However, as early retirement loomed, we decided to cast our fate to the south.  America, with all its faults was our home and we just felt more at ease there among people from our own culture. This is really hard for Canadians to understand.  On paper Canada seems such a better place to live.  But we are Americans and we feel more at home here.

I spent the first 27 ½ years of my life as an American.  I spent the next 27 ½ years as a Canadian.  I have spent the last 20 as a New Mexican, in a state that is an entity unto itself.  I love it here but when I die I want my ashes spread on the west coast of Canada because that is where I learned how to live life. 

My experience with the Victoria Family Violence Project required me to learn quickly on the job. When the director, Alayne Hamilton, first asked me to consider the position of consulting psychologist, I dismissed it out of hand as I had no experience with abusive men or group therapy.  She persevered and eventually I went to Ahimsa House, home of the Project to talk to her and Mike, one of the men working there.  I demurred but Mike said, well we need a licensed Psychologist working here or they won’t fund our program.  You are the only psychologist in town we are willing to let in this building so we are not letting you out of the building until you agree.  

In order to learn more about the program, I apprenticed myself to a lay leader in what they called Phase I, the entry level to the program. The idea of a Ph.D. Psychologist apprenticing with a lay group leader who installed cable during the day and had never finished high school raised some eyebrows but we worked well together and I learned the basics of the program during my twelve weeks with this group.  At the end of the group I told him I thought he was gifted in this area and I hope I had some influence over his eventual enrollment in and graduation from the Social Work program at the University.  Concurrently, I was accepted into the therapeutic group which was being run for the lay leaders, all of whom had been through the program.

The leader of that group was a professional therapist who had never received a degree but was gifted in his work.  I learned more about leading groups from him than anyone else I have ever known.  After ten weeks I was ready to start my own group.  My partner Wendy and I became so good at sharing this role it often seemed as though we were two heads on the same body.  

We led groups of 6 to 8 men who were attempting to change their lives for the better and to stop the violence that had so dominated their lives in the past.  One of the things we tried to teach them was to change their communication patterns by expressing their feelings to their partners rather than expressing judgments or controlling statements. One night the following conversation took place between two of the guys. I will refer to them as Tom and Jerry.

Tom said, “My wife won’t let me express my feelings.”

Jerry said, “What do you mean?”

“Well I told her I feel she’s a slut and she got mad and told me to shut up.”

“That’s not a feeling.”

“Yes it is,” he said somewhat agitated.”

“No, that’s a judgement and an insulting one as well.”

“No it’s a feeling.”

By this time both guys were getting pretty mad.  As the banter continued and tempers begin to flare I found myself splitting into three people.  First there was fearful Larry who was looking for the fastest way to the door.  Second there was Aikido Larry who was thinking about which technique he would use when one of these guys came after the other. Lastly there was adult psychologist Larry who said, “Let’s examine this interaction.”  I managed to put my fear and distracting thoughts aside in order to focus on the job to be done.  This is a core concept in the Japanese approach to problems known as Morita Therapy.

I asked Jerry to demonstrate a feeling statement to Tom.  With a malicious grin and a gleam in his eye he said to Tom, "I feel you’re an asshole.”  I thought, uh oh, here we go.  

After a brief pause Tom said, “Okay I get it."  That was the closest I ever saw anybody get to coming to blows during my five years working there.  But he did get it and became one of the best communicators in the group.  An unusual way to facilitate change but it worked.

There was one guy in the group who was particularly difficult to deal with but we all really liked him.  In his case, change was slow.  He had a pretty good handle on his anger at this time after having been through the program twice but he really got upset when he thought something was happening to his daughters, both of whom often found themselves in dire straits.

On the last night of these groups that ran for six months, we would meet and discuss how we all had changed and improved over the period of the group. When his turn came he told a story about how he had dealt with a man who was harassing his daughters.  It had angered him so much that he went up to the man’s third-floor apartment, grabbed him by the feet and hung him over the side of the railing and told him to stop bothering his girls.  This was the last night and I didn’t want to open this up, process it and show that, in fact, that it was not completely congruent with the non-violent philosophy of the family violence project.  So I just asked a simple question.

"How is this an example of the improvement and change you’ve experienced as a result of this program?”

“Oh hell, before this program I would’ve dropped him.”

I once had a student we will call Julie whose parents had come from Greece. After she had left for college, her grandmother moved from Greece to Canada when her husband died.  She stayed with my student’s parents and didn’t do much of anything except wander around the house in her black garb, watch television and cook.  After about six months she called Julie and asked her if she would take her out to buy some different clothes. This was quite a surprise to Julie.  Also grandma wanted to know if she would help her enroll in English classes at a local college.  A bit stunned she did both.  Over the next few months she noticed a radical change in her grandmother.  In addition to changing her clothes and going to school she began taking driving lessons.  When Julie asked her grandmother one day why she had made such a big changes, she replied, “Oprah.”

Years ago I owned a house in Victoria B.C. that had been built in 1910.  It constantly needed repairs and I had a fantastic handyman named Burt who would do the work.  He always asked me to help, mostly because he liked the company and not for my skills at home repair.  One time he and his wife were with me and my wife at a friend’s house.  I asked him how much it would cost to repair my front porch. He replied, “400 dollars.”  I said, “What if I help?”  His wife answered quickly, “600 dollars.”

Anyway, Burt liked to drink.  He never drank on the job but his binges were legendary.  I called him one day to tell him I was getting new gutters on the house and I just couldn’t get the old ones off.  He said they were going out to dinner and he would stop by afterward to look at it.  Around nine that night Burt and his wife showed up and he was three sheets to the wind.  It was windy, dark and pouring rain but he said, “Bring a flashlight, hammer and ladder.”  He climbed up, looked at the gutter and asked for the hammer. 

I said, “I have been thinking about all the ways to get this down and I just can’t figure it out.”

He reared back, swung the hammer and the whole gutter flew off into the yard. He said, “That’s the trouble with you f…ing intellectuals, you think too much.” No one has ever confused me with an intellectual before or after that incident but it was definitely an example of the superiority of action over thinking, at least in this case.  In Japanese psychology, thoughts and feelings are seen as fleeting and not under your control and the fastest way out of a bad state is to do something.  This is very different than western psychology.

Burt taught me a lot about home repair but that night he was definitely my action guru.

On another occasion I was talking to my mentor in Seattle when he told me he had been to the 100th birthday party of a famous Jungian analyst.  He asked the birthday boy what he had been up to.  After hearing a long list of projects, plans and activities he said, “Joe, how do you do all of that at your age?  I get tired just thinking about it.”

Joe answered, “I don’t think about it.”

So now when I really need to do something I try not think a lot about it.  If I can just get started, it usually takes care of itself. 

A dramatic and fascinating example of change being inspired by a complete stranger was described to me by a former student.  This woman, who we shall call Eleanor, was at a major decision point in her life when this event occurred. She told me about it in a career and life development course I was teaching in which she was a student.  The students had completed several inventories designed to indicate appropriate career paths they might follow.  She had the most interesting test results I’ve ever seen.  I said to her somewhat jokingly, “It looks like you could either be a CPA or a counselor.”  She told me that, in fact, before coming to graduate school in counseling she had been debating whether to become an accountant or counselor.  She clearly had a wide range of abilities. 

One day while she was in the process of trying to figure out which path to follow she was leaving the grocery store with her hands full when a stranger opened the door for her.  She smiled and said thank you, and he said, "You should become a counselor.”  She stood there stunned and when she turned around he was gone.

She went back to school, completed the prerequisites for graduate school and counseling, and enrolled in a graduate program with a specialty in grief counseling.  Today she works as a grief counselor and is known in hospice circles as the "angel of death.”  She seems to have the ability to walk into a room, sit down next to person who is dying but can’t let go, place her hand on the person and within a half an hour the person has let go and is gone.  She has found her calling thanks to a stranger’s comment.

This is a most remarkable woman.  She suffers from a serious disease but never talks about it or uses it as an excuse to avoid difficult situations.  She has now finished her Ph.D. and will continue with her life’s work, helping the dying and the grieving.  She works a lot with immigrant families and told me she always takes her shoes off when she enters a trailer or small home.  I assumed this was a sign of respect.  She said, "No, I am often the tallest person in the house and I don’t want them to feel small.”

After reading about the importance of action in Japanese Psychology and the importance of starting small I was reminded of a story I heard Bill O’Hanlon tell about Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who was best known for his work in Hypnosis and his somewhat unconventional (at least for his time) approach to clinical problems.

When one of his students heard he would be visiting a large U.S. city where his depressed aunt lived, he asked Erickson if he would stop in on her.  He agreed and when the aunt opened the door he found himself in a musty, dark house with all the curtains pulled confronting a woman who appeared to have nothing to live for and who only left the house to attend church on Sundays.

After speaking to her he found there were two things that gave her life meaning, going to church and growing African Violets.  In his own inimical way he said, “You know I don’t think you are a very good Christian and I don’t think your flowers serve much of a purpose either.”

Stunned, the woman asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, a fundamental tenet of Christianity is caring for others.  You don’t do anything for anyone else and you are the only person who gets joy from these flowers.  I am going to give you a task but I seriously doubt you can do it.  I want you to look into the church bulletin and see if there is anyone who is suffering or grieving and send them one of your plants.  Again, I doubt you will do this.”

I guess the challenge was too much to resist so she did it.  The response from the recipients and the pastor were so positive she did it again.  Soon she was sending violets to anyone she heard of who was in need.  When she died, hundreds of mourners showed up to honor “The African Violet Lady”, a person they saw as a caring and generous woman.  

And it all began with a challenge and one small act of kindness.

Except for one semester, I was a student in University from the fall of 1960 to the fall of 1970.  I saw many changes during that period, one of which was the introduction of drugs to student life. By the end of the decade I was a pretty heavy user of Marijuana and dabbled in other drugs. After I moved to Victoria and took my first job I continued to use drugs recreationally.  

Shortly after Ishiyama Sensei arrived in the mid-seventies and became our Aikido Sensei, he announced we were going to do a demonstration at the university.  We arrived, changed and went onto the mats to warm up.  He approached me and told me I was going to do the knife attacks.  This was fine with me because we had always used wooden knives in practice.  He then went to a small box on the edge of the mats and extracted a long, very pointed metal knife.  As he handed it to me I asked, “How do you want me to attack you?”

“Any way you like,” he responded.

I realized at that point that if either of us made a mistake, I could die. So I did my best to attack at full speed and with lethal intent and he countered every attack.  It seemed like it went on for hours. That night it was broadcast on the local TV station and I realized it was only about three minutes.  But I knew at that time that I wanted to experience every moment of my life with that same awareness and intensity.  I never used drugs again.  

In 1981 I was approached by my Dean regarding a pilot project in Infant Day Care.  In Victoria, B.C. there were no infant day care centers (centres!) and the government was about to initiate a program designed to encourage the establishment of infant day care. The College Day Care Centre was going to be one of the first and he planned to expand our Day Care Worker training program to include infant care.  He wanted me to head up the creation of the program.

I said I would do it but I hadn’t read any research on the subject in 10 years since my graduation from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.  I asked him if he would send me to Stanford for a month where the author of the textbook I used in my Child Development class was a professor. He agreed.

I contacted the professor and she agreed to mentor me in this endeavor if I would keep a record of my findings and give a copy to her so she could use the information for her next book.  This sounded like a good trade to me.  Summer came and I was off to Palo Alto while my wife stayed in Victoria with our two sons.  Our trade was that she would fly them down at the end of a month and the boys and I would visit relatives and generally enjoy California, Oregon and Washington while she had time alone.  So the time came and I drove down to Palo Alto where I would stay with my good friend Carol for a month. 

When I got there I was suddenly overwhelmed by the immensity of the commitment I had made.  I had not done anything like this in 10 years and I didn’t like doing it back then.  Also, it was the hottest summer in Northern California history and the first time I walked into the Stanford library I felt smothered by the oppressive heat as there was no air conditioning.  Additionally, I was not in the best emotional state as my wife and I had recently reunited after a separation that had really knocked the wind out of my sails.  And, most importantly, being a Cal graduate, I was feeling guilty for consorting with the enemy, Stanford. 

My first visit to the library lasted about an hour and I left frustrated and angry that I had put myself into this situation without really assessing how difficult it would be for me.  I missed my wife and boys, was not really that excited about the research and remembered that after finishing four years of graduate school, I never wanted to see another journal article as long as I lived.

But I had a job to do so the next day I promised to stay until noon. Reading about infant perception in the morning, I found myself beginning to get interested in the amazing things researchers had discovered about infants over the last 10 years.  The next day I stayed all day and soon I was going in at night and on the weekends. I was amassing reams of note cards and when I met with the prof at the halfway point she was delighted to see my work and said I had saved her many hours of work that she could now spend with her three young children. 

This is a good example of some of the principles of Kaizen, another form of Japanese psychology.  I started small, gradually increased my time on the project, kept with it and the project overcame my emotional state.  It really became my life. More importantly, it proved to me that I could do a very good job on a project that had to be its own reward.  There was no prize, no money or pat on the head when I was done.  Finishing the task with thoroughness and integrity was the only reward.

My clinical supervisor in Seattle once said to me, don’t think of the Psyche as part of you, think of yourself as part of the Psyche.  In the same way, this project was not part of my life, I was part of it.  I was an employee of the project.  It had a life of its own.

There were other benefits as well.  I got to know Carol really well and we remained good friends, exchanging letters at Christmas and at our Birthdays.  One of the first things she told me, having been born on December 25th, was, “I will not accept one card.  You have to send two.” We were on a pretty tight budget but occasionally we would go out to dinner.  Her boyfriend had recently left her and she would offer to pay if I promised to walk by his house with my arm around her feigning mad love and affection.  Also, I joined the Stanford Aikido Club and practiced every day there was a practice.  When I finished the project, the boys came down and we had a great vacation together.  

When I returned we set up the program and the Day Care became a fantastic resource for the community.  The people who actually made this happen were the wonderful teachers in the training program and the exceptional day care supervisors at the centre.  Also, I had a lot of new material for my course in Child Development.  I will always be grateful for the experience this project afforded me.  

Sometimes life wakes you up and change is immediate.  My friend Ron is a great example of this.  Ron’s family owned a very profitable furniture store. From an early age Ron showed great ability in art and design and was a genius working with his hands.  He once showed me a report card from a prestigious private boy’s school which he attended.  All the grades were rather mediocre except art. He excelled at art. He also showed me a picture of a beautiful boat he had built while still in elementary school.  It was a work of art. However, Ron’s parents had other plans for him.  They wanted him to become an architect and a professional of whom they could be proud.  So even though his academic record was not astounding, off he went to study architecture at University.  Not surprisingly, he flunked out.

Ron may have been the most introverted and shy person I have ever met in my life.  Upon returning home after failing in University, his parents took him into the business and made him the director of personnel.  There could not be a job on earth for which Ron was more poorly suited.  Fortunately, he married a woman who was very supportive and realized he could not survive in this job. One day, after waking from a terrible nightmare, he resigned his job, sold his stock and begin a business building wooden toys for children.  He would isolate himself in his garage while doing his woodwork and his wife would handle all sales from the kitchen of her house.  She served as the business manager, doorkeeper and was a welcoming presence who always seemed to have something delicious to offer you while you were picking up toys.    At some point they began to build a boat.  After years of work it was a beautiful sight to see. Eventually they divorced and Ron moved to a local island where he now builds boats that have been commissioned by people who value his unique ability.  What would his life have been like if his parents had seen this gift and nurtured it?

If you were to walk into the office that my wife and I use for our psychotherapy practice, you would see lots of turtles.  Turtles on the desks, turtles on the tables, a turtle candle holder, turtles in the windows and turtles on the floor.  Not live turtles but every kind of turtle you could imagine. You would even see a turtle painted on a drum on the wall and a turtle night light.  There used to be more turtles but my wife said, “Enough is enough.  We are taking some of these home.”   She has replaced them with shells and stones in the same places.  She has her magic and I have mine.

When I taught and worked with the First Nations Salish people of Vancouver Island they told me the turtle clan was the healing clan and that I belonged to that clan.  This was an incredible honor so I started collecting turtles.  People saw my turtles and starting giving me turtles so I have a lot. People have brought them from all over the world.

I have turtles everywhere to remind me to slow down.  My nature is to go fast, to want to finish everything before I need to and come to closure too early.  There is also a practical issue here.  I do not have the physical abilities I had when I was younger and when I get ahead of myself I tend to break things, harm my person and otherwise cause havoc.  

My mother was the same way.  She fell many times in her 80s because this previously active and athletic woman just could not slow down.  She would stand up from her easy chair, set off at breakneck speed only to trip and fall.  On one Super bowl Sunday I got a call from her residence just as the game was going to start.  She had fallen and they could not stop her nosebleed due to her use of blood thinners.  The woman said that my mother had asked her not to call me because she knew I was watching the game but that they were really worried.  

I drove rapidly to the residence where I found my mother covered in blood and rapidly swelling and darkening around the eyes.  I did not feel adequate to deal with this so I called 911 for an ambulance to take her to the hospital.  When the first responder walked in he looked at the game on the TV, then my mother, then me.  "I gather you are rooting for different teams,” he said.  

We all went to the hospital and she sent me home and said, “Don’t come get me until the game is over.”

At the beginning of the final quarter, the hospital called and the nurse told me I had to come get her NOW.  They needed the bed.  I guess Super bowl Sunday is a high volume day in the ER.   The next week I bought a TiVo box.

I used to take her to the Coumadin (blood thinner) clinic to get her blood tested. One time she registered very high blood pressure.  “I am a nervous Nelly and I always will be,” she said.  “And I gave it to him.”  Then looking at me pensively she said, “He doesn’t seem to be like that anymore.”  

I looked at the nurse and said, “Thousands of dollars in therapy.” She said, “Me too.”

One last story about change.  My brother and I were extremely close. I was five years his senior and from the day he was born I felt responsibility for his safety and well-being.  In 1965 my wife and I were living in San Francisco taking courses at S.F. State and preparing to move to Minnesota where I was to begin my Ph.D. studies.  He was still at home in L.A. with my parents.  Shortly before Christmas my father called to tell me that my brother had acute Leukemia and that although he was undergoing new treatment (a variation of which saves children today), he was not expected to live.  Over the next six months he was in and out of hospital, suffering intensely through repeated relapses and remissions.  My life vacillated between the hubris of entering graduate school and the depression resulting from the impending loss of my best friend.  I think I engaged in a lot of denial.  Susan says we visited him once in hospital while he was sick but I have no recollection of that.  The day finally came when my father called to tell us to come to L.A. to say goodbye. 

It was the sixties in San Francisco and compared to my friends at home and my father’s contemporaries, I had long hair.  Today it probably would not even qualify as long hair but it did at that time and it identified me as belonging to a certain cohort that was not popular with my parents’ generation.  Whenever I would go home my dad would offer me money to get it cut and I always refused. I think that although this was a version of what Erikson calls a negative identity (identity through opposition) it also was symbolic of the emergence of my own identity, separate from my family and the dominant culture.  

As my wife and I were getting ready to go to the hospital to say goodbye to Steve my dad said, “I want you to get a haircut before you see him. I want him to remember you as you were.” 

I was completely paralyzed.  I had to choose between being who I was at the time and pleasing my father, who I knew was in a state of total despair.  So I agreed.  After the haircut, as I drove up the driveway to pick up my wife on the way to the hospital she came out of the house with tears running down her face. “Steve is dead,” she said.  I never got to say goodbye to the second most important person in my life.  Tears form in my eyes as I write this fifty years later.

I was psychologically sophisticated enough at the time to know that the real reason I was sent to the barber was so that I would not embarrass my parents. Although not being able to say goodbye to my brother and my best friend was a result of parental narcissism, in some ways it was a powerful experience in the activation of what is called in Psychosynthesis, my own internal unifying center. 

I vowed that day that no matter how my future children presented themselves to the world and no matter what choices they made in life, I would support them for themselves and not how they reflected on me.  Being my parents’ child, I couldn’t always do that but the two fine men I see today are proof that my wife and I, nutty as we were in those early years, got that part right.  I remember when my youngest son was about eight, my wife said to him, “You really like yourself don’t you?”  He looked at her like she was the dumbest person on earth. 

“Of course,” he replied.  She looked at me, smiled and said, “If he only knew what we have had to go through to get to that place that he takes for granted.”

Although I held this against my father for years, when he was dying my mother asked us to come to L.A. to say goodbye to him.  She said she didn’t want the experience with Steve to be repeated and that she was the one who wanted me to get a haircut and had regretted it ever since.  She knew I blamed my Dad and that she didn’t want him going to his grave with that between us.

I think that my wife and I, coming out of very different but equally dysfunctional families, have been our own best parents.  Even during our worst times together we often have been able to sidestep our own narcissism and support what is best for the other.  My wife sometimes says that I saved her from her family but I often wonder about it when I see the humane society bumper sticker, “Who rescued who?”

Psychosynthesis

In the early 70s my friend John gave me some information on Psychosynthesis. After reading a few articles, I became fascinated by the approach to psychotherapy and life in general.  Let me lay out some of the theory.

Think about how you act in different situations.  For example, at work are you one person and at home someone completely different? When you are with your parents or other authority figures do you behave differently again, perhaps like a compliant child or an obstinate rebel?  Are you the outgoing leader with some friends and the passive follower with others?  Like the famous Dr. Jekyll, on some days are you the perfect mate or parent and on other days the diabolical Mr. Hyde?  Do you sometimes wonder, “Why did I do that?” Do you find yourself joyful one moment and in the depths of sadness in the next with no idea of why you experience such intense fluctuations?  In Psychosynthesis we call the people you become in these different situations subpersonalities.  In other words, you assume a different identity in each situation, often without even being aware of it.  

Unfortunately, the beliefs, thoughts, feelings and expectations that motivate our behavior when we are “in” one of these subpersonalities are often unconscious and unexamined and can be completely different for each subpersonality.  This leads to splitting and internal conflict between the different parts of ourselves and we seem to be in a state of war with ourselves and others.  These subpersonalities have formed as a result of early experience and probably served us well in our attempt to survive and even prosper in our families and culture. However, in adulthood these patterns that reflect our adaptation to what and how others wanted us to be do not reflect our true nature nor are they effective in the world we now inhabit. In fact, they may be quite destructive and counterproductive.  For example, someone who complied and was always nice in order to avoid physical abuse from an alcoholic father may find herself constantly bending to the whims of others and not looking after her own welfare. This kind of person often asks, “Why do I keep doing this.”

Although this is not a healthy or happy existence, in our culture it is “normal.” Many of us live in a trance as we follow the dictates of these parts of ourselves that do not reflect our basic nature or our deeper desire to live in harmony within ourselves and with others. While in this trance we can experience addictions, compulsions, poor interpersonal relationships and a general unhappiness that can appear as depression, anxiety or as other psychological symptoms.

Psychosynthesis is a process that carefully opens the doors to the unconscious realms and shines a light on the dark secrets that keep us prisoners of our past. As we examine the genesis of these subpersonalities and discern which aspects of each subpersonality are congruent with our true nature and which are not, it becomes possible to reconstruct ourselves in harmony with our true selves so that we can become whole people who interact in a healthy manner with both the world around us and the world within.  

We all come into this world potentially whole.  By this I mean that we have the possibility of living out a destiny that is congruent with the gifts that reflect our own unique being. If you are comfortable with a spiritual perspective, you might conceptualize this as following your soul’s journey.  If you are not comfortable with this approach, you might look at this way of being as living in harmony with your own intrinsic nature or even your own genetic code.  

If you have observed very young children you probably have noticed how unique each child is, even shortly after birth.  Some are very wary and observant of the world around them and others are virtually oblivious to their environment.  You may have noticed that some are “people oriented” and some are “object oriented.”  As a parent, it was a shock to me that this uniqueness surfaced very early in my children and seemed totally independent of and resistant to environmental factors. One would wake if a pin dropped and the other would not be awakened by a train barreling through the front room. One has always been fascinated by ideas and the other by concrete problems to be solved.  Effective parents see these unique traits and abilities in their children and engage in mirroring their children.  In other words, they see that their children have certain abilities and dispositions and they actively recognize and foster, or at least accept, these aspects. When this happens we say that there is an empathic response from the parent to the child’s authentic self.  This does not mean we cannot set limits or teach our children good social skills. It just means that good parents have a basic respect for who the child is as they engage in the difficult process of preparing children for adult life.

Unfortunately, most of us do not experience perfect parenting nor are we perfect parents ourselves.  When, as children, our abilities and feelings are not recognized or actually are demeaned or punished and we are dismissed, shamed or otherwise experience an empathic failure, we learn very quickly what is acceptable and what is not.  For a child, rejection by a parent is terrifying and, in the child’s mind, can be experienced as life threatening.  In Psychosynthesis we call this the fear of nonbeing.  As a response to this and other fears we develop subpersonalities that help us cope with the world around us and insure our survival.  This is why we call these adaptations survival subpersonalities.

A common example is the subpersonality of “The Pleaser.”  If parents only mirror and shine on their child when he or she is compliant and helpful and meets the parents’ expectations, the child may develop a subpersonality that as an adult requires the person to be helpful and giving in order to feel any self-worth.  The person may also experience an inability to form boundaries, say “no” or know what he or she actually wants in life.  Another child might respond to this expectation by developing “The Rebel,” whose identity and self-esteem is dependent upon constantly being in opposition to authority and others’ expectations.   In fact, both of these subpersonalities could exist in one person. The important factor here is that we, as adults, often are not aware of the unconscious motivations and feelings behind the behavior we exhibit when we are “in” these subpersonalities.

Each subpersonality has its own way of interacting consciously with the world but there are two unconscious aspects of each that are very important.  The painful, shaming experiences of childhood are pushed out of our conscious awareness and into what we call the lower unconscious.  Outside of our awareness, these unconscious memories and experiences often drive the behavior we exhibit when we are acting out of that subpersonality.  In fact, at its most extreme, the main goal of the subpersonality is to avoid all feelings and memories that resurface in situations that resemble the original wounding experience and, in the mind of the inner child, activate the threat of nonbeing. On the other hand, those gifts and unique aspects of our being that were not accepted and for which we were shamed are also repressed into what we call the higher unconscious. In this realm such denigrated characteristics as intuition, sensitivity, creativity and artistic ability may reside completely hidden.

The initial work of Psychosynthesis involves examining each of the subpersonalities while delving into the repressed unconscious experiences that led to their creation.  The process of uncovering the painful experiences as well as our true gifts can be lengthy and intense but very rewarding as we discover the motivation behind outmoded, destructive and maladaptive behavior, thoughts and feelings contained in the farther reaches of the subpersonalities.  

As we examine how the subpersonalities were formed, how they have evolved into adult subpersonalities, how they form alliances between each other and how they experience conflict with each other we see that some aspects of each subpersonality may be helpful to us in our journey to wholeness and happiness. It also becomes clear that other aspects, useful in surviving our youthful fears, are no longer helpful, limit our ability to function and are downright destructive.

Most importantly, we want to integrate the positive aspects of each subpersonality into our everyday life.  This process is called synthesis.  We want to synthesize the many subpersonalities into one whole personality which, although it may behave differently in different situations, always reflects the true wholeness of the person we really are and helps us to reach our individual destiny.  Our behavior becomes a product of conscious thought and feeling rather than being driven by unconscious shame and guilt and the avoidance of nonbeing.  We refer to this ultimate state as functioning from the authentic self.  

As memories surface and the unconscious material becomes conscious, a sense of “I” begins to evolve.  In other words, an observer that is independent of childhood or cultural conditioning begins to surface and we begin to see who we really are, how we actually experienced early life and how we want to live life now, in harmony with but not bound by the expectations of others.  As Psychosynthesis progresses, it becomes clear that the “I” is a reflection of a deeper aspect of you, your self. The self is the ultimate expression of who you are and, if you have a spiritual approach to life, a representation of your soul.  If you are not comfortable with this concept, think of the self as the totality of all of your potential and experiences which possesses the innate knowledge of exactly how you should lead your life.  

In Psychosynthesis we speak of the will, which provides the impetus for our behavior. The will of the survival personality drives you to respond to life in a way that avoids re-experiencing the wounding of your childhood and the fear of nonbeing.  As we age, these responses become less and less satisfying and eventually become counterproductive.  Their ineffectiveness and the unhappiness that accompanies them is often the reason we end up in psychotherapy. The “I” has its own will and as it becomes stronger during the process of Psychosynthesis, it is able to direct your behavior in a way that is more congruent with your nature than the dictates of survival personalities. Ultimately, you may experience the will of the self which can appear as a calling or a motivation to action that you cannot possibly ignore regardless of how foolish it may seem to others.

As the “I” strengthens and the self becomes clearer, it becomes possible to disidentify from each subpersonality.  In other words, we can still inhabit the subpersonality but the behavior we associate with the subpersonality is now serving the healthy needs of the self rather than keeping unconscious fears at bay.  For example, one may begin to parent in a way that serves the needs and healthy authentic development of your children rather than serving your own primitive need to feel safe by being in control or serving the need for your children’s culturally sanctioned accomplishments to augment your own self-image. You may begin to do your job in a way that makes the most sense to you and allows you accomplish more than when you were working primarily for the approval and adulation of your coworkers and superiors.  On the other hand, you may find that as the need for the approval of others wanes you feel a desperate need to explore a career that reflects your basic nature and not the expectation of parents, spouses or the culture in general.  Be warned that such major transformations, although personally healthy, can be very disturbing to the others in your life.  This is not a process to be taken lightly.

Although dredging up the past and recovering memories and feelings that are painful can be very unpleasant, the freedom from unconscious control allows one to fully function in the present without the need for validation from others or the need to meet unrealistic expectations of yourself and others contained within the unconscious areas of unexamined subpersonalities.  It becomes possible for you to be a happy, satisfied and whole person just being who you really are.

I have been asked, “Isn’t this all about me? Is this not a selfish, self-absorbed and narcissistic process in which I am involved?”  My experience has been quite the opposite.  When we are operating from the needs of survival subpersonalities, our motivation is unconscious, driven by unrealistic demands and fundamentally designed to keep us safe from our fear of nonbeing.  We behave with hidden agendas (often hidden from ourselves), we blame others, project our feelings and motivations onto others and are generally unhappy whenever the world doesn’t live up to our expectations.  Living from the self allows us to moderate the need for external validation, relate to others in an authentic, altruistic and empathic manner and to be fundamentally satisfied and happy with life.  This is the beauty of Psychosynthesis, a path to self-acceptance and harmony in both the internal and external world.  

Some Useful Psychological Concepts

The Guilt-Resentment-Persecution Triangle describes the dynamic of many relationships.  The idea here is that if you use guilt to convince someone to do what you want them to do they will do it but feel resentment.  Sometimes the resentment is conscious and sometimes unconscious. Resentment then morphs into persecution. This can take many forms.  One of the most common is passive aggressive behavior. Forgetting, postponing, or just plain not doing are examples of this behavior.  I knew someone once who was a master at this. His wife kept on asking him to put in skylights that they had bought and he kept agreeing but never did it.  Finally, she erupted, showed him where to put them in and demanded that he do it, shaming him in the process.  He finally did it but he “accidentally” put them in the wrong places.  The example of the boy I forced to learn letters earlier was also exhibiting passive aggressive behavior when he learned his letters and them presented them to me in an insulting way.  

The Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor drama is also a useful way of seeing some relationships.  When one sees oneself as a victim it is often assumed others fall into one of two categories, rescuer or persecutor.  And if you are not a rescuer you are definitely a persecutor.  Although there are real victims out there, someone who continually takes the victim stance often is not willing to take responsibility for his or her behavior and blames others for the consequences of that behavior. Heaven help the person that points out that this person is often responsible for his or her own predicament.  A common pattern seen in narcissistic individuals begins with the narcissist feeling like a victim because others are not giving him the constant validation he needs and feels he deserves.  This validation actually serves the purpose of fending off unconscious feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.  Usually, when validation is not forthcoming the narcissist then feels justified in becoming the persecutor and will attack those who hold him responsible for his attitudes and behaviors.  Unfortunately, there is usually someone out there who, for his or her own conscious or unconscious reasons, will step up and rescue the narcissist.  This can be called collusion.  One need only read the entertainment or political news sections to see this drama replayed over and over.  

Unconscious empathy is a skill that some people possess without even knowing it. It involves unconsciously picking up what another person is feeling even though the other person may not be expressing it. The feeling is then perceived as coming from the receiver. Have you noticed that sometimes after speaking with or spending time with a particular person you feel angry or depressed or inadequate?  While this feeling may belong to you, sometimes you are unconsciously picking up what the other is not willing to recognize in him- or herself.  While this is a great tool, especially if you are a therapist, it is also a curse.  People with this skill, often called “sensitives”, need to learn how to discriminate between their own feelings and the feelings of others not being expressed. Psychological boundaries that protect us from unconscious assault are also important to develop.  

Much has been written about the concepts “Masculine” and “Feminine” and the differences between them.  I do not think these are particularly helpful concepts in the 21st century. They often suffer from overgeneralization or stereotyping and tend to be used in a pejorative manner.  I think the concepts of Eros and Logos are more useful.  Eros is the domain of feelings, connection, empathy and intuition.  Logos is the domain of thought, logic and rational analysis. Both are necessary but in the past the former has been ascribed to women and the latter to men.  Traditionally, men who live in the world of Eros are seen as sissies and women who live in the world of Logos are seen as unfeeling and cold.  Although everyone usually favors one of these approaches to life over the other, it is a balance that is necessary, both in men and women. Different situations require different solutions.

A third principle that is neither Eros or Logos is the Power principle. The Power principle is neither relational or logical.  The fundamental axiom is “might makes right.”  I am bigger and more powerful so you will do as I say.  History is replete with examples of this principle and it usually doesn’t end well for the powerful, even if it takes generations to overcome the oppressor.  It is particularly destructive in relationships between people and especially damaging to children.  Also, like guilt, it engenders resentment and eventually retaliation, if possible.  

The Inflation Deflation cycle is a useful concept to understand mood swings and such concepts as narcissism, depression and anxiety.  A simple analogy my supervisor once used is helpful understanding this cycle.  Think of your personality as a balloon.  A balloon that is underinflated will not support itself.  It just lays there.  A balloon that is overinflated is very large but very thin and can be popped easily. The key to a healthy personality is to have a balloon that is just the right size to support itself but not so big that it pops easily when life does not support your self-concept or inflated ideas you have about yourself. Many people oscillate between these two states depending on the feedback the world around them provides. 

Good parenting is about helping a child develop a personality that can support itself and be content in the world and at the same time not be so big that it ignores the needs of others and is self-absorbed or narcissistic.  Narcissism is the psyche’s way of blowing up a big balloon to cover the unconscious little, flaccid balloon that is the true nature of the narcissist.  

How do we encourage and support our children in their quest to be themselves and be effective in the world without creating a narcissistic monster?  Here are some ideas.

Parenting

Parenting is a very difficult task.  This statement will, of course, surprise no-one who has actually tried it.  In the fifty years my wife and I have shared the title of parent, we have, like everyone else, learned gradually through trial and error what it means to be good parents.  We are still learning.  I sometimes wonder how parents cope with the number of books, courses and "experts” who are willing to tell them how to raise children.  It must be very frustrating, especially since many of the experts seem to disagree with each other.  My daughter-in-law said than when she expressed her fears about parenting to her grandmother she replied, “There are probably 100 ways to raise children and 99 of them are ok.”  I spent a lot of time working with parents both as a teacher and a therapist. Here are some of the ideas I thought were important.

There are two things you can do to begin becoming a better parent. First, find some way to rediscover the memories of your own childhood. When did you feel good about yourself? When did you feel bad?  What would you change about your parents and what would you leave untouched if you had your childhood to do over again?  Parents who remain naive about this part of their lives are likely to re-enact the negative aspects of their own childhood in some way with their own children.  Through reading, reflection, discussion or therapy you can re-parent yourself and break the cycle of abusive or ineffectual parenting that is often passed from generation to generation.  Secondly, familiarize yourself with developmental psychology. Find out what needs and behaviors are normal for children in your child’s age group.  Often, what may seem strange or unruly to parents is normal for children in a particular age group.  In addition to these two fundamental tasks, there are a variety of parenting techniques and ideas that I have found to be very helpful which I will present in the following pages.

It seems to me that the most important thing you can do as a parent is to recognize who your child is.  What is his temperament? What are her interests? What are his strengths and what are his challenges?  Above all else it is important to recognize that this is her life and not yours.  Children should not have to live out their parents unrealized dreams and aspirations. My previous story about Ron is a good example of this.  Given this assumption, there are some useful tools for helping children to develop within a family and culture while still maintaining their own identity.  Let’s look at the four strokes first.

A stroke is something you experience from the environment around you.  A positive stroke such as a smile or praise feels good, while a negative stroke, such as criticism or a spanking, feels bad.  A stroke is said to be conditional if something has to be done by the child to receive it.  On the other hand, unconditional strokes are not related to the child’s behavior.  For example, if the child takes out the garbage and mother says, “Thanks a lot,” this is a conditional positive stroke.  Sending a child to her room after she teased her sister is a conditional negative stroke.  In both cases, the stroke was a result of some specific act.  In one case the consequence, or stroke, was positive and in the other it was negative.  "I love you” is an unconditional positive stroke since your love, which feels good, is not connected to anything the child has done.  If you are in a lousy mood and you say to a child, “Get lost,” this is an unconditional negative stroke.  This remark feels bad and is in no way related to anything she has done.  What are the effects of these different strokes?

The receipt of unconditional positive strokes is absolutely essential to the formation of positive self-esteem in a child.  The message conveyed is, “you are o.k. for who you are; no matter what you do I will still love you.”  Many parents who were abused or neglected as children have never experienced this kind of stroke and, as a result, don’t understand the importance of letting their own child know how much they care for her.  For many parents, their own unhappiness may be so great that they cannot express love or appreciation to anyone.  For these kinds of parents, repairing their own self-esteem through therapy is the first step towards being able to give positive strokes to their child.

One of the most meaningful ways you can deliver unconditional positive strokes to your child is to spend time doing what she likes to do.  This may be swimming, reading a book, going for bike rides, preparing a meal together or just hanging out.  Children invest their parents with a lot of power.  You are very important to your child. Spending time with a child doing what she likes to do gives the child the message that you consider her needs important and that you like her. This is a message that enhances her self-esteem.  Of the four strokes, this is the most important for children to receive from their parents and is, unfortunately, the least common.  Unconditional positive strokes by themselves are not enough however. This does not prepare a child for a world in which there are limits and can lead to an inflated sense of self, sometimes termed omnipotence or narcissism.

Conditional positive strokes, while they also enhance self-esteem in the child, act as reinforcement of behavior that is considered acceptable, appropriate or pleasing by the parents.  For example, when you say to your child, “You did a good job,” or “I really appreciate you taking your dishes to the sink,” or “Thank you for picking up your clothes,” it not only gives her a feeling of accomplishment and self-worth, but also serves to increase the behavior that earned the stroke. We will talk more about this later.

The conditional negative stroke, or punishment, as it is more commonly known, is, unfortunately, the most common tool parents use to try to influence their children’s behavior. Parents tend to use punishment because it is fast and easy and often puts an immediate end to an unacceptable behavior.  However, in the long run, punishment often does not work.  While punishment teaches a child what kind of behavior is considered inappropriate, it does not necessarily teach her what is appropriate.  For instance, if you punish a child for whining, she doesn’t really learn another more constructive way to ask for things she wants. In the end she probably will whine because it occasionally pays off, making the punishment worth suffering.  Punishment also has the effect of arousing a child emotionally and she may get upset, angry, or fearful.  Stirring up these intense negative emotions does nothing to help a child learn appropriate behavior and, when the child begins to associate these feelings with the punisher, she may form a negative image of the parent in her mind.  The child learns to fear, avoid and lie to her parent. Furthermore, punishment, especially physical punishment (e.g., hitting or spanking), models negative behavior. If a child is hit every time she does something a parent doesn’t like, the message is: “If you don’t like what someone is doing, hit her.”  Punishment is also likely to result in revenge.  The punished child may see herself at the losing end of a power struggle and try to find a way of getting even, often by repeating the behavior she was punished for in the first place.  Prolonged or severe punishment will result in the formation of a negative self-image as the child incorporates the belief that she is bad. Punishment may sometimes be deemed necessary by a parent, but is often overused in our culture.  We will discuss some alternatives later.

Because of our own inability to deal with a child or because of problems in our own lives, we may feel compelled to deal out unconditional negative strokes to our children. Sarcasm, critical remarks about a child’s character (“You are a bad child.”) or the use of undeserved negative strokes of any kind is abuse.  This is devastating to the self-esteem of the child who receives it.  Since the negative stroke is in no way related to the child’s behavior, the message to the child is “you are not worthwhile no matter what you do.”  Many parents will recognize this kind of stroke from their own childhood, and should eliminate it from their own parenting. Unlike punishment, which may be unavoidable, abuse is never appropriate.

Knowing that negative strokes are to be avoided, how can we as parents deal with misbehavior? There are essentially three options we have open to us in these situations.  

The first option is for a parent to change herself or her attitudes toward her child’s behavior. It is important for parents to realize that their thoughts about how children should behave are based mostly on their own specific experience in a family and in a culture. Sometimes, these expectations are not realistic and behavior that you consider inappropriate may be entirely normal for a child of a given age.  This is why it is important to have some knowledge of developmental psychology. Find out what is normal for children the same age as your own.  For example, if your two year old daughter is constantly saying “no!” is getting into everything and is generally driving you crazy, you may have to give up trying to control her every move through constant punishment and accept this as normal for a child of her age.  This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for her behavior, but it is extremely important to remember that, in most cases, what you are seeing is not deviant nor aimed at you personally.  This is particularly important to keep in mind when dealing with adolescents who have a natural bent toward independence and question all forms of authority.  I have found pediatricians, day-care supervisors, parenting courses and other parents to be helpful sources of information about normal, age-appropriate behavior.

Changing yourself or your attitudes will not always be the right choice and may lead the child to an unrealistic belief that the world will change to meet her demands.  If this is the case, one of the other two options will be more appropriate.  However, examining your own behavior and attitudes is always a good place to start.

The second option involves changing the environment.  To return to the example of the two year old, this approach would involve accepting her curiosity as normal and moving everything breakable or dangerous in the house above the child’s reach.  Eventually she will lose interest in these objects and also learn what she can and can’t touch.  Sometimes children are in classrooms or schools that are not suited to them. This is another situation in which you might like to change the environment.  Again, this may not be the best approach.  In some cases it may be best for her to learn to cope with less than perfect situations and realize that the world will not always accommodate to her.

The final option, the one which parents most frequently turn to, is to try to change the child, usually in the form of punishment.  While this particular response is relatively easy and quick, it is not very effective and has, as we have already seen, many negative side effects.  As an alternative to punishment, there are several ways we can modify behavior.  Let’s look at them.

As a preventative measure, I would suggest that the most important thing a parent can do is to provide a good role model for the child. Behave as you would like the child to behave.  Children learn best by modeling.  If they see violent, negative behavior, that is what they will model. All the parenting skills combined cannot undo bad models.  

It is also important to state limits clearly.  Often children will misbehave just to find out what the limits are, their thinking being, “How far can I go before she will react?”  Limits must also be consistent.  If, for example, it is o.k. to throw toys on one day, but a punishable offence on the next, the child learns that the world is an unsafe and unpredictable place and will probably act out her anxiety in some way that you will find unpleasant.  This is not to say that limits can’t change. When you realize that a limit is unrealistic or unfair, it is time to change it. When dealing with older children, for example, good parents will listen and try to come to some mutual agreement about fair limits.  

The most effective way of changing behavior is through conditional positive strokes or positive reinforcement.  Many children misbehave in order to get attention. The theory behind positive reinforcement is to grant children the attention they desire when they are behaving appropriately and to deny it when they are misbehaving.  In other words, reinforce appropriate behavior, ignore negative behavior.  A former student of mine who taught dance to school-age children told me about a child who was a constant source of disruption in her class,  He would stand in the back row of the class gyrating and making strange sounds.  At first, she would stop the class and admonish him, but this had no effect.  This behavior became more frequent and disruptive as the class progressed.  Finally, at the end of her wits and having turned into a screaming banshee, she decided he had to go.  As a last resort, however, she decided to try positive reinforcement.  She completely ignored him when he acted up in class and paid attention to him only when he was acting appropriately. Amazingly, within about two weeks he was one of the best members of her class.  The secret to her success was a process called shaping.  When we shape a behavior, we begin by reinforcing any small approach to the expected behavior.  In this case, she began by reinforcing him when he was standing still and paying attention.  When the initial task is learned, the child is reinforced for gradual improvements and failure or negative behavior is ignored until the final goal is reached. Thus the child experiences positive strokes for attempting to change rather than experiencing punishment and failure.

Changing a child’s behavior is seldom as easy as was described in the above example.  One of the problems with children who misbehave for attention is that they have learned that the only way they will get attention is to misbehave. Often, a child will decide that a negative stroke is better than no stroke at all. In these cases, the continued negative responses she receives lead to the development of low self-esteem. Furthermore, children with very poor self-esteem sometimes reach the point where negative responses from others take on the role of positive reinforcements.  In other words, the child’s attitude is, “I only feel good when someone is treating me badly.”  Life for these children becomes one attempt after another to get someone to yell at them, hit them or otherwise respond negatively.  Parents, not knowing any other response, deliver negative strokes thinking they are punishing the child when they are, in fact, reinforcing negative behavior and solidifying low self-esteem.

People with poor self-esteem are destructive to themselves and to others. When I worked in a residential treatment center in the early 70’s, we admitted a boy who was the angriest, meanest six-year-old I had ever met.  His favorite pastimes were setting cats on fire and smearing dog feces inside little girl’s mouths.  He was the product of a violent and alcoholic home and his whole life seemed to be dedicated to enraging adults to the point where they would become abusive with him. I decided to implement a plan which consisted of completely ignoring him until he did something positive.  This plan was to be carried out by all staff members at the center.  About five minutes into the plan, he broke a window.  He was ignored and, to his amazement, no one responded. Realizing something was amiss, he found the smallest, most defenseless girl in the center and began pounding her mercilessly in the face. Obviously we had to immediately stop him and find some consequence for his behavior. I’ll never forget the grin on his face as I marched him away to his room. He had won.

There are two factors which contributed to this boy’s behavior.  The first is the need for attention which we have already discussed. Children must feel they can affect the people around them.  If they cannot affect you in a way that results in you giving them positive strokes, they will find out how to produce negative strokes.  The second is the need for power.  Children who feel powerless in their lives will attempt to gain power by acting in ways that are destructive to themselves and to others. How can we as parents ensure that our children have a feeling of power over their lives?  With young children, this can be as simple as letting them pick out their own clothes, or which bedtime story to read.  As they get older, you might let them set their own bedtime and decide which TV shows they want to watch.  Responsible parenting allows you to gradually give a child more and more control over her own life.  Children who know you respect and trust them will respond in kind.  A child who receives your trust will be trustworthy herself.  

Parents sometimes allow children too much power.  Children should not be allowed the freedom to decide to stop brushing their teeth, eat unhealthily, verbally or physically abuse others, miss sleep or participate in dangerous activities.  This is neglect and can result in omnipotent children who have little regard for others and believe life should meet all of their expectations.  The proper balance of autonomy allowed and limits imposed is something we all have struggled with as parents.  Children need power over some aspects of their lives, but they also need to feel safe in the hands of a parent who is in control of herself and the welfare of the child.

I would like to make one last comment about power.  Beware of power struggles. Try to avoid them by planning ahead and seeing what difficulties will arise in situations you face.  Don’t get into battles you can’t win.  Decide what rules and limits are really important.  Be really clear about them and don’t back down. Everything else should be negotiable or flexible, depending on the situation. Although children understand and respect strength in parents, they also place great value on fairness.  It is wise to avoid power struggles but we all eventually find ourselves in these battles which constitute the worst (and sometimes the funniest) memories of our parenting lives.  Try to have a sense of humor.  

Another alternative to punishment is the use of consequences. Consequences can be natural or logical.  A natural consequence is a consequence that occurs directly as a result of a child’s behavior and without the parent’s intervention.  If you go out in the rain without rain gear you will get wet and cold. If you do not eat dinner you get hungry. I do not recommend the following technique but it was an interesting example of learning as a result of natural consequences. When my son was about nine or ten months old, I was trying to teach him to stay away from hot things.  I would point to the stove and say, “Hot!”  He would put his hand on a cold burner and say “Hot!” very pleased with himself.  I used lots of different objects to try and teach this, all to no avail, since nothing was ever really hot. One day I was sitting drinking a cup of coffee and he walked up to me.  I pointed to the coffee and said “Hot!” Before I could stop him he stuck his finger into the coffee, immediately withdrew it and yelled, “HOT!” From that point on he always avoided anything I told him was hot. Again, I do not recommend this procedure, but it does exemplify the principle of natural consequences.

Often behaviors do not have natural consequences, or the consequences are so awful you cannot let a child experience them. For example, you do not teach children about not going in the street by allowing them to be hit by cars.  You can, however, apply logical consequences in these situations.  Logical consequences are consequences which make sense to the child and are linked in some logical way to the behavior.  Spanking, for example, is not logically related to any behavior, nor is being sent to your room without dinner because you swore.  Not getting desert because you did not eat your meal, however, is a logical consequence because the consequence is related to the behavior, eating your meal.  When I was trying to teach my one-year-old son not to go in the street I used logical consequences.  I would hold his hand, walk with him to the curb and say, “No street.”  He would look at me like I was crazy and say “No street.”  I would then let go and if he walked into the street I would pick him up, say “No!” firmly and take him into the house.  He would protest but we would stay inside for a while just to make the point. Going inside is a logical consequence to not behaving safely outside. I repeated this each day, each time moving farther away as he reached the curb, turned around, smiled and said “No street.”  When I felt that he had learned not to go in the street, I let him wander while I sat on the porch and watched.  One day he began to walk toward the corner about a half a block away.  My wife started after him but I said, “Let’s see what happens.”  When he got to the corner he turned his head, smiled, said “No,no,no!” and came back.  Needless to say, he got a lot of positive strokes for that decision.  

In the end, you may have to resort to punishment, but it should be your last option.  If you do resort to punishment, make sure it is being carried out for the child’s good and not yours.  In other words, the punishment should teach the child about limits or consequences and not be just the result of your frustration or anger. Avoid physical punishment.  This is bad modeling and is not necessary. Lastly, it is important to separate the behavior from the child; make sure the child understands that, though you may not like what she is doing, you still love her. Improving a child’s behavior at the expense of her self-esteem is a hollow victory.

It is important to not confuse reinforcement or positive strokes with bribery or natural and logical consequences with threatening. Reinforcement is spontaneous or part of a contract.  For example, we may reinforce a child who has just brought home a great report card or a child may earn a certain amount of money by completing tasks for which she is responsible.  We may spontaneously reinforce a child because she has done something that we have decided is appropriate or more mature than we previously accepted.  For example, a child may begin to baby-sit her younger sister when you go out. These are all things that are good for the child.  On the other hand, bribery is a calculated way to get a child to do something for you, usually after the child has started misbehaving.  For example, a child starts to scream in the store and we say, “Be quiet and I’ll get you a chocolate bar.”  The child learns, “If I misbehave long enough I will eventually get what I want.”  If we are going to reward a child for good behavior, it should be spontaneous or agreed upon before you go in the store. If the child misbehaves, no reward will be forthcoming.  

Threats are not very effective because, like bribes, they are usually made after the negative behavior begins.  In addition, threats are often seen as a challenge by the child, who may think to herself, “Let’s just see if she means this.”  Also, parents often threaten consequences that cannot be carried out, or that hurt the parent more than the child.  If I want to go shopping and tell my toddler that she will be taken home if she misbehaves, I am actually giving her a wonderful way to avoid shopping and setting myself up for a disappointing day or an opportunity to go back on my word.  Before getting into potentially troublesome situations, be really clear with your children what you expect of them and what will happen if they do or do not meet your expectations.  Do not make the child wait too long for positive consequences and if you resort to a negative consequence, it should be clear why this is happening.  

This reminds me of an experience I had with my youngest son. Threats are almost always a bad idea with children.  Threats you can’t carry out are even worse.  It was Halloween and we were going to take the boys to a party at our oldest son’s school after dinner.  We were having shrimp salad and my youngest son refused to eat any. So at first I told him we wouldn’t go until he ate two bites.  He refused.  Now I had really set myself up here in a power struggle I could not win.  We were going no matter what.  So I backed down to one bite. Still no agreement.  So I picked up a shrimp, stuffed it in his mouth, picked him up and loaded him into the car.  At the party he ate candy, bobbed for apples, played games and generally had a great time.  When we came home we put them to bed and he was so exhausted he was sound asleep before I could even kiss him goodnight.  As I leaned over to kiss him, his mouth opened and there on his lower gum was the shrimp.  

Parents ask a lot of questions about discipline.  Instead of thinking of discipline as punishment, it is helpful to think of it as teaching children how to govern their own behavior.  The child who has experienced unconditional love, conditional positive strokes, limits, good models and a minimum of negativity is not going to need to misbehave for attention or to prove her own power.  However, all children (and adults) misbehave.  What is important is our reaction to that behavior.

We said earlier that there were three ways to respond to misbehavior: Change yourself, change the environment or change the child.  All three approaches are appropriate in different situations. It is important to decide which one is best in the particular situation in which you find yourself.  Elizabeth Creary, in her book Beyond Spanking and Spoiling, says that the best way to answer the question, “What should I do?” is to ask yourself another question: “How can the needs of the child and my(our) needs get satisfied in this situation?”  Considering only your own needs produces a child who feels unloved and unseen, while considering only the child’s produces a spoiled child who does not understand how to get along with others.  The goal is to work toward a compromise which will lead to a situation in which both your needs and the child’s needs can be met.  To do this you may have to change yourself or your expectations, change the child’s environment, or you may have to change the child.

Children are not machines–you cannot learn how to “fix” them in courses or books. Although these sources of information are helpful, you cannot apply pat, simple solutions to complex problems. Bruno Bettleheim, in his book, The Good Enough Parent, says the key to being a good enough parent is to first understand why the child is doing what she is doing.  He maintains that, based on the child’s experience and level of understanding, everything a child does makes sense to her at the time.  According to Bettleheim, the first step in dealing with a problem is to understand the child’s perspective.  Why is the child doing what she is doing?  Is she scared?  Is she desperate for attention or power in her life?  Is she just acting like a normal four-year-old?  This approach requires us to listen to children. Although I have not addressed this topic here, it is extremely important and entire books have been written on the subject.  I enthusiastically recommend learning how to listen to your children if you have trouble in this area.  Secondly, he advises us to try and remember what it was like to be a child, to try to imagine what our own responses might have to the situations that cause problems for our children.  

Closely related to this idea is the concept of mirroring.  Mirroring entails recognizing what your child is feeling or thinking and reflecting it back.  This process begins with comforting an unhappy baby, returning her smiles and gazes and engaging in loving conversations with the cooing and babbling infant. Later we can show children that we understand why they are unhappy or angry even though we may not alter our limits or environment to satisfy the child’s desires.  A friend of mine once told me of an experience with her two-year-old granddaughter who was staying with her while her mother was delivering her second child. At one point during the week the toddler picked up a doll and started banging its head against the table while repeating over and over, “No want baby!”  My friend said, “I know you are angry and it is ok to be angry about having to share mommy, but it is not ok to hit the baby. Mommy and Grandma will love you just as much now as we did before the baby came.”  This process of mirroring tells the child her feelings and perceptions are valid even if her behavior is not acceptable.  It tells the child she matters and is worthy of existence in this world.  Mirroring helps to form a sense of self which will help a child to make healthy decisions later in life.

If we are able to do these two things, understand the child’s motives and feel what the child feels, we will most likely make the right decisions. Trust in your own intuition and your ability to become better at this very difficult task of childrearing. Integrate the information you feel is helpful with what you know in your heart is right for you and your child. Remember that, no matter what else happens, if your child leaves childhood knowing you love her and will always love her and has been given the tools necessary to negotiate the perils of life, you have been successful.  She will accept herself, will be able to love others and pass this gift to her own children.

White Seal Speaks

On March 12, 1862 the steamship Brother Jonathan arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada from San Francisco.  It brought with it a most unwelcome guest, Smallpox.  When the disease began to appear in the locals, the government moved to inoculate as many people as possible. As many white people as possible, that is.  When native people camping near Victoria became ill, they were forced to leave and return to their villages.  There was no attempt to vaccinate them.  Between April and December of 1862, half of the indigenous population between Victoria and Alaska perished.  Later, more died.

Around the same time, the government started sending boats into the inlets where native villages lay.  They would tell the inhabitants that they had one hour to get their children ready to leave for residential schools run by the Catholic and Anglican churches. There the children lost their families, their names, their language, their culture, their religion and in many cases, their innocence and virginity.  All of this in the name of “civilizing the Indians” and bringing them to Jesus.  After my wife read this she said, “They didn’t lose it. It was stolen.”  A moving story was told to me by a man whose grandmother experienced this travesty.  When I said, “You should write down her stories,” he replied, “She says you have stolen everything else from us, you can’t steal our stories too.”

This history, and many more injustices, were on my mind when I first arrived at the Red Lion Inn in Victoria on a crisp fall morning to begin teaching a basic counseling skills course to some of the Salish people of Vancouver Island. Never in my life have I met a kinder, more welcoming group of students.  After all we had done to them, they still made me feel welcome.

The tribes, or bands, had horrible social issues.  Drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, sexual abuse and suicide were rampant. Each band had a social worker who had to deal with these problems.  Often the workers had no training and few resources and were overwhelmed and desperate for help.  From this need sprang the Camosun College Native Band Social Worker program.  I was chosen to teach several of the courses, beginning with Basic Counseling Skills, a week long all day program of instruction.

I remember unloading my station wagon that was packed with boxes of reprints and then carefully reviewing my presentation schedule complete with exercises and role plays before arriving at the classroom promptly at 9:00am.  No one was there.  Around 9:30 people began to straggle in and at 10 I began.  At lunchtime I carried all my boxes back to the car unopened and returned them to the college.  It was clear to me this was nothing like any group I had ever taught before.  What did I have to offer these people?  The problems were horrendous and I was lost as to how to approach the topic in a way that made sense.  I should have known then that I would learn much more from them than they would learn from me.  In retrospect, teaching in that program was one of the highlights of my life.

The indigenous people of Canada like to be referred to as First Nations people and they do have their own nations.  Nothing was more moving than watching some of my former students graduating from University with degrees in social work wearing the beautiful beaded and buttoned capes of their people.  While other students were introduced by their name only, the names of First Nation students were followed by phases like, “From the Salish Nation” or “From the Haida Nation.”  It seems to me this communicates that, “Yes we are part of Canada but we are our own people.”  This, in spite of all we have done to try to destroy that identity.

My first lesson was about the First Nations concept of time.  At the end of the day I asked if we could start on time the next day.  

“What time?” one student asked.  

I said, “How about 9:30?”  

He said, “9:30 white man time or Indian time?”  

“What is the difference?” I asked curiously.  

“White man time, 9:30.  Indian time, see you for lunch.”

Everybody laughed and we decided that 10:00 white man time would suffice. One wonderful elderly lady said, “Yeah we got to go to the Bingo tonight so we can’t get up too early.” Everybody laughed again and then let me in on that well known First Nations disorder, Bingo Addiction.

The older lady then said, “Larry, you hear about the two Indian boys lost in the woods?” “Nope,” I replied. One says, “We are lost, do you think we should pray?” The other says, “Sure but I never been to church.” The first one says, “I have lots of times and I know what they say.” “OK then, pray.” The first one screws up his face and in the loudest voice says, “Under the B!”

For my first exercise I chose reflective listening, a style of listening that shows the other person that you hear them, understand them and have empathy.  My first attempt went something like this:

Ernie (a chief):  “You know about 5 years ago I quit drinkin’.  Me and my friend Paul was out on my fishin’ boat one night and we drunk up a storm.  Then next day I woke up and Paul was gone. Overboard in the night.  I still cry about it.”

Frankie (a wonderful young man who I will talk about later): “Ernie it sounds like you come here with a heavy heart.”

Never in all my years of teaching counseling skills had I seen people so naturally listen and speak from the heart.  I had nothing to teach them about this.

After a long discussion about what was troubling them most, I realized they were frustrated by their inability to stand up to the white bureaucrats who controlled their lives.  Assertiveness and outspokenness are not valued traits in their culture but are essential when dealing with government agencies and what they would call “European culture.”  They found the course useful and I will never forget the stories they shared with me as I learned who they were and what they needed from me.  Their kindness to and tolerance of me, a representative of a race of people who had treated them so badly and knew so little of their culture moved me deeply.  They invited me back to teach Child Development, the next course.  

One of the funniest stories was told by a woman from a village so remote you had to fly in or travel by boat to get there.  She said as the plane flew in it would pass over hot springs frequented by “white hippies” bathing nude in the pools. The people of her band called them the white seals and it was a local custom to report on any white seal sightings after landing.  Hence the title of this piece.

One of the reasons direct communication and assertive behavior was difficult was that much of the communication between them was indirect or spoken in metaphor.  Assertiveness, confrontation and in some cases even eye contact were considered rude.  This left them vulnerable to being steamrolled by the white authorities and was often confusing to a culture as direct as ours.  One of the best examples of this was the avoidance of eye contact as a sign of respect. Many of my students remembered being beaten because they would not look a nun or a teacher in the eyes for fear of appearing disrespectful.

Once we had to make an important decision.  We sat in a circle and I laid out the problem.  One of the students started by telling a story about his sister.  The next described a fishing trip. This went on as each told a story.  I became more and more confused and frustrated and was about to demand that we deal with the issue at hand when Chief Josephine said, “Well, I guess we have arrived at a decision.”

Stunned, I asked, “When did that happen and what was the decision?”  They all laughed and one of them said playfully, “Oh, you white people are so stupid.”

Somewhere in all that metaphor was a discussion and decision about the topic but I’ll be damned if I had any idea what it was.  

On another occasion I was teaching a course at the College and there was one First Nations student in the course.  I assigned a paper that required the students to describe how their parents had disciplined them as children and the effect it had on them.  The lone Salish student came to me and told me she couldn’t do the paper because she was not raised like that.  She explained that if a child misbehaved some adult or elder would take them aside and tell them a story, most likely with that pesky trickster Raven at the center.  It was up to the child to realize the meaning of the story and apply the moral to his or her own behavior.  So she wrote a beautiful paper relating stories she was told and how her behavior changed in response to the stories.

At the end of one course I taught, the students asked me when I would have their papers finished and grades submitted.  I said, “Well, you know, I have to go fishin’ with my brother up in Uclulet and then I have to go huntin’ with my dad. Also, my cousin wants me to help him clear some pasture….”

Amid howls of laughter, one of them said, “You really understand us don’t you?” I hoped I did.

Those courses and the education I received from those people prepared me for one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. After I had taught the courses, I received a phone call from one of the First Nations employees at the College.  She had relatives in the course and said to me, “Larry, my sister’s son is in terrible trouble and I know you understand our people. Could you help him?”

I agreed and soon met with the boy.  He was about 17 and what transpired between us is confidential but let me tell you he was in about as much trouble as you could imagine.  I can also say that my attempts to help him failed miserably. The rest of the story I can tell because it appeared in the local newspaper.  

At some point he got loaded up on drugs and alcohol and robbed a convenience store at a gas station.  He beat the attendant so badly he was in hospital for weeks.  After his arrest it looked as though he was on his way to adult prison. Soon after this happened I received a call from the chief of his mother’s tribe who asked me if I would write a letter to the judge pleading with him not to send the boy to prison but rather to turn him over the elders of the tribe.  The judge agreed.

One of the issues he faced was the fact that his father was white and his mother was First Nations.  As a child he was beaten by the white kids for being First Nations and beaten by the First Nations kids for being white.  So this action by the elders solidified his identity as a First Nations person.  They told him, “You are one of us.”  

The boy was taken into the tribe and they began teaching him the old religion and the respect for nature and life in general that were so central to the culture. Then they placed him on a rural trap line for the winter where he had to practice the skills they had taught him and to survive on his own, completely sober.  At the end of this experience they held a Potlatch, a ceremony in the long house or big house in which gifts are given by the host to others in the tribe.  These were outlawed by the early white government as part of a heathen culture and only recently have been allowed as part of First Nations heritage.  Really, what good capitalist gives away what he owns to his neighbors?

In this case, however, the recipient of the gifts was the young man beaten by my client.  Each member of the tribe donated money to cover expenses and lost wages.  Then each member stood up and expressed the shame they felt after hearing of the treatment he had received from one of their own.  Then the young man who had beaten him stood up and expressed his shame and they embraced. The last I heard of this fine young man thirty years ago was that he was helping First Nations youth around the province in a program aimed at preventing drug and alcohol abuse.  

We often talk about shame as a bad thing.  In this case it served to solidify this boy’s identity as a member of the tribe and emphasized the fact that he belonged and was truly a member of a race and culture with values and expectations.  It gave him an identity not as a “half breed,” but as a proud First Nations young man whose behavior reflected on his brothers and sisters in the tribe. That may have been the most important letter I have ever written.  

Another moving experience happened during the first course I taught.  On Wednesday one of the younger members of the group, Frankie, approached me and said, “I like you Larry.  I want to explain to you what it is like to be an Indian.” 

He suggested we go over to the shopping center and buy a couple of hot dogs then he would tell me what he wanted to tell me.  There, in the midst of middle class white people going about their daily business I had one of the most moving experiences of my life.  

He began by saying, “I used to hate myself for being Indian.  Then I hated white people.  Now I don’t hate anybody.”

He talked about his life as a child and the difficulties of growing up First Nations in white culture.  At some point in his adolescence he entered a program that had the purpose of teaching young First Nations boys the old culture and the values that were so central to his people before we showed up.  It transformed him and he became the proud young man he was at that time with a purpose in life based on love and respect and not on hate.  I will be forever grateful for that experience. Sadly, Frankie died young but his memory lives on as an inspiration to those who want to live a purposeful life.  

At the end of that first week, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and aware that somehow these people had changed me.  But I was wondering if I had achieved anything of substance when Chief Ernie walked up to me, grabbed my hand and said, “Thank you Larry.  I think what you have taught me will really help me help my people.”  I only hoped the same was true for me.  

 One last thought

Anthony Sutich, along with Abraham Maslow, founded the Transpersonal Psychology movement.  While in graduate school training to become a psychotherapist, he was diagnosed with an arthritic condition so severe he was given the choice to spend the rest of his life either sitting or lying down as his joints were well into the process of becoming completely immobile.  He chose to lie down.  I met him at a conference in the early 70s and you would sit behind him and he would talk to you through his frozen jaw while looking at you in a mirror mounted to the side of his gurney.  He worked as a therapist and helped many people, probably as much by inspiration as by psychotherapy.   

Later in life he decided to return to school and finish his Ph.D.  He finished the work but became very sick and was not present when his committee met for the last time and granted him his degree.  That night the chair of the committee had a dream in which Anthony came to his bedside walking.  “Anthony, you’re walking” he said in the Dream.  “Yes,” Anthony replied.  “I have died but I want to know if I passed the final review of my thesis.“  "Yes Dr. Sutich,” replied the chair.  "Good and goodbye” answered Anthony.  The chair was then awakened by the phone.  It was Anthony’s wife saying, “Anthony has just died.”

Whenever I am having a bad day or the world is not behaving in the way I want it to (this seems to happen a lot) or I feel frustrated, angry or hard done by I think about Anthony Sutich who gave so much to so many people and will be remembered for his kindness, indomitable spirit and for accomplishing so much in spite of probably having a lot of bad days.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN DEFCON

Close, but not as strong. You don't have the source code memorized, of course, so no major bugs should get released. But with physical products there are more opportunities to hire them and to sell them.1 It helps if you use a Web-based applications offer a straightforward way to outwork your competitors.2 At a minimum, if you were hired at some big company, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a good hacker, especially when you first start angel investing.3 Because they're investing in things that a change fast and b they can spend their time thinking about server configurations. Actually what it says is that circuit densities will double every 18 months. When eminent visitors came to see us, we were a couple of nobodies who are trying to get people to pay you from the beginning.4 It's an exciting place.

For the angel to have someone to make the medicine go down. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what we mean by it is changing. I wanted. And this, as you can, and your competitors can, you tend to feel rich.5 As a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods.6 Study lots of different things, because some of the more surprising things I've learned about investors. What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity.7

And since I made much more money from it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity. We're impatient. And so all over the place. If a company is doing well, investors will want founders to turn down most acquisition offers. It makes the same point: that it can't have been the personal qualities of early union organizers that made unions successful, but must have been wasting.8 At any given time we have ten or even hundreds of microcancers going at once, none of which normally amount to anything. I like about this idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it.9 Because VCs like publicity. Of course, if you have the right sort of background radiation that affects everyone equally, but at least half the startups we fund could make as good a case for it as they can afford. Joe Kraus's idea that you should be smarter. There is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities.

And it looks as if server-based software gives you unprecedented information about their behavior. In practice a group of 10 managers to work together.10 But because he doesn't understand the risks, he tends to magnify them. Increase taxes, and willingness to take risks. You only take one shower in the morning.11 I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.12 I remember when computers were, for me at least, how I write one. We're starting to move from social lies to real lies. A lot of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. Many published essays peter out in the countryside.

For Web-based software, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect. It's not so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a Swedish or a Japanese company.13 One is that this is a valid approach. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. But an illusion it was. Once I was forced into it because I was a kid I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with them. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. If you try this trick, you'll probably buy a Japanese one. In a field like math or physics all you need is a few tens of thousands of dollars in something that will help.

Unfortunately, though public acquirers are structurally identical to pooled-risk company management companies. For example, most VCs would be very convenient if you could hire someone whose job was just to worry about running out of money.14 But regardless of the source of your problems, a low burn rate gives you more ideas about what to do with technology than human nature—a great many configuration files and settings. That's something Yahoo did understand. So I'd advise you to be skeptical about claims of experience and connections.15 So my guess is that they drift just the right amount.16 Plus he introduced us to one of their fellow students was on the line.17

But there is something afoot. Even when the startup launches, there have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. The thin end of the spectrum. Software companies, at least not in the sense that their growth is due mostly to some external wave they're riding, so to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask is this how I want to be as a startup. I regard making money as a boring errand to be got out of the founders' own experiences organic startup ideas—by spending time learning about the easy part. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work in offices now: you can't show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory, so you don't need to write. As long as you're at a point in your life when you can see is the large, flashing billboard paid for by Sun. This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.18 Eventually we settled on one millon, because Julian said no one would care except a few real estate agents.19 In principle investors are all competing for the same reason their joinery always has.20

But I wouldn't bet on it. But if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice, because the structure of VC deals prevents early acquisitions.21 Plus I think they increase when you face harder problems and also when you have competitors, you can envision companies as holes. To developers, the most common form of discussion was the disputation. We can stop there, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads.22 Which will make you think What did I do before x?23 Most investors, especially VCs, are not like founders. The most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is, and how much is because big companies made them that way, who can argue with you except yourself. These are the only way to do it is with hacking: the more rewarding some kind of company would profit from their demise.24 For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me.

Notes

In the early adopters you evolve the idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make the hiring point more strongly.

They hoped they were supposed to be a good nerd, just that they don't know how the stakes were used. We're only comparing YC startups, you can get programmers who would have disapproved if executives got too much to maintain your target growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a different idea of happiness from many older societies.

The revenue estimate is based on revenues of 1. There are lots of others followed. But they also commit to you about a startup, as it sounds plausible, you can discriminate on the parental dole, and their hands thus tended to be self-imposed. I realize I'm going to use thresholds proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where w is will and d discipline.

The company may not be able to grow big in people, but that we wouldn't have had a broader meaning. By this I used thresholds of. Some translators use calm instead of crawling back repentant at the outset which founders will usually take one of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

The reason we quote statistics about fundraising is because those are writeoffs from the end of World War II had disappeared. 5 million cap, but he got there by another path. That's the difference between us and the super-angels hate to match.

Only founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, but this sort of person who would never come face to face with the amount—maybe not linearly, but he turned them down because investors don't like content is the way they do the startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work have different time quanta. I get the answer is no longer a precondition.

A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that they kill you—when you ad lib you end up with an online service. 56 million. Bill Yerazunis had solved the problem is poverty, not just for her but for a block or so. In technology, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver.

That would be in that. The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich from a mediocre VC. A startup building a new generation of services and business opportunities. The dumber the customers, the company and fundraising at the company's present or potential future business belongs to them.

Now many tech companies don't. If it's 90%, you'd ultimately be a good product. Earlier versions used a recent Business Week article mentioning del. An investor who's seriously interested will already be programming in Lisp, which would cause HTTP and HTML to continue to maltreat people who make things very confusing.

Keep heat low. The reason not to like to fight. The word boss is derived from the end of World War II to the inane questions of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. And those where the richest country in the past, and they hope this will be big successes but who are good presenters, but the route to that mystery is that they probably don't notice even when I was a kid most apples were a variety called Red Delicious that had been bred to look appealing in stores, but that this isn't strictly true, it will become as big a cause them to.

Copyright owners tend to work in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

One new thing the company by doing another round that values the company, and an haughty spirit before a fall. But I think that's because delicious/popular. The reason you don't have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take another startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write has a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say how justified this worry is. Even the cheap kinds of content.

To a kid and as an adult. A scientist isn't committed to rejecting it. What if a company with rapid, genuine growth is genuine. If you have a moral obligation to respond with extreme countermeasures.

I couldn't convince Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this talk, so you'd have to assume it's bad.

If they were going to need common sense when intepreting it. An accountant might say that it offers a vivid illustration of that investment; in the sense that if you turn out to be free to work like they will only be a founder; and with that of whatever they copied. I'm not saying that if you hadn't written about them. Though we're happy to provide this service, and suddenly they need.

I replace the url with that additional constraint, you now get to be good. The VCs recapitalize the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to.

Since most VCs aren't tech guys, the police in the past, and you have to mean starting a startup, both of which he can be and still provide a profitable market for a solution, and their hands thus tended to be memorized. Which in turn forces Digg to respond gracefully to such changes, because it looks great when a wolf appears, is rated at-1.

Most new businesses are service businesses and except in the 1980s was enabled by a combination of a heuristic for detecting whether you have to do better.

Again, hard work. Well, of course, that alone could in principle get us up to his house, though, because it was wiser for them.

I wonder if they'd like it if you get nothing. The most important factor in the world, and stir. Microsoft itself didn't raise outside money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores.

Y Combinator certainly never asks what classes you took in college. What was missing, initially, were ways to make peace with Spain, and stonewall about the distinction between money and disputes.

Aristotle's contribution? Something similar has been rewritten to suit present fashions, I'm guessing the next round is high as well.

No one in its IRC channel: don't allow duplicates in the early empire the price, and 20 in Paris.

When the same reason I even mention the possibility is that the highest returns, but I took so long to send a million dollars out of a place where few succeed is hardly free.

[ravimyneni]

Reasons why we must get rid of IIT-JEE

The entrance process is such that IITs produce one-dimensional graduates who may not even be interested in the subjects they gave many years of their life to.

We should get rid of the IIT-JEE. Given the iconic status of the IITs and the resulting craze for its famed entrance exam in India, this statement may come across almost as blasphemy.

But IITs are scientific institutions, and the tradition of science is to hold nothing sacred and examine everything through the less of evidence.

Radical as it may sound, this sentiment has been gaining ground of late. The HRD ministry mooted a proposal to radically reform the IIT-JEE by even dismantling the JEE-Advanced, the flagship exam for the IITs. That proposal, however, was shot down by the IIT council a couple of months back. This rigidity to re-examine, introspect and improve oneself is alarming, and that is indeed the root cause of many of the flaws of this celebrated exam.

 The test has been gamed by coaching centers

When a high-stakes exam, watched closely by millions of people, is not redesigned for years, the stakeholders manage to decipher it completely.

 Coaching centers have figured out the typical problems given in the exam, built a library of similar problems, and approaches to solving them.

Lakhs of students take the IIT-JEE every year. It is the gateway to the dream destination for those students, the source of the ultimate bragging right for millions of their parents, and the fountain of unlimited riches for the coaching centers. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that the exam is watched closely and patterns of its questions analyzed in great detail.

On top of that, the exam has not seen any radical redesign. Originally a single-phase exam, it was split between JEE-Mains and JEE-Advanced some years ago, but the main focus of the exam — testing high-level problem-solving abilities based on quantitative sums drawn from Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics — has remained the same over the past 30 years or so.

With so many interested parties avidly scrutinizing the broadly unchanged exam for the past few decades, is it really a surprise that the exam no longer remains a test for raw brainpower?

The coaching centers have already figured out the typical problems given in the exam, built a huge library of similar problems, and approaches to solving them. They start drilling those problems and solutions in the students’ head from early years, often from as early as Class 8.

So what was once a test of intelligence (of the quantitative kind, admittedly) has become more of a test of how much money you can spend to access the best coaching centers, and how early you start your single-minded pursuit of this dream (or nightmare?).

 The test has become so difficult so as to render it meaningless

If too many students compete for an exam and start preparing from an early age, it breeds an arms race. The same level of questions that separated students of different abilities ten years ago will cease to do so now — because everyone is simply more prepared to handle those questions. The questions need to become increasingly difficult to differentiate between students.

This is compounded by the fact that IIT-JEE tests skills in a narrow area — quantitative problem-solving in Physics, Chemistry, and Math. It is possible for a student to attain a high level of mastery in a narrow area. With so many students attaining near-perfect competence in one narrow domain, the test must, over the years, become much, much more difficult to retain its ability to select — which is exactly what happened over the years.

  If too many students compete for an exam and start preparing from an early age, it breeds an arms race.

Instead, if the test evaluated wider (and possibly unrelated) skill sets — for example, quantitative skills, reading skills, and social skills — it would have been difficult for students to master all of those to a certain level of perfection; and differentiation would have been possible through even a moderately challenging test.

 It breeds unidimensional professionals

As a result of focusing so narrowly during the formative years of learning, millions of students are ignoring important skills needed for success at the workplace and in life.

In IIT-factories of Kota, and in similar cram-schools all over India, students are learning Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics at the exclusion of all other skills necessary for success.

In future, they are often handicapped by an inability to read, write or speak at a level needed for professional success. They often lack nuanced social and historical awareness needed to become vibrant members of the society. Working solo with their textbooks for many years, they often underappreciate the value of teamwork and collaboration.

The comeuppance sometimes comes mid-career, when these unidimensional professionals cannot progress to managerial levels.

Sometimes, the day of reckoning comes sooner, as they get rejected in numerous interviews right at the beginning of their career due to the lack of ability to express themselves.

Sure, one can argue that many IITians become successful corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. However, that’s a tiny fraction of the graduates IITs churn out — most remain anonymous cubicle-dwellers in mid-level positions.

 Students training for just one exam from early in life lack social and historical awareness needed to become vibrant members of the society.

Given that the IITs pretty much get to choose the best from lakhs of school-leaving students, should we, as a nation, be happy with only a few success stories? Shouldn’t such ‘chosen elites’ have left a much stronger imprint, both in scientific domain and elsewhere?

 The difficulty level of IIT-JEE makes studying in IIT redundant

To stay ahead of the coaching centers and to be able to differentiate between intensely prepared students, IIT-JEE now has to necessarily pose notoriously difficult sums to the aspirants. This simply meant that the level of sums posed has become more advanced, rather more inventive or creative.

While the exam theoretically stays within the prescribed syllabus, most of the problems posed in IIT-JEE are practically college-level sums. Even when I studied for IIT-JEE around 25 years back, the recommended Physics books for preparation were Fundamentals of Physics by Resnick and Halliday, and Problems in General Physics by I E Irodov: both college-level calculus-based physics books. I presume things have gotten only more difficult since then.

Now the question is: what is the value of a college education if you are expected to study a lot of college-level stuff just to get there?

 A college entrance exam should test interest

IIT-JEE fails miserably here. College admission processes in most advanced countries, notably in the US, check for the aspirant’s demonstrated an interest in the college as well as the intended major. IIT-JEE, however, does nothing of that sort.

Lakhs of students, through unthinking herd mindset, pursue a dream that’s not really theirs. Many, after reaching their dream place, become disenchanted and end up switching careers to pursue MBA. For some, the frustration leads to drug abuse. Some end up committing suicide. Even students who plod on and finish their degrees do not end up doing anything remotely related what they studied in IIT.

Such mismatches happen because unlike most other college admission processes, IIT-JEE restricts itself to a written exam, without any test of interest. Everyone knows that people are most productive when he or she works on areas that he or she are interested in. By not checking for this obvious area, IIT-JEE indirectly helps breed a discontent workforce.

 For IITs, IIT-JEE is the hammer, and everything looks like a nail

I was delighted when a few IITs decided to offer a BS in Economics a few years back. Our society’s economic understanding is quite limited, which pulls us down. People from all strata of society fall for Ponzi schemes, unable to understand the relationship between risk and return. Most people do not appreciate the importance of copyrights and patents, hindering innovation and progress. In addition, common masses have a fetish for free goods that the government doles out, not knowing that there is no free lunch.

I thought an economics course at the IITs could go a long way to make our society more economically literate. However, that hope was soon belied, because I saw the selection process for this course is the same old IIT-JEE.

Yes — you heard it right, one has to master quantitative Physics, Chemistry and Math to be eligible to study economics, a discipline requiring vastly different skill sets.

 Shouldn’t such ‘elites’ have left a much stronger imprint, both in the scientific domain and elsewhere?

Not only that, those Economics graduates need to study all the common first-year engineering courses, including electrical circuits and mechanics of deformable bodies! Nothing can be more ill-conceived than that.

Solution: A standardized test

So, if IIT-JEE has outlived its utility, what could be the way forward? A clear solution is a standardized, skill-oriented exam like SAT or ACT. Almost all US universities accept SAT or ACT scores as one of their key admission criteria. Such a system will obviate the need for multiple selection processes and entrance examinations in India, reducing student burden significantly.

As such exams test a wide range of skills (reading, critical thinking, analysis of science and social sciences, problem-solving, writing), it will also make our learning more skill-oriented.

We may argue that the cost of SAT is prohibitive for most Indians. If that is so, we can develop our own home-grown version. Skeptics may also reason that a standardized test like that does not test aptitude in subjects like Physics or Chemistry, so how will an elite engineering institute like IIT select students through such an exam?

Well, top-ranked scientific institutions of the world, including MIT and Caltech, use precisely this test to admit their students.

A person who is widely read can communicate well through writing and can critically evaluate issues can become more successful as an engineer or scientist as opposed to one who has only a narrow mastery over a small range of subjects.

We Indians take our exams very seriously. The only way to get the nation to focus on skill building is to incorporate it into the exam system.

If we are really serious about addressing our skill-shortage, if we want our future generations to cope with the rapidly changing world, we must reform our exam system radically, and urgently.

[academia-krp]

Please welcome our new [student]. [He] goes by the name [Smokestack] also known as [Liao Renshu]. He has an [emitter-type] quirk called [typhokinesis]. He has been assigned to the [ventus] dormitory in [student room 102]. He has been assigned to [Sixth Sense’s] squad.

You have chosen wisely.

Quirk:

Quirk: smoke manipulation (typhokinesis) / emitter-type ; the ability to shape and manipulate smoke.

Sub-Abilities:

—  {

SMOKE GENERATION } : the ability to produce smoke. renshu himself can generate smoke by breathing it out through his mouth.

—  { SMOKE MIMICRY } : renshu is able to transform his entire body into smoke. in this form, he has near intangibility; so long as the obstacle isn’t air-proofed and has an opening, no matter how small, he can pass through it. he’s also able to turn parts of his body into smoke (ex. an arm, legs, elbow, etc).

Weaknesses:

—  he is only able to transform completely into smoke form for seven seconds, though if it’s just one body part he’s able to do it longer, approximately seventeen seconds.

—  the amount of smoke he can generate correlates to how long he can breathe it out in one exhale.

—  he needs to recharge after he produces smoke. the duration of it, though, depends on how much smoke he breathes out. if it’s a large amount, he needs at least one or two minutes to recharge. if it’s only a medium or small amount, thirty seconds to one minute is enough.

Biography:

Background:

act i.   his home life is simple; it has always been him, his mother, and his grandfather. he doesn’t remember much of a “father” in his childhood (or in his life in general, really) and he never did question why; the look of sadness on his mother’s face and the anger that passed his grandfather’s when he first mentioned the word was burned into his mind. so, if asked, he will say “it’s always just been me, my mom, and my grandpa” with a smile that conveys more than what was said. other than that, his life was relatively peaceful. his mother is kind, caring; his grandfather wise, attentive. he is content.

he is ten when he first learns of the destruction a villain can cause. school is in session, and he sits in class, stares out the window as his teacher drones on about math formulas and such. he feels a rumbling of sorts, looks down to see his pencil shifting around with the vibrations, looks around as his classmates’ hushed whispers grow louder and louder in panic. feels himself being flung across the room as an explosion reverberates throughout the school. he doesn’t remember how he manages to get out of the school (he figures his quirk had a hand in it), but he is outside and he watches as half his school is engulfed in flames, screams, cries, and the sweltering heat of the fire surrounding him.

he is ushered towards an ambulance, his broken arm and multiple cuts and bruises taking precedence over gawking at the school. it doesn’t take long for his mother and grandfather to come; they run up to him as he sits at the back of the ambulance and hug him tightly, minding his broken arm. his mother is crying, sobbing “i could’ve lost you, oh my god” right next to his ear. he hugs her back with his one good arm, tries to soothe her, but his words are stuck in his throat, eyes still glued to his school burning right in front of him, to the emergency services bringing people out of the building, half of them covered with white sheets. he knows why.

a year later, his mother joins the hero program.

act ii.  as his mother grows more and more active and famous in her heroism, renshu sees her less and less at home. he sees her on television more than he sees her in person, in fact. he doesn’t tell anyone that it hurts him more than he’d like it to. instead, he busies himself by asking his grandfather to train him in wushu, by burying himself in his studies, by joining clubs and activities he only somewhat cares about. it works, for a while.

he is thirteen and walking back from school when he sees a commotion going on. he approaches the crowd, sees that they’re currently crowding around the window front of an electronics store, where multiple televisions are on display. he manages to push his way to the front and, to his surprise, all of the televisions are currently on the news channel, a live airing of a battle between his mother and a villain on display. he watches intently, anxiety gripping his heart tighter and tighter with every blow they trade with one another. the villain does something, then, but he doesn’t know what, a blast causing the camera to short circuit. it’s a long and tense few seconds, but the camera feed is back on and the first thing he sees is his mother. his mother, lying on the ground, unmoving, blood pooling around her, a gaping wound on her back.

ah, so this is what grief is like, he thinks as he screams.

act iii.   he copes, somehow. he goes back to school after a few days, his friends and schoolmates saying “i’m sorry for your loss, she was a great hero”, his teachers whispering “poor boy, to lose his mother at such a young age”, everyone’s eyes on him at all times, either out of pity or interest. he ignores the stares and smiles politely, thanks the people who give condolences, tells the teachers that he’s fine whenever asked, he always is. he works hard in school, in training, in keeping up this pretense of being “fine” even though he feels empty and tired, is still completely and absolutely grieving behind his polite smiles.

it’s fine, he thinks, he’ll push through it. it’s all to continue the hero legacy given to him by his mother, after all.

Personality:

polite smiles, amiable words, small, subtle gestures; those are the words people would use to describe renshu at first impression. they are not wrong; it is what he puts up whenever he meets new people, after all, and being friendly has never been a crime. he is also humorous and sarcastic, unable to help the sharp quips leaving his mouth every now and then, though sometimes they can be a little too sharp. he always apologize whenever he realizes he’s gone too far, however, and tries to cheer them up with his breezy playfulness.

affable as he is, though, there is a certain distance to him that people note once they’ve spent some time with him. he does not actively push people away, but neither does he let them come too close, instead keeping everyone at arm’s length. he has been called enigmatic due to this, no one really knowing how renshu is beneath that cordial and playful front. he’d rather keep it that way.

[annabookchase]

Study Date (percabeth fluff)

Imagine your OTP setting up a study date together. Person A thinks they’re actually going to study while Person B has the only intention of making out with Person A.

Thank you @lemi10125!!

Percy shrugs his hoodie on, walking out the door of Goode High. He’s just gotten out of class, but the biting chill and grey sky dampers any feeling of freedom he might have felt otherwise. It’s not all bad, though; he’s on his way to meet Annabeth at the library. He’d gotten the text in the middle of class:

A: Will you meet me at the library right after school? I have a lot of work and I’d like your help.

Of course, Percy said yes. If he was being honest, he felt pretty swamped with his classes, too. Fall has never been his favorite season, with school starting. This year, it’s even worse with all of the responsibilities he has as a senior. Basically, he has no time.

When he walks into the library, he knows right where to go. He and Annabeth had been meeting here since school started this year. Since they were seniors and therefore had the freedom to leave school campus on their breaks, they took advantage of the fact that the old stone library was a short walk from both schools. Over the past few months, they found many secluded spots, but none as good as the one he finds Annabeth at now.

She’s nestled in the corner between the Ancient Greek Classics and the old catalog files; two places high school students collectively ignore. Annabeth was drawn to it because she heard they had some old book that the Athena cabin doesn’t, but she quickly realized it’s more hidden appeal. It even has an old couch just big enough for the two teenagers.

As Percy sets his bag down on the floor next to said couch, Annabeth looks up from her laptop. “Hi,” she says, leaning her head up into the greeting kiss Percy offers. “Hello,” he says chirpily. He plops himself down next to Annabeth, leaning down to pull out a math book. “I don’t know about you, but I have way too much homework, so-”

“Percy.” Annabeth’s tone of voice is precise and concentrated, and when he turns to see her expression, Percy realizes that this impromptu study date isn’t going to contain much studying. “Oh,” he says, swallowing thickly. “Got it. Bad day?”

Annabeth laughs. “More like bad week. Plus…” she trails off, maneuvering a hand to rest on her boyfriend’s thigh. “I’ve missed you.”

“I guess it has been almost a week since we’ve really had time together, but- oh.” Annabeth gives him that look and crawls into his lap, effectively short-circuiting his brain. Percy feels a tingle rush through him, specifically to the bottom of his belly.

He shakes himself out of his stupor and places his hands firmly onto Annabeth’s hips. She catches his lips in hers and he complies, tugging on her bottom lip with his teeth. He feels them relax into each other, going with the easy and familiar rhythm.

Expectedly, this becomes not enough. Percy’s hands have moved from her hips to just under the hem of her shirt. Where Annabeth’s weight was comfortably settled on Percy’s thighs, he can feel her pushing down harder, searching for more. As she makes sudden, glorious contact, Percy has to fight back a groan. “Please tell me,” Annabeth mutters against his lips, “that your parents are not home right now.”

Percy tries to think, which is difficult with Annabeth’s soft panting and her hips stuttering against his. “I think…” He struggles to remember. It’s Thursday, meaning his mom is at an afternoon class, and Paul will be staying at the high school until seven for teacher meetings. “I think they’re gone.”

“You think?” Annabeth’s face moves too far away from Percy’s own. “No, I know,” Percy recovers. “I know they’re gone until at least six. Probably later if they meet for dinner somewhere.”

“Thank the gods,” Annabeth exclaims quietly. She glances at her watch. “We have two hours. Let’s go?” Percy nods. Annabeth slides off his lap, quickly gathering her things. When they walk back out into the streets, the cold hits their feverish skin even worse than before. This causes them to snuggle into each other’s spaces. Basically, by the time they get to Percy’s apartment, they’re as riled up as two teenagers can get.

And, for the record, they do manage to get most of their neglected homework done.