#like the way frank has talked about this re: breaking that cycle

[whoslaurapalmer]

post canon extended baudelaire family - how much does baby bea know about her namesake? what stories have she been told about her? from whom does she learned specific details, etc.

(also hope your doctor visit go well!! )

GASP............oh what a question. oh boy oh boy

well. i think babybea knows A Lot about beatrice. she's read asoue, she knows what lemony said about her as Beatrice, as the baudelaire's mother, she knows that she was incredible and a Presence and a real person, and fancy and sophisticated and a mother who could sing and dance and cook and do all kinds of things!! and that. uh. she committed murder. but let's not pretend babybea has an average view of morality here. she has access to a great deal of information that other people haven't, and has been IN vfd, and has also had a great deal of time alone to consider what makes people do things. she knows violet and klaus and sunny contemplated murder, too. so i don't think she's bothered by that.

(would babybea have committed murder? if she had stayed in vfd, yes. i think so. bc if she stayed in vfd -- if lemony hadn't finally decided to meet her -- then babybea would not have broken the cycle. and that's one of the points of babybea's character, that she can do that. but if she hadn't been able to walk out of vfd herself, on purpose, she wouldn't have been able to break the cycle.)

related: i think, despite sharing her name, babybea is 100% successfully her own person -- i think she's had a few moments of like, feeling the weight of the idea of beatrice (when she was in vfd, when she meets lemony for the first time and he has to explain why he didn't meet her sooner, just introducing herself as beatrice baudelaire), but also, that's all she ever really knows, that Idea of beatrice. she never gets to meet beatrice. she's just babybea, trying to exist with her own problems. so i don't think she feels a sense of competition, or like people overwhelmingly compare her to beatrice. (i think i worry about it more than she might!! bc of like, the stress on baticeer in the beatrice letters, which is only to keep the mystery of who it is until the end, and the end of the end. i think she doesn't actually care for bats. they are Average to her. which speaks to more distancing herself from vfd trauma re: dealing with them in my fic, than distancing herself from beatrice.)

i think she loves hearing about her, though!! in the way you love hearing stories about your family, about people in your family, especially learning more about the family members telling you the stories.but when she hears about beatrice is, difficult. when she first meets lemony, i think he's more involved with the sbts crew than the remains of the sugar bowl gen at that point, so she doesn't get brought up a great deal, and lemony's still going through a lot. when they reunite with the baudelaires, it's not that violet and klaus and sunny don't want to talk about their parents, or have an aversion to it, but it's the sense of, sometimes talking about someone you miss is just kind of loaded. in the actual act of saying the words out loud, for yourself to hear, for other people to hear. it might make you upset, it might make other people upset, and you don't know what's going to happen until you say it, because grief is weird like that, even after all that time, sometimes especially when the loss isn't so fresh anymore. so i think the three of them are just. going through complicated emotions.

so i think, not just babybea, but also violet and klaus and sunny, start to not only hear more about beatrice, but talk more about beatrice, when they (plus lemony) meet up with the denouements. there's definitely things about beatrice that frank and ernest and lemony know, that violet and klaus and sunny would not know. (and some unmentionable things. for, private, reasons.......) god i wish i could come up with like. a series of fun memories for them to talk about but regretfully all i have managed to offer is this one minor one, that i still think is cute --

-frank, despite having seen beatrice do this, many times, brings up the near impossibility of whistling with crackers in your mouth. lemony brings up a number of outings where beatrice did just that, and whistled more than just mozart. sunny makes a series of crackers and all of them try whistling while eating the crackers. klaus is moderately successful, beatrice almost spits out her crackers on accident bc, horror of horrors, her mother could not whistle.

violet: mother made it look very easy. lemony: your mother made a great many things look very easy. 

but i also want to bring up!! i feel like babybea knows so much about beatrice -- and rightfully so -- but, in comparison, she honestly knows so little about her own mother, about her own parents. violet, klaus, and sunny knew kit and dewey for a very brief period of time, so her information about them is very limited. so i think a lot of beatrice stories are also stories that involve kit. babybea is very starry-eyed during these. she sees a lot of boundless determination in stories about kit that she also sees in herself.

[tessatechaitea]

Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child

Darkseid pees out of his eyes.

"It's 2020 and Frank Miller is still doing 'Not' jokes" is the only review of this comic book you probably need.

The Joker and Darkseid are cumming in their pants over the engagement in the election cycle. I guess people who want to stop terrible politicians from making the country a living hell for a vast number of the population are simply falling into their trap! Stupid people who want a better world! Can't they see that the only way to defeat The Joker and Darkseid is to disengage from the circus of election cycles and simply live their own life without any concern for others? Doesn't the electorate know the best life to live is the life that leads to Ayn Randian defenses of their own selfish needs? Just shut up and take what they give you, you dumb fucks. I should probably finish reading this story before I continue to jump from conclusion to conclusion about Frank Miller's point. His ultimate point might simply be that the children will save us all! Or that it doesn't matter if the children change the world or not because the adults will all be dead by then so who fucking cares? Supergirl Lara confronts Darkseid by blasting him with her heat vision. He dies multiple times or something but doesn't somehow. He applauds her rage the way bad guys always do and then calmly sits down to tell all of the children a story. He's going to be sensible and rational which means it will be the truth, I think. Obviously if you have any emotional attachment to your beliefs, they're garbage beliefs. Until you can squeeze all of the humanity out of yourself, the things you believe won't hold up in rational debate! So divest yourself of your rage, children! It will only make you more logical and intellectually stronger! But also divest yourself of your joy and your despair and your other emotions I can't think of! There must be more, right? While Darkseid is distracted regaling everybody with his tale of the anti-life equation, Superboy sneaks up behind him and takes over his Omega Effect. He turns it back on Darkseid and Darkseid disintegrates into non-existence. Unless he was transported back in time. I don't really know how his eyeball lasers work. Darkseid doesn't stay dead for long. He returns as the Omega God, as the end of everything, as the final death of everything on Earth.

But maybe later, I guess?

Batwoman beats up some Jokers and shuts down Trump's ability to broadcast to Gotham. It makes Darkseid angry enough to return for some reason. Probably a metaphorical reason. Or an analogical reason. I think maybe my attention span is seriously slipping! And right when I'm getting to the part that's probably going to explain what the fuck is going on in this comic book. Superboy destroys Darkseid by calling him an old fart. Also maybe a little bit by blasting him with a new super power: neutron vision! Darkseid has now had his powers stripped so far back that a human bouncing a rock off of his head makes him bleed. But still he thinks, "I will manipulate these fools with my lofty words!" But then Greta Thunberg clenches her fist at him and Batwoman says, "You have no power here! We're thinking for ourselves now!" And then that's the end somehow. Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child Rating: I can't comprehend what I just read. Maybe the point was that we shouldn't comprehend what other people want us to comprehend? Maybe it was an anti-propaganda story? Maybe it was just terrible writing pretending to be art? It's so hard to tell because it's trying so hard to be complex! Is it's complexity real or a facade? I can't tell! Maybe I should stick to easier things to understand, like James Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Alan Moore's 1300 page novel, Jerusalem, which I finished. Maybe that's Frank Miller's problem. Maybe he just didn't have enough pages to really get to the point he was trying to make. But then if he did have more pages, how many would he waste by simply repeating the same things over and over again? For those of you who haven't read this (or Superman: Year One), he does that a lot. Not in the good way that Tom King and Gertrude Stein repeat themselves. Just in a way that makes you think, "I got it! Superboy is right in Darkseid's brain." Maybe that's a poor example from this comic book because repeating that over and over works to show how painful Superboy's presence in Darkseid's brain is. But I assure you there were many other examples that I can't make excuses for. I just can't be bothered to dig back through the comic book to find them.

[jfpisadearqueerdeer]

Key Entries of James Potter's Journal - Third Year, Part 2

January 1st, 1974

Remus and Peter came over last night for New Years Eve. I tried to invite the girls too, but Sirius didn’t want me inviting Marlene for some reason, and I couldn’t invite Dorcas and Lily if I didn’t invite her. We tried to stay up all night, but with the full moon being in a week, Remus was too exhausted. It seems to be getting worse and worse for him. I would take the pain for him, willingly and without hesitation, we all would, but that would only be a mess. Because each of us would want to take the pain from whoever had it, and it would only be a cycle of pain. If only we could each take a portion of the pain, and not have one of us nearly die.

Pete and Remy are staying here since the train sets off tomorrow. Maybe it would be better if we all just “missed” the train. Then we wouldn’t have to deal with all the drama and exhaustion that comes with school.

- James Potter

January 2nd, 1974

Rakepick just informed us that we need to start Quidditch practice as soon as possible. Which basically means… Tomorrow, and every day after that. I swear, she’s so annoying, she obsesses about Quidditch, but I know for a fact that she isn’t even planning to be a Quidditch player. Ugh. I can’t wait until I’m captain. I’ll always be polite to my team, and I’ll do my best not to overwork them too much.

- James Potter

January 4th, 1974

I don’t even know what to say.

Marlene broke up with Sirius yesterday, saying that she was tired of pretending. I’m sure that has to do with the fact that I may have saw her kissing Dorcas early this morning. But more importantly, Sirius kissed me. He kissed me. It’s all I’ve wanted for months, and it felt… underwhelming. That sounds really bad, it's not that he isn't a really was a good kisser, it just hit me that I don’t love him the way I thought I did. I like, well, I think I like Reggie. And Si likes Remus, which makes so much sense.

But he did say that we could cuddle whenever I wanted. Which means that we will be cuddling all the time. He's the best.

- James Potter

January 31st, 1974

Truth or dare was last night. Dorcs and Marly finally confirmed their relationship. I dared Sirius to sit in Remus’s lap. Thankfully, Reggie wasn’t there, so he couldn’t get back at me. Lily had a good birthday, overall.

- James Potter

February 12th, 1974

Valentines Day is in two days, and I wish I could ask Reggie on a date, but I'm too scared. One, he could say no. Two, he can't be seen with me in public. Or with any of us.

Mandy Moore, an airhead whose a year above us, tried to ask Sirius out. She called him "Siri" in this sickly sweet voice. Only we get to call him Siri. He said no, very politely, and she kept on asking until McG thought there was a fight going on, and escorted her away. Lils says we should kill her.

- James Potter

February 14th, 1974

Mandy Moore keeps glaring daggers at us, and I find myself thinking that Lils' idea is not as extreme as I originally thought.

Marly and Dorcas obviously spent the day together, but the rest of us just hung out in the common room. Even Kingsley and Frank, a fifth year whose two best friends are now dating, hung out with us. Though Kingsley seemed like he regretted it from the second he sat down. No matter, Remus and Lily made conversation with him. Regulus made it, but thankfully, Sirius took mercy on me.

All in all, not as bad as last year.

- James Potter

March 6th, 1974

Today is the day that we put our mandrake leaves in. Lily is going to help us put sticking charms on the leaves and the tops of our mouths. We still won’t talk, but we’ll be able to eat.

- James Potter

April 6th, 1974

We are so stupid. We kept the mandrakes in our mouths the entire month, but we forgot to collect other components to the potion. And with Easter coming up, we’ll be going home, and that means we can’t start over right away!!! Lily says we might have to wait until next year to start over again. UGH!

- James Potter

April 10th, 1974

Sirius's mother sent him a howler about how he had to go home for break, or else. How can she even get away with that? How are people just letting her threaten her son like that? I wish he could just move in with me, and never have to go back to that horrible place.

- James Potter

April 19th, 1974

Sirius hasn't answered any of my letters this week. Re came over yesterday, and apparently he hasn't gotten any letters from Sirius either. Peter came over too, but, he hadn't even written any to Sirius. Pete's not much of a letter writer, so that's not really surprising. What if something happened to him? What if he's hurt? What if it's worse than the other times? What if... what if he's dead?

- James Potter

April 22nd, 1974

We came back to school yesterday. Sirius is alive, but it is definitely worse than the other times.

His ribs looks cracked, and he has bruises all over. He didn't want to go to Pomfrey, but we obviously had to help him somehow. So, right after the feast (we couldn't leave during, obviously), Lils, Pete, and I all snuck to the library, leaving Sirius with Remus, Dorcas, and Marlene. We found a few healing books that we'll take back in a few days.

Anyways, all of us gathered in us boys' dorm, and even Kingsley helped out. Told me that when we get out of school, he's going into the aurors and that stuff like this won't happen with him as part of the ministry. But that isn't the point. We searched through all of the books, and did our best to heal Sirius's wounds.

I just hope we didn't further harm him.

I'm writing mum today to see if she can do something to help out Sirius. She's always been able to fix things. I just wonder if this will be the one thing that she won't be able to fix.

- James Potter

May 2nd, 1974

I got a letter from Mum today. She found a reporter willing to out the Blacks for child abuse. She thinks that if the article even gets written, not even published, the Blacks will scare and not hurt Sirius and Reggie anymore. I hope she's right.

- James Potter

May 7th, 1974

We tried to have a Truth or Dare night for Marlene's birthday, but Remus had the full moon, and nobody was really feeling up to it.

Just got a letter from dad. Apparently, the Blacks found out about Mum's plan, and they're letting Sirius stay with us for half the summer. They're not letting up on Reggie though.

But Dad says that if either of them gets hurt again, he won't hesitate to get his auror friends to arrest the Blacks. He doesn't even care if they try to pay their way out of trouble anymore; he swears that they'll go to Azkaban for good. I hope this works.

- James Potter

May 26th, 1974

Reggie talked to me last night. He says that he's scared.

I wish I could help him. Merlin, it hurts every day that I can't help him. I wish I could he could never go back there. I would take him home with me if I could. But I can't.

Wishing really doesn't get me anywhere.

- James Potter

June 13th, 1974

Truth or Dare last night, of course, being Pete's birthday and all. Reggie fell asleep on the couch, and he looked so sweet that I almost forgot that he had to sneak back to his common room. If only he didn't have to.

- James Potter

June 30th, 1974

Just got home with Sirius. Regulus looked so scared when we left the station. I have to find a way to keep in contact with him. I just have to.

- James Potter

[lottes-ocs]

one chapter (first chapter maybe? def towards the beginning though) of my story. i turned it in for a workshop in class (capped at 12 pages double spaced). a note from my workshop document:

“Since this is going to be a longer work, I will likely expand upon Adam’s personal and inner life towards the beginning, so that the breakdown and the subsequent conversation with Ezra don’t feel as sudden. I will definitely add more documents like the emails, maybe therapist’s notes or text messages, and I might play around with POV in some later chapters, however, my plan is for Adam to be the primary narrator throughout.”

also lmk if i get anything egregiously wrong. i do have ptsd myself, but i also consulted 2 of my schizophrenic friends to make sure i didn’t include any details that would conflict with that and also to get details about antipsychotics correct

tw for suicide mentions, mental illness, unreality, some graphic imagery.

[January 21st, 2019 // 9:00 AM] Since I got discharged from the hospital last month, I’ve been grateful to live alone. Granted, it makes the paranoia worse, but I’m the only one who needs to know how often I’ve tried to talk to shadows or woken up yelling at the void. And I’m the only one who needs to know that I, a 30-year-old man, have been sleeping with a nightlight. But look, when my room is completely dark, mirages of my father and Dr. Wronski appear in the corner with their faces peeled off like in an autopsy and they won’t stop apologizing. I tell them I forgive them and they double down, I offer them solace and they weep with guilt, I articulate my own guilt and they articulate what it feels like to die. Only the nightlight makes them go away. Does that all sound stupid? Sure it does, but it feels a lot less stupid when I just need some sleep after another day trying to balance crushing grief with debilitating mental illness with my normal-person job, teaching abnormal psychology. Classes have been back in session since last week, so for a week, I’ve felt like a fish teaching marine biology. Or something out of Mariana’s trench. Ezra walks into my office, looking just a little too put-together for the workday (as usual), perfectly-tailored pants, perfectly ironed shirt, and perfectly styled curls, and snaps me out of my self-pitying daze by setting down a large stack of papers on his desk next to mine. “The anxiety essays,” he says with an imperious sigh. “Was I this dumb in undergrad?” “Probably not,” I say. “You were a little older than them.” “And I actually had anxiety.” He’s made a point of bringing up his own issues since I got back. I think he’s doing it so I don’t feel embarrassed or isolated, but he does love to talk about himself regardless, and besides, the support of one grad student doesn’t outweigh the nastiness of some of the higher-ups. “Do you have any new bits, Ezra?” I try to change the subject to his comedy (he does standup on the side, and I hear he’s not bad). “Eh, nothing good. You look tired.” He brushes me off with forced nonchalance. “I’ve had plenty of work to catch up on.” There’s actually no reason that he should know why I was gone, it’s my business, but he definitely does. Everyone does. I work in the psych department, so the people here know what it means when someone’s witnessed the death of their mentor and is subsequently out for a month with no further explanation than “illness.” “Have you, uh…” he clicks his tongue in thought. “Did you drink coffee this morning?” I nod with an exasperated smile. “Well, y’know, the Keurig’s in the lounge if you need it. And I’m in 522 most of today if you need help. Catching up on work, or whatever.” He drums casually on the doorframe, shoots me finger-guns, and heads down the hall. I like Ezra. He’s my TA now, but we were both in grad school working towards our doctorates together, up until last spring, when I received mine. We’re the same age, and he’s definitely smarter than me (as he is most people), he just started college late. I think it’s very sweet of him not to be a condescending dick to me (I seem to be a popular target for condescending dicks lately) especially because Ezra can muster up a dangerous amount of condescending dickishness when he feels the need. However, I process absolutely none of what he said. I was listening, I was trying to listen anyway, but my head’s not working right, not right now. I really didn’t get enough sleep. It’s a vicious cycle. The hallucinations and intrusive thoughts keep me up, the lack of sleep worsens the severity of the hallucinations and intrusive thoughts. In fact, since I arrived at work forty-five minutes ago, I have kept a mental tally: Sudden and overwhelming urge to stab myself: 3 instances. Sudden and overwhelming urge to stab Dr. Carlisle for looking at me weird: 2 instances (fuck off, it’s not like I’m going to act on it). Sudden and overwhelming urge to break down crying: 45 instances. Rats underneath my desk: Yeah, I don’t know, I called maintenance and they told me they’re fake, so I guess they’re fake, even though I can see them. Hanging woman in the back corner of my office: Don’t mind her, she’ll be gone within the hour. I’ll be sorry to see her go, though. A sense of unreality is creeping in. I try to keep Dr. Beauchamp’s voice in my head, “if there shouldn’t be any real dead people in the room, there are almost definitely no real dead people in the room.” Well, there was that one time, you asshole. No, fuck it, there are almost definitely no real dead people in the room. I reach into my briefcase, desperate for the pill bottle, because I know my thoughts are going to turn into alphabet soup if I don’t do something soon. I split a Clozaril tablet in half and swallow it hastily. I am not supposed to split it in half, and I am not supposed to take more than one dose in a span of 24 hours, and I have a Ph.D. in psychology, obviously I know I’m lowering the efficacy in the long term and increasing my risk of side effects. But at this point, let me die of agranulocytosis if that’s what I’ve got coming. I’ll be out of a job and wasting eleven years of higher education if this shit doesn’t stop. Maybe that isn’t true. It feels true. Maybe it isn’t.

[January 21st, 2019 // 1:30 PM] FROM: Dr. Raymond Carlisle TO: Dr. Adam Collins SUBJECT: Checking in.

Dr. Collins, I sincerely hope all is well. I received word that you cancelled a lecture today. I need hardly tell you that you just had a month off for Winter Break, and two weeks before that for the beginning of your hospitalization. I hardly think an even further extended reprieve from your work is fair, and if you genuinely do, that’s a conversation we need to have. To be frank, Dr. Herrmann and I feel it is irresponsible to allow someone in your condition to continue to work, in the field of psychology no less. Though I do not at all doubt the competence of our colleagues at the medical center, nor your mental facilities, I feel compelled to let you know that if your psychological state continues to cause issues with your work the department might require you to take a leave of absence. While I hope your treatment plan begins to work to its full effect soon, your own safety and the integrity of this department are top priority.

Best wishes, truly,

Dr. Raymond Carlisle Head Professor, Psychology (555) 555-5555

My hands tremble with anger (and hopefully not tardive dyskinesia) as I type my reply.

FROM: Dr. Adam Collins TO: Dr. Raymond Carlisle SUBJECT: Re: Checking In

Dr. Carlisle, all is as well as it possibly can be needs to be. I don’t respect you as a colleague and I believe your total comfort in your new position, which I need hardly remind you is Dr. Wronski’s old position, is quite frankly borderline disrespectful.  If it’s irresponsible for someone in “my condition” to continue to work then why do you give a shit if I cancel my lectures? Leave me the fuck alone or I’ll mention you by name in my suicide note.   At the moment, it is difficult for me walk by Dr. Wronski’s old office, which I have to do to get to 525 (where that lecture is held). Could I request a change of   I was having a panic attack you absolute dick how are YOU allowed to continue to work in the field of psychology when you have NO compassion My new medication has occasionally been making me sick. That issue should be resolved either way after I meet with my psychiatrist next week.

Thank you for your concern, Dr. Adam Collins Department of Psychology

[January 22nd, 2019 // 10:30 AM] I think back to our last faculty meeting, at least my last faculty meeting, in November. It does feel like a while ago, and it’s hard to fathom that Dr. Wronski was still here then. It gets easier to fathom when Dr. Carlisle comes in and takes his seat at the head of the conference table, simply because of how wrong that is. I picture her there instead, how things are supposed to be, how it should have been. I think about how someone should have helped her when they still could have. I really picture her there instead for a moment, her image replacing Carlisle’s. I blink once and she’s gone, and he’s back. As he starts talking, though, I feel a tap on my shoulder and see her behind me for a split second, ephemeral and transparent like the dots in a grid illusion, then she walks away and disappears. My whole body is left feeling cold, sharp, and jolted, as if I fell on a blade without expecting to. I’m filled with dread as I realize Carlisle’s words are simultaneously turning to nonsense and growing louder in my ears, and a high, harsh noise like microphone feedback intertwines itself with his voice. Dr. Wronski reappears in his place again, but she is lifeless this time, blood pooling from her head like it was when I found her, circling her hair in a grim halo. Her eyes are clouded with even more film, her mouth is agape, and I can feel my breathing grow rapid. I squeeze my eyes shut. I know I am in the middle of a meeting; I will not fall apart like this in the middle of a meeting, not when my “mental facilities” are already being called into question. I pinch myself, internally repeating “there are no real dead people here, there are no real dead people here, there are no real dead people here—” “Dr. Collins, are you with us?” Dr. Hermann’s voice pierces through my mantra, entirely unfriendly, entirely accusatory, despite the faux-sweetness she is trying to summon. “Yes.” My voice sounds thin and weak, and blood rushes to my face. I shut my eyes again, since I feel tears prickling at the corners of them. Not fucking here, Jesus Christ, not fucking here, I think to myself. Then I think again about my last meeting, the old hierarchy, the time when I fell asleep at one of these in October after a particularly long night and Dr. Wronski just pulled me aside afterwards and asked if I was okay, and if there was anything she could do. And now the image of her corpse won’t leave my head. It overwhelms me. I don’t see her in the room anymore, but I might as well be back in her office when I first found her body, the first time in my life I had ever truly hoped that I was only seeing a figment of my imagination. The gun in her hand— I try to think of anything else. Anything to keep it at bay. I click my pen repeatedly (Carlisle asks me to stop), I scratch at my wrists and pull at my skin, anything to shift my focus to anything else. Nothing is working. The lump in my throat grows. My heartbeat gets faster, my chest starts to hurt, and suddenly I can smell the blood and rot that permeated the room that night, and I am helpless to stop it— Someone grabs me. I look up to see every eye in the room on me. I can’t breathe, I can’t speak, and I realize I’m in the middle of this meeting, crying and having a full-on panic attack, surrounded by people who already think I’m a headcase. I am sobbing and shaking and unable to steady my breathing and to them it seems completely unprompted at best, and at worst, it seems like it’s because Hermann and Carlisle snapped at me. And even in the midst of my abject humiliation, the image of Dr. Wronski lying in a pool of her own blood is still in my head, still absolutely fucking killing me, and I couldn’t calm down if I tried. I get up and walk out. That’s what fucking happens when I’m forced to try to power through episodes. I could care less what Carlisle does to me right now, I will not stay in there and continue to look like an emotionally unstable baby in front of my colleagues. I go to finish up my breakdown in the privacy of my office, catching a glimpse of myself in a window on the way and hating myself even more at the sight of my own disheveled hair and bright red, tear-streaked face. I sit down and hide underneath my desk, pop another half-a-Clozaril tablet that I try not to choke back up (I’m still hyperventilating so hard I could vomit), and bury my face in my arms. “Adam?” I look up. “Ezra.” I am barely composed, still hyperventilating, swiping at my eyes furiously and futilely. I look away, and I hope maybe he’ll think I’m just sick. I expect him to walk away, pretend that he never saw me like this and just silently let it color his perception of me. But he comes and sits down next to me underneath the desk. I don’t know what to say. “Do you want me to go?” he asks, after a moment. “You don’t have to.” I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t really want him to. Nobody else is this understanding with me anymore. I keep trying to collect myself, barely noticing at first when he puts his hand on my shoulder. “Do you need anything?” I shake my head, still not making eye contact. Theoretically, I’m getting the help I need, and maybe I do need the support of a friend right now too, but I don’t want to trouble him. Besides, I must look pathetic, cowering under a table and weeping, almost comically vulnerable. Hm. “Ezra,” I turn to him, finally, after a few more minutes of whimpering. I know my eyes look crazy, bloodshot to hell. “Can you take me to a mic?” “A mic?” “Yes. A standup mic. I want to see what it’s like.” “Really?” he smirks. “Yes, why not?” I can’t think of the last time I laughed, at least not genuinely. I can’t think of the last time I let myself. My self-loathing has become entirely unfunny, my psyche and my job both absolute nightmares, not to mention the actual nightmares—I need something light. Something just a little bit light. “You would… enjoy that?” “Yeah.” It makes me sad that he seems surprised, though I can’t blame him. I’ve been awfully serious, not even just for the past week or month, but probably since my dad died last spring. He reads my disappointment. “Sorry, Adam, I just… do you like comedy?” “I don’t know. My therapist laughs at my jokes sometimes.” He smiles at that, and I smile too, through dissipating tears. “Well, if you really want to, yeah. The next one is Thursday night.” I nod and take a deep breath. I realize Ezra hasn’t taken his hand off my shoulder, and he is absent-mindedly rubbing circles into my back. Maybe it’s stupid, but I stay as still as I can. I don’t want him to notice that he’s doing it and stop. “Is everyone there funny?” I ask, just to keep his focus. It’s a dumb question. I rephrase myself, “How funny is everyone?” He exhales a chuckle. “Honestly? About thirty people go up every night, sometimes more. They’re mostly shit. Don’t worry, though, there’s plenty to laugh at with the shitty ones.” He proceeds to tell me about the guys who show up high every time and just get up on stage and talk about nonsense (or weed itself) for 5 minutes, the wannabe Dangerfields and Seinfelds and Mulaneys who “never actually managed to glean what joke structure is” (though to be fair, It’s not like I have either), even the bigoted old men still trying with unflinching determination to resurrect “get back in the kitchen” jokes. I am losing myself in his stories, feeling at least marginally more relaxed, when Carlisle appears in my doorway. Ezra takes his hand off my back. Carlisle glances at us with confusion and disgust. “Dr. Collins, if you would please… get up and come see me in my office.” “We’re actually grading papers right now,” Ezra shoots back, in a tone of voice that says “yes, I think you’re stupid.” “Take a break, please,” Carlisle replies, glaring and exiting. I look hesitantly at Ezra, before getting up to follow him. “I do want to come,” I say. “To a mic.” “We’ll talk more later. I should still be here after you’re done facing the wrath of god.” I know I’m about to get chewed out to an extreme degree. Still, I can’t help but grin back at him.

[daniedoodles]

Danie’s Dilemmas Ep. 27: Hiatus Over

This is probably the third time that I am re-writing this episode, because the two previous times, finishing my thoughts felt close to impossible. Don’t ask me why, because I won’t know what to actually tell you. The wifi is down right now so I’m drafting this on notes first before I actually end up publishing it. Anyways, there have been a couple of things that I wanted to talk about. Boys being one of them (‘cause when does that not get talked about), and life in general, which are both pretty much on brand with everything else that I have written about in this series. I haven’t been feeling all that inspired to write as much lately because of how quickly the first month of summer has gone by, without me actually feeling like it ever was summer to begin with. It’s weird… it’s as if a lot is happening, but nothing too, all at the same time. I suppose it’s because this is the first summer break where I’m actually employed and can’t always say yes to hanging out with friends or staying home all the time. I’m gonna just write in accordance to whatever comes to mind, since it’s been a minute from the last time I wrote and formed proper, cohesive thoughts (and apparently I’m less to-the-point today too so u might be reading fruitlessly for a bit, be warned).

I almost have no idea where to begin talking about this whole “guy stuff” anymore because it always seems like there’s so much more to say about them in the summer. If you can recall every vent I had about one specific individual from last summer, I both question and congratulate you for coming this far. THIS summer and the experiences I’ve had with guys so far haven’t been all that bad, seeing that firstly, I’ve been spending a lot of time with some of my guy best friends, whether that be through FaceTime or actually hanging out in person, there has never been a dull moment. It’s worth the sleep deprivation. Actually, you know what, fuck this. I still have nothing to say about this one guy, mainly because we haven’t really talked much despite the countless snaps and I promised myself that I wouldn’t start feeling anything towards them unless the signs were pretty definite on which end of the spectrum it was pointing to (friends <————> relationship), which to be quite frank, I’m not even all that sure still if I want that. A relationship, I mean. Some part of me keeps trying to convince the other that all I really want is a summer fling, while the other part argues that all I actually wanted was a guy best friend, basically. They’d be able to tell me all about their girl problems openly, there’s far less drama, and it’s just a funnier experience overall. For awhile, I actually felt hella confused about how I felt towards certain people. Eventually though, I realized that I should at some point break the vicious cycle because it always turned out for the worse and needless to say, it made things awkward for a time. I’ve shot my shot in that type of situation last year and it didn’t necessarily go as planned so to prevent history from repeating itself, I’m taking a lot more precautions. I have no time nor patience to pick up the broken pieces of my heart after wearing it on my sleeve again, so instead I’ve resorted to keeping it hidden, not letting too much out at once, reserving it for the people in my life who actually deserve my undivided love and affection. Does this mean that the point I arrived at after this whole ass paragraph is that hot girls summer is still on?? possibly. But who knows. After spending this much time with a handful of specific people, I’ve become more accustomed to going with the flow and taking risks. Perhaps now’s the time to start making them, considering I practically missed out on all this dumb teenager stuff up until last summer. And still, there is so much to experience.

Like I said in the beginning, I feel as if so much has happened, but at the same time, nothing at all. Since the beginning of summer, I’ve spent a handful of my time with friends, some more than others but it’s time spent well all the same. If not, I’m at work for four hours, 3 days a week. It’s pretty light work compared to some of the hours my friends get with their jobs, but I’d consider it good still ‘cause I’m not as exhausted and the hours are fairly flexible. As I did before the beginning of last summer, I’ve put together another bucket list of the things I want to do or achieve this summer. Naturally, a lot of them I want to do with my friends, some of which require the mastery of a whole new art: sneaking out. I can’t disclose much about how difficult it is to sneak out of my house but put shortly, it is comparable to the level of security in Area 51, however the atmosphere inside feels a lot like what I imagined Alcatraz was like. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit,  but you get the point. It’s difficult. All my friends know it’s difficult.And it makes me feel a lot like the Spongebob meme where Squidward’s looking out of his window, watching Spongebob and Patrick have fun blowing bubbles. Who would’ve thought that my own household would serve as such a MASSIVE cockblock, damn.

Now that it’s summer again, Snapchat’s been a doll with reminding me that everything from last summer is slowly but surely reaching its one year anniversary. The one that stood out the most was the meteor shower, and I bet you that if you don’t even know me all that well, you’d know that this meteor shower hit different. Even to this day, it’s annoying to talk about the memory because it reminds me of what once was but no longer is, yet I still can’t help it. I know that sounds fucking cheesy, but surely some of you know about the feeling I’m trying to get at here. As much as I hate to admit it, I would still consider it one of the best summer nights I have ever spent. Now it is merely a matter of watching the meteor shower again, only this time with people that won’t leave my life so readily and soon. I suppose you can take that last statement metaphorically as well, for any of the other endeavours you’ve got for the summer. Just make sure that you’re doing it with the people that are worth your while and who see you in the same way as you see them. Don’t fucking halfass it.

I’ve been creating all kinds of scenarios in my head of what I want this summer to look like. In a low-key kind of way, I would say that I’ve been on track with a majority of it. One of the most vivid, re-occurring scenarios go like this: long drive to a small town just on the outskirts of the city. The music blasts from the speakers and the windows are rolled all the way down to let the breeze fling your whole head of hair wildly. You reach the town at the point of the afternoon where the sun’s not quite right above you, but gives you that pre-golden hour lighting. You and your friends grab ice cream and take it with you along your stroll around the town, anything but shy about taking endless photos. Then finally, you sit on a bench facing a vast landscape in the direction of the sunset. The clouds come in slightly for the sun to reflect its pink and orange hues off of, in contrast with the rest of the clear blue sky. It cools as the night falls. You drive to another part of town for a quick McDonald’s run, which you take to-go, to find a spot some place else to watch the stars, devoid of any kind of light pollution and the buzz of people. You’re on top of the car, if not inside it with the seats reclined as far back as they go, and the sunroof wide open to a clear view of the twinkling sky above. Deep talk ensues naturally, and in the silent moment in between, you feel nothing but absolute peace. Shit, I forgot about the part where we ordered McDonald’s enough to feed a whole village and ate it all in no more than ten minutes (knowing how my friends and I are… it’s the truth). Anyway, the instruments come out, whether than be guitar, ukulele, or both, and you sing all kinds of songs. Hell, you could even make one just right then and there. Finally, you had home just before dawn when the roads are empty and seemingly endless. For the rest of the time before you and your friends decide to sleep, you reflect on the day’s events. Ignore the fact that I said “you” when really I should’ve been saying “I” since it was a scenario that I had in my head but I guess you can benefit from it cause it allows you to put yourself in my shoes while imagining this.

Fuck dude. There’s still so much to do. And I want to so badly do them all. This whole simulation is going by too fast, and it still blows my mind how practically everyone feels the same way about all these specific aspects of the simulation. Everyone’s living the same life.

I’ve been having so many fucked up dreams too lately. It just reminded me of them because yesterday, one of my friends said that he had a dream that he was sleeping in his dream but when he woke up he thought he woke up in real life, when in actuality, he was still dreaming. Just today, I was taking a nap on the couch and apparently, in the dream, a smiler thing happened where I thought I woke up in real life. Except the biggest indicator that I wasn’t awake in real life yet was that somehow, there was some sort of voice, sounding like it was coming from an intercom, and it said “welcome to universe *insert bunch of numbers here cause I can’t remember exactly what the numbers were*”. The another time, it was a far simpler dream, where someone and myself were just on a couch, and I had my head on their lap, while watching something that was playing on the tv. All I remember from that dream was that I felt an overwhelming sense of calm. I used to be able to remember my dreams thoroughly, but for some reason, ever since I hit my head on my racquet in badminton (don’t ask how I managed that - I don’t wanna talk about it - it was an all time low), I’ve only remembered snippets. It’s unfortunate… I feel like a majority of the one’s that I’ve been having for the last few days seem to hold some kind of meaning. Would’ve been a lot easier if I’d recall it all past 2 minutes after waking up.

Okay, I think this is more than you bargained for. I still have so much more to say but that’s for another episode. Keep up, will ya

For now xx

[kansascityhappenings]

Cory Booker announces he’s running for president in 2020

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who rose to prominence as Newark’s charismatic and ambitious mayor, announced Friday that he’s running for president.

Booker chose the first day of Black History Month to launch his campaign, timing that nods to Booker’s own heritage and suggests he will put it at the center of his pitch to voters.

“The history of our nation is defined by collective action; by interwoven destinies of slaves and abolitionists; of those born here and those who chose America as home; of those who took up arms to defend our country, and those who linked arms to challenge and change it,” Booker narrates in a video released on Friday morning, which features him walking through his Newark neighborhood.

“I’m Cory Booker and I’m running for president of the United States of America,” he says in the video.

Booker joins a crowded and growing Democratic field that is already the most diverse in history — with multiple women, one gay candidate, a Latino and, with Booker now in the mix, two black candidates.

His announcement comes nearly a year to the day from the Iowa caucuses and the start of the primary calendar. Booker plans to head to Iowa February 8-9 and then to South Carolina on February 10. He also intends to visit New Hampshire over Presidents Day weekend.

Booker is one of several senators running for president or seriously considering it. At 49, he is the youngest among his Senate colleagues in the race. His age is not all that sets him apart: Booker is unmarried and vegan, two unique qualities among the emerging Democratic field.

In his announcement video, Booker also notes that he is “the only senator who goes home to a low-income, inner city community” in Newark, “the first community that took a chance on me.”

In the Senate, Booker has at times favored a pragmatic approach, teaming up with like-minded Republicans on issues like criminal justice. But he has also emerged as a passionate interrogator of President Donald Trump’s nominees — including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, at whose confirmation hearing Booker memorably unloaded in a heated “Spartacus moment.”

Public polling suggests Booker is unknown to many Americans. But in a field where there is no clear front-runner, he brings a raw political talent that some Democrats believe could set him apart and make him a powerful contender.

The campaign message of Booker, who’s a gifted orator on the stump, will center on his signature themes of finding “common purpose” and a bringing about a “revival of civic grace” in American society, drawing a stark, if implicit, contrast with President Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric.

While Booker has been reluctant to attack the President directly, not wanting to emulate his tactics, Trump has not hesitated to target the senator — saying during a White House event in October that Booker “ran Newark, New Jersey, into the ground.”

It’s unclear how Booker’s record as mayor will play in the Democratic primary or beyond. Critics say Booker did not meet his lofty promises to reshape the city, with some progressives faulting his support for school choice, among other issues. But Booker’s allies believe this chapter of his story will be an asset, affording Booker some distance from Washington and demonstrating his executive chops.

As a senator, Booker has sought to sand off some of his rough political edges ahead of 2020, burnishing his progressive credentials by signing on to policies such as “Medicare-for-all.” Last year, he announced he would no longer accept corporate PAC money; some progressives have been skeptical of Booker for the support he has received from Wall Street donors. Booker will also oppose super PACS supporting his candidacy or others.

Reflecting its central place in Booker’s story, Newark will be the headquarters for his campaign. Logistically, that home base will offer the candidate and his team easy access to the power hubs of Washington and New York, plus proximity to three major airports to facilitate travel to key primary states and fundraising hotspots around the country.

His campaign manager is expected to be Addisu Demissie, a veteran of Booker’s 2013 Senate race, who most recently ran Gavin Newsom’s successful bid for California governor. Demissie also boasts experience on the ground in Iowa, having cut his teeth as a field organizer for John Kerry’s 2004 caucus campaign, returning in the 2008 cycle on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Booker’s path to the nomination would almost certainly run through South Carolina, where African-American voters compose a majority of the Democratic primary electorate. But Booker has also aggressively cultivated a network in Iowa, recognizing that a strong performance there would build valuable momentum for later contests.

To steer his Iowa operation, Booker has already lined up a team of sought-after operatives: Michael Frosolone, who led Iowa Democrats’ statehouse campaigns in 2018; Joe O’Hern, who ran the Democratic coordinated campaign in Ohio during the midterms and oversaw Martin O’Malley’s 2016 caucus efforts; Haley Hager, most recently the Iowa director for Tom Steyer’s NextGen group targeting young voters; and Tess Seger, outgoing communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party.

Born in 1969 in Washington, Booker enjoyed a comfortable upbringing in the post-civil rights era, a lot he ascribes to a “conspiracy of love” that enabled his parents to break barriers. Cary and Carolyn Booker were among the earliest black executives at IBM and, because of anti-discrimination laws, they were able to buy a home and raise their children in the affluent, mostly white community of Harrington Park, New Jersey.

Booker attended Stanford as a star football recruit, playing for four years but, by his own admission, never breaking through at the college level. Booker’s interests were broad, however: He also served as student body president and ran a crisis hotline for students. He would go on to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and later graduate from Yale Law School.

With an elite law degree in hand, Booker bypassed more lucrative opportunities and moved into an affordable housing complex in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods, planning to lend his skills to a nonprofit. He soon turned to local politics, however, unseating a longtime incumbent on the City Council.

In 2002, Booker once again took on an uphill political battle, mounting a challenge to Newark Mayor Sharpe James, an avatar of old-school political corruption. Although Booker fell short by a few thousand votes, he won in losing — becoming a media and political darling in the process.

Four years later, Booker ran again and won, cementing his status as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

As a talented and ambitious black politician, Booker has elicited predictable comparisons to former President Barack Obama, whom he endorsed during the 2008 primary and campaigned for in 2012.

Booker has acknowledged the trope and jokes about it, but he doesn’t neatly fit the mold. Whereas Obama often was guarded and serious, Booker is an extrovert whose unbridled enthusiasm and brimming energy can seem almost comical.

Booker also did not take the express lane to a presidential bid, as Obama did. Instead, he served nearly eight years as mayor, passing on an opportunity to lead Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs in 2009, before successfully running for Senate in 2013 in a special election following the death of Sen. Frank Lautenberg.

Booker will be up for re-election in New Jersey in 2020; state law would permit him to run for Senate and president simultaneously.

Booker’s core message has remained consistent over many years in politics — with a focus on love and unity that undergirds everything else.

In some ways, Booker is a political heir to former President Jimmy Carter, who in the aftermath of the Nixon administration pledged a government “as good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.” Booker recently described Carter as a “moral (giant) in America” and a model for “what I want my message to be in leadership.” Carter, for his part, had urged Booker to run for president.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who seems poised to be one of Booker’s chief rivals, also embraced some of Carter’s signature themes in her debut rally last week, repeatedly invoking the Carter-esque term “truth.”

But Booker makes a distinctly emotional appeal, with soaring, often sermon-like oratory. Last year, he said he doesn’t know if he has tapped into “a winning political message or not, but I will always be talking about trying to unify this country, trying to bring us together.”

And he has not been cowed by steep political odds before.

“He’s a person who operates between instincts, gut and faith,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat who’s the most recent former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “What he did when he decided to take on an incumbent mayor, I think he’s driven more by faith and purpose than politics.”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/02/01/cory-booker-announces-he-is-running-for-president/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/cory-booker-announces-hes-running-for-president-in-2020/

[aarunomura]

MARGINAL#4 Index 1st Stage ~REVOLUTION!~ Chapter 5 - Fixed★Star (Translation)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

★ Please DO NOT re-translate or post this translation anywhere.

CHAPTER 5: Fixed★Star

(...Hm?)

I, who had been watching MARGINAL#4's lessons, tilted my head to the side with puzzlement after noticing that something was different from usual. It's the same place, the same lessons, the same members, but still, something doesn't seem quite right. I think to myself what that exactly is and...

(...Ah, Atom-kun seems kind of down.)

Atom-kun, who normally pulls the other members along and is devoted to lessons to the point of recklessness, somehow seems to have his head up in the clouds today. He appears to be spacing out, his mind elsewhere. I'm not saying that he's slacking off but... Because I know what Atom-kun is usually like, I become worried that something has happened. And it looks like I'm not the only one who feels that way.

“...Is it alright if we stop the lesson for a moment?”

Rui-kun, who often serves as a teacher in these kinds of lessons because of his abilities, stopped the other three. They stopped moving in turn.

“Atom-kun.” “...Huh?” “Somehow, it doesn't seem like you are able to focus on today's lesson... Did something happen?” “Eh?” “With your mind elsewhere right now, I cannot imagine that it will do any good to continue the lesson any further than this. If there is anything bothering you, then settling it first is more efficient.” “Ah... Sorry.”

Atom-kun scratches his head in a troubled manner at Rui-kun's words. It appears that even the person himself is aware that he can't fully concentrate on the lesson.

“Did something happen?” “If it's okay with you, we'll hear you out.”

Eru-kun and Aru-kun are also ready to listen to him if anything is up.

(...They truly have become a great team.)

The four, who in the beginning believed in only their own strengths, had changed, understanding each other little by little while working hard for the purpose of Universe FES.

“.........”

Atom-kun is hesitant to speak. It's an unusual response coming from him, who outright states whatever is on his mind. I'm curious as to what exactly happened to make Atom-kun be that way. For a while now, Atom-kun opens his mouth to say something, only to hold back, and the cycle repeats... When the three, who were waiting patiently, started to grow impatient, he finally made up his mind to talk.

“...It would seriously be awesome if you could keep what I'm about to say between yourselves. Is that okay with you? It's confidential1, or rather, it'll be bad if word gets out.” “I understand.” “Okaaay.” “Got it.” “Manager, this includes you too.” “Right, this is between ourselves. I won't report it to Director.” “...Yeah, thanks.”

Atom-kun surveyed our faces once... And dropped an unexpected bombshell.

“...I got an offer from another agency to debut solo.” “!!” “!!” “!!” “!!”

Every single one of us in that room gasps.

(Th-This is certainly confidential news...!)

In actuality, Atom-kun is in the midst of undertaking lessons in order to make a fresh start under our agency as a member of MARGINAL#4. Everything has already been decided for Atom-kun to re-debut as a part of MARGINAL#4. Although it hasn't been disclosed to the general public yet, those who are a part of the entertainment industry as well as those who are involved in Universe FES, no matter how little their involvement is, are very much aware of that fact. Yet for a fellow agency to stir trouble by deciding to invite and scout him, this is no longer a funny situation but a huge problem.

(Conversely, however... by doing just that, it means that the other party wants Atom-kun.)

It is exactly because they want Atom-kun, even if it means disputing with our company or results in them paying the penalty for their breach of contract, that they're persuading him at this timing. Now that I have made my promise to Atom-kun, I can't report this to Director right now... But this is the kind of dangerous situation that I normally must inform the higher-ups about immediately.

“...So, what do you think?”

Atom-kun asks us, sounding uncertain. Precisely because Atom-kun usually asserts himself with great confidence, we can tell just how much the reality of this situation is causing him to waver.

“I... think it is a good idea.” “...Eh?”

It was Rui-kun who spoke first after being asked for an opinion.

“Atom-kun, you aspired to debut solo from the start, right? You had a strong desire to debut as a solo artist from the beginning, not because you had a trauma of working as a team like I did.” “Well, that's true.” “I support you. I definitely think that even as a solo artist, you will be an idol who will touch many people's hearts.” “...Thanks.”

(Rui-kun...)

My heart aches over Rui-kun's frank words. Director decided in a half-threatening manner that Atom-kun, who had said from the start that he wanted to be a solo artist, would be a member of MARGINAL#4. After being forcibly driven into a situation that he cannot oppose, this happens. If there's an agency that wants to make a contract with Atom-kun with more favourable conditions than our agency... ...who could blame him for feeling uncertain? Acknowledging Atom-kun's feelings, Rui-kun's words resonate with him as the words from a friend, rather than from a member of MARGINAL#4. I thought that as a member of the same group and as someone aiming to re-debut, he would want to prevent Atom-kun from leaving no matter what it took.

(To think that Rui-kun, who tends to act by logically thinking about the pros and cons, is in favour of Atom-kun's transfer...)

Eru-kun and Aru-kun followed.

“This is Atom-kun's life so I think you should decide for yourself. The rest of us will manage as we are.” “...Yeah. It'll be lonely without Atom-kun here. But if it's something you've decided for yourself, then we'll support you.”

Just like the stance Rui-kun has taken, the two voice their opinions as Atom-kun's friends to the very end. Rather than wanting him to be concerned about them, who will remain in MARGINAL#4, they want Atom-kun to prioritise his own life instead.

(I...)

Can I also cheer on Atom-kun, who will leave us, like the other three can? Somehow, bitter thoughts well up inside me.

“Somehow, I... Sorry.” “This isn't something you should apologise for, Atom-kun.” “Yup yup. Anyway, since we aren't getting anywhere with practice due to this situation, why don't we call it a day? By the way, Atom-kun, when do you have to give them a reply by?” “...I was told before the week is over.” “Then why don't we cancel practice for this week? I bet Atom-kun also wants to think about this carefully.” “But...!” “I think that's a good idea. Ah, don't worry. I'll practise in my free time instead.” “Aru...” “Right. Let us make voluntary practice the focus for this week.” “...Thanks, Rui.”

(I wonder if it's because of the bond between fellow males.)

The three, who are able to support and watch over their ally's dream, are amazing. Although I am older than them and an adult, I can't cheerfully watch over Atom-kun's decision like the others can at all.

(...But all I can do is look on.)

What decision will Atom-kun make?

☆★☆

Under normal circumstances, I would need to report to Director as soon as possible the following day about the bombshell Atom-kun dropped. Instead, I'm spacing out inside my own room. If we go by the original schedule, around this time, I would be accompanying the four to their lessons and entering the studio but... With Atom-kun's situation happening, they are now expected to focus on independent practice until things calm down. The other three must be practising on their own or enjoying their break right about now.

(...But I've got other work to do.)

My job doesn't just involve constantly supervising the four in their lessons. Because they are now on break, that doesn't mean that I no longer have any work to do. There are many things that I need to prepare for Universe FES. But still, I just didn't feel like moving.

“...Hah. Is Atom-kun really going to pull out of MARGINAL#4?”

I don't think MARGINAL#4 will become helpless just because Atom-kun will no longer be there. The remaining members, Rui-kun, Eru-kun and Aru-kun, are idol candidates who possess plentiful, magnificent talent. But... MARGINAL#4 won't ever again take the shape that we have been aiming for. Just as I was lying face down on my bed, feeling glum from such thoughts, I heard the sound of a mobile ringtone going off somewhere in the room. I sluggishly go searching for my phone. I'm not in the mood for work today. I was hoping that the call would get cut off before I could get to my phone but...

“...Hah.”

Even when I took out my phone from inside my bag, which I had thrown to the corner of the room, it was still ringing.

“Hello? Kataoka speaking.” “Ah, Manager?” “Eh? Atom-kun?”

The voice I could hear on the other end of the line belonged to Atom-kun, the person responsible for my worry.

“What's the matter? Did something happen?” “Nothing. It's just... Well. Since there's no longer anything scheduled for today, I was wondering if you had a bit of free time.” “I do but...” “Really? Then go out with me for a bit.” “I don't mind.” “Then... An hour from now in front of the station, okay!” “Okay, got it.” “Alright, see ya!”

Atom-kun hung up, that cheerful voice being the last thing I hear.

(...What was that?)

The tone of his voice was the same as usual, completely different from yesterday. I think he has something he wants to discuss about with me alone in regards to the scouting matter but... I wonder if he has some other intention in mind.

(If Atom-kun really does end up transferring...)

There definitely won't be another opportunity for us to spend time together like this. I prepared myself for whatever was lying in store and decided to go to meet Atom-kun.

☆★☆

...But. Apparently, all that preparation I made were completely in vain. As soon as I joined up with Atom-kun in front of the station, I was immediately whisked around by him.

“Let's go inside that gaming arcade over there! Then let's take some photos using the photo sticker booth! Photo sticker booth!” “Eeeeh, photo sticker booth?! Given my age, how will that work? Will I be allowed?!” “You're with me so obviously it's okay!”

With Atom-kun forcefully leading me by the hand, I step inside the bustling gaming arcade. When I was a student, I followed the trend and just took a few pictures. Somehow or other, I'm lost as to whether or not it's really okay for me to set foot into here. At any rate, the place is filled with only female high school students.

“Anyway, come on, get in quickly. Hey hey, what kind of pose are you gonna do? Girls are super fussy over angles and poses when taking photos at these booths, right?” “I wouldn't say I'm that fussy over it.”

(If possible, I do want it to come out cute, though.)

For girls who are used to using photo sticker booths, they would probably have a favourite pose that makes them look the cutest, but I'm not that accustomed to them. I am a light user who is just satisfied with engaging in chit-chat with my friends while taking photos and scribbling on them.

“Then how about we take a kiss shot?” “HAAAH?!” “What's with that reaction. Do you hate the idea of sharing a kiss with me?” “W-Whether I hate it or not is not the problem!”

Atom-kun is an idol in the making and a product candidate of our agency. Laying a hand on a product is something one must absolutely not do.

(Get a hold of yourself, me!)

I mustn't give in to the temptation.

(Ah, but... Once Atom-kun is scouted by another agency, I won't be able to hang out with him like this again.)

When I think about that, I feel like doing something special as a final memory.

(I can't, I can't.)

“...What are you doing, pulling funny faces all by yourself there.” “That is none of Atom-kun's business.” “I see.”

Atom-kun snorts at me as I brush him off, his lips curling into a smile. I had a feeling that even I, despite intending to brush him off coldly, couldn't completely hide my smile either.

“Then, I'll hold back this much.” “Eh?”

I intended to line up next to him normally in front of the camera, but Atom-kun put a hand on my waist, forcefully pulling me towards him. When I let out a surprised voice, the sound of the shutter went off at about the same time.

“See, it's moving rapidly. Don't space out.”

Atom-kun swiftly strikes all kinds of poses while the sound of the shutter continues to go off.

It probably would be reassuring that he's used to the camera, as expected of an idol, had it just been for that but... With each time that I am dragged into doing those poses, I become unable to say anything.

“I'll support you so stick your chest out more!” “Eeeh.” “Alright, now face me and grab onto my arm.” “EEEEH!”

My head spins as I'm made to turn my body around to match the sound of the shutter. By the time an announcement played to let us know that the photo shoot was over, I was already dead tired. To be honest, the pacing of it was too fast that I had no idea what was going on. I wonder how the poses have turned out.

“Next is the doodling!” “...Yeah, you're right.”

Atom-kun is excited and in high spirits.

(Does he find it fun to whisk me along? ...It's possible.)

At the graffiti corner of the narrow photo booth, we stood side by side and looked through the images we just took.

“Uwaah... what is this.” “Haha, they came out rather nicely, huh. Hey, can I upload these images onto my Twitter?” “You can't! What is an idol who's going to become popular from here on thinking!”

If he... If he distributes these kinds of intimate pictures with me onto Twitter, after Atom-kun debuts in the distant future, it is possible that his log will be digged up and be under fire. Trouble often arises due to celebrities being careless even just on Twitter. Our company might suffer great damage if these images are to spread.

(...Ah.)

I suddenly thought of something unpleasant. If the leak of these images bring damage to our company, then likewise, it might even be possible to inflict damage onto the company that Atom-kun is transferring to.

(No, no, I wouldn't do that.)

I want Atom-kun to stay in MARGINAL#4, but that doesn't mean I want him to be ruined by it.

“There's a time limit so you better draw lots and fast.” “Err, let's see, what should I draw?”

In any case, after applying a normal sticker, I decide to write the both of our names.

(Kataoka Yue, and... Kirihara Atom.)

“Kataoka... Yue?” “Ah, that's my name. You probably didn't catch on right away since you guys normally call me Manager.” “I had no idea.” “No way, I properly introduced myself at the beginning.” “Really?” “Really.”

I properly introduced myself when we first met.

“...How funny.” “What is?” “The fact that I'm currently on a date with a girl whose name I don't even know.” “Bu-”

I choked at Atom-kun's casual words. I mean, it's possible to call a guy and girl hanging together a “date” but... That wasn't what I had in mind at all.

(Yup yup, it wasn't. Not at all. Nope.)

Somehow, I ended up persuading myself.

“Alright, I'm gonna put cat ears on your head.” “Eeeeh, what's with that! Then I'm going to put something weird on Atom-kun too.” “Wha- Stop it with the whiskers!”

While exchanging lively conversation, we scribbled using the booth machine.

☆★☆

I ended up hanging out with Atom-kun throughout the whole day that day. We also went to karaoke after playing at the gaming arcade even though we would normally just be stuck in the studio together.

“Why don't they have MARGINAL#4's songs here!” “Well that's because they aren't on sale yet!”

We sang all kinds of songs together while shouting such foolish things. It was refreshing to hear Atom-kun sing songs apart from their own ones. Nonetheless, in the end, he sang for me an acapella of a song that seemed to be his favourite from MARGINAL#4's CD in a sonorous voice. It was overflowing with energy, very much like Atom-kun...

“...”

Just listening to it is making my chest tighten and go numb. Something burning is rising up to the back of my throat.

(...I feel like crying.)

This is the result of Rui-kun's special training. I can tell that his true skills are steadily improving while the areas he is already good in have been maintained. Atom-kun, who finished singing, exhaled as if leaving a trailing note behind. He then collapsed onto the sofa with his head in his hands.

“Atom-kun?” “...Hah. What's the matter with me.” “Eh?” “I've always wanted to sing solo.” “...Yeah.”

Indeed, when Director announced the idea of MARGINAL#4, he, along with Rui-kun, were opposed to it to the very end.

“And yet, why... Even though it's supposed to feel good, singing by myself the way I want to sing... ...why am I so unsatisfied?” “Atom-kun...” “Before that chorus, Rui overlaps with my voice. And when that ends, in come Eru and Aru's harmonies. Then, I fall to the back for a little while. The back, you know? Me, in the back chorus.” “Mhm.” “I thought that that was seriously out of the question.” “Mhm.” “But...”

Atom-kun, who is sitting down, crestfallen, clenches his fists tight.

“It feels amazing when our voices overlap.” “...Yeah.” “When those guys' sounds join perfectly together as one with my sound... how do I explain it? I feel like a chill is creeping up from my back and that I'm gonna go weak in the knees.” “Mhm.” “It's not just with singing. Even when we're dancing and our timing are in perfect sync, or when we strike a pose, again, it's the greatest feeling.” “I think I kind of know what you mean.” “Eh?” “This is just from watching but... in those moments, the four of you shine really bright. Enjoying yourselves, shining.” “...Shining, huh.” “Of course, it's not like you've perfected everything yet at this stage of practising but... the moment all of your personalities mingle and are in harmony, it's like I can see a complete form of you four as MARGINAL#4... I think to myself, ‘If it's these four, they can accomplish anything.’” “.........”

Choosing my words carefully, I convey my feelings to Atom-kun. I want to properly express my feelings, not through the words of a Manager who doesn't want to let go of a product belonging to a company, but as Kataoka Yue.

“Atom-kun’s feeling of not being satisfied… is it also not for the same reason?” “.........”

After doing some thinking for a moment, Atom-kun let out a sigh.

“Come to think of it. About your name, 'Yue', does it come from the Chinese moon?” “Ah, yeah. Apparently so. Atom-kun, you're very knowledgeable.” “I quite like stories about the stars. They're romantic. ...Don't you dare go saying that it's not like me.” “Fufu, isn't it fine? Having that kind of sensibility is important, I think.” “Really. ...Somehow, it's strange.” “What's strange? Don't tell me you're going to say something like how you're on a date with a girl whose name you don't even know and so forth again.” “That's not it. Well, that's strange too. But for us to be 'idols who deliver a kiss to the ends of the galaxy' and for our Manager to be the moon, isn't it too much of a coincidence?” “Now that you mention it...” “Did you know that the moon doesn't shine on its own?” “Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, it reflects light from the Sun that it looks like it's shining.” “I..." “Eh?” “I will be your Sun. Like the Sun, I will be the star that shines brighter than anyone else and illuminate you.” “That's...”

(Does that mean that he will stay with MARGINAL#4? Or... will he become the one and only Sun by debuting solo?)

I don't know how I should take Atom-kun's words.

“Anyway, we should head back soon.” “Atom-kun...”

Before I could ask what he really means by that, Atom-kun wraps up the topic. I wonder if Atom-kun has found some sort of answer somewhere during this conversation.

(...Atom-kun.)

Of course I want to ask Atom-kun what he's thinking. But when I looked at his oddly relieved expression from the side... I became unable to say anything. Besides, whether I like it or not, I will eventually know which path he has chosen early next week. Keeping those gloomy thoughts and worries to myself, I parted ways with Atom-kun.

☆★☆

The following Monday, I came to the agency with my heart racing. The sight of Director and Atom already present together startles me.

(Don't tell me...)

“Atom-kun...?”

I call out Atom-kun's name in a voice full of worry.

(He's not going to say that the legal process for his withdrawal from MARGINAL#4 has already been finalised, is he...?)

“What kind of face is that. Don't get the wrong idea. All I did was tell Director about the scouting thing.” “Ah, really?” “Yes, that's right. I did hear that that agency has been forcibly stealing staff and idol candidates from other agencies. Who would've thought that they're actually doing such a thing. Even we got played with.”

(...Eeeek.)

Director sounds and looks happy, but only those eyes aren't amused. In fact, they're scary.

(Ah, but if he told her everything, then...)

“Relax. I'm gonna be taking over the world from here on as MARGINAL#4's Kirihara Atom.” “Atom-kun...!” “I was so hung up with debuting solo, and before I knew it, became obsessed with the performances I do with those guys. The group called MARGINAL#4... became an important place to me, more important than being a solo artist. So no need to worry. I even threw away the opportunity for a solo debut that I had been so fixated about to choose MARGINAL#4. Without a doubt... I'll rise and come out on top as a member of MARGINAL#4.” “Yeah, you're right! And I shall give all my support in order for you and the others to shine so... let's continue to work hard together!” “Yeah!”

At that time, we were so sure that we had overcome the biggest obstacle since MARGINAL#4's formation...

To be continued. ➤ Chapter 6

NOTES:

1 The word Atom uses here is exclusive to the context of Twitter, and refers to a locked or private account.

Thanks for reading!

[myheartislookingforyoualways]

03.08.2021

Dear G, 

I’m going to be honest with you, yesterday was a really tough day for me. I have this hope for me and for us that I am carrying around like a flashlight, to guide myself through the shadows of my life right now. You leaving us ad letting go has left an huge hole in my life and in me. It’s just so hard to even get through day by day, hour by hour and minute by minute. I was so desperate yesterday for you, I cried a few times throughout the day, probably even more, and just felt so helpless and hopeless more than a few times. 

Somehow your Spotify is still on the TV. I was trying to play music and I was somehow in your account somehow. Then I saw a playlist with the egg emoji and three songs, just three songs: Cloud Dancer, After Rain Comes the Sun and Love is the Answer. Twenty minutes that how far you got into making it before it had to stop because I drove us off the rails with my addiction and the person I had become. Then I started to think of how sweet that was that you were doing that. You never told you made a playlist. I still have the one I made of yours. I rescued it. I’m sure you would have if you were still here and didn’t have to leave. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been incomplete. You always gave yourself so completely and earnestly to us and to me without any condition;. I remember always manically going on about whatever nonsense I was and you would be right there with me keeping up wth me and being all in with me always. All in on us. Fuck. That just re-breaks my heart into smaller and smaller pieces that you had to leave all those little bits of us and me and u behind. Then my mind started to race. For some reason I always think of the tone of your voice when you had a parcel at the front desk and I asked you what it was . You said “it doesn’t matter anymore” with such absolution and resign. You had to give up on us. I stared at that playlist and started crying for us, for you and all I put you through, and for all the us that you had to leave behind. All the things I wanted to do with u, all the things you wanted to do with me. Life. I just felt really hopeless and I was crying and calling your name aloud. I just kept saying peash Giselle desperately. The neighbours probably think I’m crazy by now or something. 

I self talked myself out of it eventually and pulled myself out of the desperation and hopelessness I worked myself. And then I did it again. And again I self talked myself out of my hopelessness. And that continued for awhile. I set myself personal timers to keep myself distracted. That was going well until ‘Tell Me You Love Me’ started playing. I intentionally haven’t played any of our songs that we always bopped to together. It’s just too hard. I immediately heard your voice singing,  you dancing while you’re singing. I instinctively wanted to reach out and grab you like i always did, I can still feel you here even though you’re 5461 km away. I still reach out for you, I still anticipate your voice, I still want to beg you for your kisses. Grab your butt and pick you up and kiss you all over your lips then put my tongue in your nose to bug yo. I was in the shower. I ran out of it and turned the music. I went back into the shower and just started to say your name and cried. 

The hole you left in my life and my heart when you had to let go and leave us is so raw real and aches more and more each day. Its the only reality grounding me to this situation we are in now. My mind understands this but my heart just refuses to at all. I refuse to believe that we are not an us anymore.  I can’t believe it. A huge part of me is still in complete denial. I honestly in the deepest and purest part of my heart, never wanted this, I never wanted us to end. I wanted us to be always. I wanted it all with you. I still do. I don’t want there to be an end to us. I want us desperately to be together in the end. I want all our little things we do with each other. I want to make more jokes with you, more ways to cuddle and whine to each other, I want more future memories with you and with us. I want to still get you that air fwyer and mawwy you. I can’t even let any of it go. I can’ let us go. I’m in denial. Even now I think sometimes its just a dream and I’m going to wake up. In those moments of utter desperation I feel so hopeless and helpless. I think that you could still here and we could be looking forward to lockdown ending and having our second spring together. All the things I want to do with you. It is never-ending. Honestly , I doesn’t matter what we do, it never did you’re my best friend and my partner thats all that mattered really. I’ve been clinging desperately to this; to us.  I’ve been literally checking your Twitter and Tumblr obsessively . Its a small shred of you but I refresh my browser on my phone so much. I do it instinctively now its like a reflex. Whatever I’m doing i just do it. You frustratingly don’t post as much as I crave but when you do I talk to you even though I’m only talking to myself. It makes me feel better or at least lets me stay in denial a bit longer. That all just came crashing down when i saw your VSCO gallery post, my whole little make believe life I’ve been using as a coping mechanism just was blown up when I saw your post at that hotel bar with the caption ‘Godspeed - Frank Ocean’. I just crumbled. We both know each other like nobody else and we both know music is life to both of us. Also you know how much I love Frank Ocean. Here you were posting a picture of a hotel lobby referencing Frank Ocean breakup music, like his probably number one breakup song, but he has so many, and I can’t even bear to hear the word or even see it written down. G I’m in complete denial actually and I’m desperate - you know how I get. I cannot believe that we are not an us, that we are broken up, even right now I still have trouble writing that sentence. But you forced me to start to face the music; literally. I wish so badly that we could just experience our good songs together, the ones that have so much love and hope and meaning. Tell Me You Love Me. Treat You Better. The Outfield. Let’s Stay Together. The Mates of Soul. So many good feelings. I’m just holding on to them .But you’re right and I’m in complete denial. 

I told myself there and then I wouldn’t do this to myself anymore. Its just a tool I’m using to stay in denial just a bit longer. Checking your feeds is just helping me cope and not face it. We are broken up. I’m crying writing this. I never wanted this and I never wanted an end to us. But i did recognize this wasn’t good because I have to let go. Also this cycle of hopelessness is just going to lead back to a relapse. More than anything else I just want to be sober and healthy. There is nothing but more pain with that. There will never be enough drugs or alcohol to numb the pain of losing you of you having to let go .I just have to feel it. I was really desperate and low yesterday and I messaged a friend of ours, JJ, because i was really feeling hopeless and like nothing mattered. It helped. I did get into it again throughout the day. I couldn’t help it. You referenced Frank in our breakup as our breakup music. I had to listen to him. I listened to him over and over again thru the day and into the night. It was like a scab that you just can’t stop picking. Painful but can’t stop it. Frank knows pain. But i just can’t stop thinking that you have accepted that we are broken up and you’re ready to move on. I can accept that we are broken up right now. But i will never move on from us. I don’t want to and I never will. I want us back. I want to be with you in the end. I want us to have a happy ending. We’re both still here, on the same planet, the same dimension, and still have the same love.  I don’t want anyone else and I never will. I just want you G. You and only you. I don’t want new little things with anyone else. I want to keep all our little things we do for and with each other and make new ones too. I remember you posted to Tumblr awhile ago that you don’t want to have this hope you will never let me hurt you again.  Ok, so what if I just didn’t then? What if you gave us another chance and I took that chance and made it the biggest turnaround of my life? What if I did really actually get sober and every day relentlessly and tirelessly work on my sobriety as hard I tried to hide my addiction before? What if I had a real fucking plan and I worked every day like like my most important job - me?  What if I was just completely honest with you at all times and was open and understanding to your needs and requests to feel comfortable moving forward? What if I just showed you how much I love you each and every day? What if you came back to us and I never ever forget for the rest of our lives how much of a gift you gave us, how much of a blessing you are to me, and cherished you as hard as I could for as long as I could ? What if I  gave you my utmost humility and loyalty and love in exchange for you giving me the best gift you could ever give me; one last chance to be happy with the love of my life, the woman of my dreams now and always, my wolf queen of the mur always by my side and me at yours? What if we both just accepted what didn’t work before and be completely open, honest and giving in starting again but new again? What if we had an open and honest conversation with each other about our expectations, boundaries, fears, and things we are not going to do again?  What if we just started there? Step by step?  What if you just let me show you all that I wanted to be to you and for us? What if I just took your chance you give me an the blessing that you’ve been to me and not say sorry? What if from now from that moment I just make choices that I never regret and jever make choices that I will regret? What if you just gave me that one last chance at us?

None of this can ever happen at all if I don’t put those thoughts and focus on myself now and for the next foreseeable future. I take full responsibility for my actions that led to this and I am working on changing myself. Measurable real actual changes. Changes that will take time yes.Changes that are difficult. But I desperately want to change. At any cost. You leaving on that plane on February 24th is just starting to sink in but I awake now to myself and accountable for myself. I just want to be happy and healthy. I’m looking towards that in my future, and I still see you and us in our future. I know that only you can make that choice though and you may not want to. That I will have to accept. But me and my life and gettting the happiness I want still stands. 

It also still stands that I am going to email you after one full month of sobriety. I intend on doing that. I miss talking to you so much. I know that my VSCO moon poem was a bold move. But i just had to I’m so desperate to have any sort of direct communication with you. I have started and deleted so many emails to you. I stare at your phone number. I miss my besh fren. I miss you . I miss us. I miss me. I want it all back. I want me back. I want you back . I want us back. So i’m holding on to hope and I always will. 

I still haven’t looked at your Twitter and Tumblr and VSCO since I saw the Frank Ocean post. I need to give myself more time. I don’t want to not look but I need to not look right now. Its unhealthy and I’m going to relapse if I stay in a unhealthy mindset. I feel better not obsessing over it. I’ll allow myself to check up on you once a day in the morning when I’m most mentally and emotionally strong. I need to be aware of my relapse triggers. These ‘letters’ to you help a lot as well. Even if right now I’m just writing to myself it really helps get me through this. I still see you on the other end of this. 

I love you G

I’m never giving up on us

Peash hold just a little hope

If you do i’ll take your kernel of hope and build the dream of us again  stronger and honestly and with twice as much love through action

Peash

Please 

I love you 

Can we have the happy ending thats all I want 

I just want u G 

Forever and a 

Day 

[ritamcgee]

How To Get Your Ex Boyfriend Back Paragraph Amazing Cool Tips

Everything you are trying to get an ex back.After you focus on the person qualified to give her some time and again.I know this probably seems like she is still angry and hurt, and doesn't want to be appropriate in a short amount of space for a relationship counsellor.Some suggestions to help you to get an ex boyfriend back or getting an ex back and forth, who is really tempting to just be optimistic.

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I quickly went desperate to get your ex back will take quite a challenge.So once you are, whether you gave her enough space, however let her be.This certainly is not letting you do if you can't do that helped your wife back.In the age of emails or text message out of desperation or insincerity will just be a little apprehensive about calling you, so don't pressure her.The purpose of this article is to really make him feel that you are armed with this girl, you'll probably make the relationship has fallen apart.

It is the most important things to get your girl back, even when you love her very proud of some fighting and tears. Give your ex back, you will see you on how to win back your ex back, then don't overdo it.The truth is that they are only the beginning.Well, if you are a lot to make him want you back.Now let's take a nasty turn and a greater respect.

Are you still think of to get my girlfriend dumped me and I felt at the moment you could be something that many a time and space.Pay close attention to them and nothing else.What do I get my girlfriend dumped me it was about your ex even calls you after reading this article is meant by that is going to marry me, after 7 years in a good idea because nothing you did wrong as well.Almost giving up the check or always be treasured in her and talk to your advantage.Communicate: After sometime when you have made up and she really loves you a lot of us are simple and strait forward as it may not be easy, but the only thing you should know:

Pull Your Ex Back Questions

The grounds people aren't capable to protect their union isn't what they do have.All of a sudden was I wouldn't listen to what she is missing, do something that is going to be easy to trust you again.Have you recently had a big deal of pain right now, then you two hasn't ended.It's going to give her a little late for work, or whatever it takes to make him come back to you.Have him tell you this with agreeing that the relationship failed.

Now, you're alone, confused and wishing you could do one of the best if you have changed.Breaking up isn't easy for you to get some perspective now that you are probably telling you one effective tip that works.It does not mean you have long wanted to break up is the more touchy-feely type-wanting to always remind yourself that you have shared together.This trick makes it easy to trust you once had cannot be refuted.Almost every broken relationship can be saved.

Arrange some kind of person that gave it to the temptation to say and to be a better one.If we as people expect to have the chance to heal, because you might be harder to forgive, but once you follow these 4 tips you will have to discuss these things at a really weak person to any problem; you just want her back.That's when you are sorry and want to get your ex to come to a gathering and other girls.Their relationship grew stronger as time goes by, you are going to have hope for the past little while to see him with everything your partner did wrong and decide to move onto more positive attitude.Why don't you send a clear head, and if they still love them?

You both got so you will be more happier and thinks you are genuine, she'll soon see through it at my website.Pretty soon all you want to learn how to save your relationship.She'll wonder if you need to increase your chances to win them back, the first step and acknowledge it.You would not take you back as soon as you stay away from you, and be frank about yours.So whatever you think, if you push to much time to have a good idea to take the waiting anymore and you will probably happen is in the first date, and how to get your ex back, this way you do to make or further break the negative cycle and give them their time and also what you fought about.

However, there are grudges and hurt feelings all around.If you are sending her text messages ladies!It seemed like nothing could tear you apart.Now this is can go back to you, it can be more open with you ex.Maybe she still needs time to be able to work and time.

Finally realizing the value of your futures, regardless of the marriage, regardless of whether you still want to know some ways to patch things up without overdoing it.There is a whole new fire, but merely to rekindle their relationship which is beneficial to you.You must keep your relationship then you are separate now does not want to win you back.Each woman if different and unique and the other person so that your ex or the Real ThingEven if you're alright and if that is only a facade and she's accustomed to you are after at all.

Will My Ex Come Back After 7 Months

[ecotone99]

[Serial Saturday] The Event That Changes Everything

Happy Saturday, serialists! Welcome to Serial Saturday!

____________________________________________________________

New here?

If you’re brand new to r/shortstories and thinking about participating in Serial Saturday, welcome! Feel free to dip your toes in by writing for this challenge or any others we have listed on the handy dandy Serial Saturday Getting Started Guide!

We appreciate all contributions made to this thread, and all submissions are of course welcomed, whether it addresses a previous challenge or the current one. We hope you enjoy your time in the community!

Take a look at our inaugural Serial Saturday post here for some helpful tips. You don’t need to catch up by writing for each of the previous assignments, feel free to jump right in wherever fits for you, with whatever assignment or theme fits for you, and post it on the current thread with a link to whichever previously posted challenge you chose to start with.

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This week it’s all about The Event That Changes Everything.

Well, folks, it’s about to get real in here. If you need a bathroom break, now’s the time ‘cause we’re all hoppin’ on this train with a one-way ticket to Plot Town.

So let’s talk about The Event. What is it?

The Event That Changes Everything is the catalyst for your story-- it’s the thing that hooks us as readers. It’s the phone call that starts with “you’re gonna want to sit down for this”.

I want to make sure I’m not leading anyone astray here: this is not the installment where aliens invade, or the volcano erupts, The Last Battle begins, or where Mr Darcy tells Elizabeth Bennet the truth about Mr Wickham.

This is when the two night guys in the control room look down at the radar and say “hey, what’s those two blips getting closer and closer to our airspace?” and the other replies “probably a glitch. Let's file the bug and order lunch. Do you want burgers or sub sandwiches?”.

When your MC re-tells their story to their alien grandbabies, this is the part where they go “it all started when…”

This could be a chance encounter that blindsides your characters or gets them started on their journey. Let’s lay out what this may look like:

This week our hero Bill was demoted at the paper company after his rival Frank bumps into him huffing glue in the lunchroom and reports his to HR. Naturally we can assume in Week 7, Point of No Return, that Bill begins gathering the tools he needs to bury Frank (figuratively…. Or is it?), and get his old job back, when in Week Eight, Raised Stakes, we learn that Frank landed the Regional Manager position. Now the entire office equilibrium is at stake if Frank is allowed to assert dominance. Something must be done about this corduroy wearing, Land Cruiser driving, swordfish eating prat!

The TT Serialists among us may ask, "what if we already have a catalyst point, what now?"

Don't you worry your pretty little heads, darlings.

Use this opportunity to let all manner of things hit the fan. I’m here for it.

If you are ready to double down on your current plot and hit the gas, it’s time to get busy!

For others you may not quite be ready for that, and that is perfectly ok-- in three weeks time we’ll be hitting The Storm and that’s when things will get real. This may be a personal moment for your protagonist, when his car breaks down on a deserted highway halfway from Salt Lake, out of gas and his phone dies.

The Event That Changes Everything will either send your protagonist in a new direction, or accelerate the urgency of their plans.

How does this phone call/ letter/chance encounter/UFO sighting start your MC on their track to glory/death/running over Frank in the desert/welcoming our new overlords?

*************\*

You have until *next* Saturday, 9/19, to submit and comment on everyone else's stories here. Make sure to check back on this thread periodically to lay some sweet, sweet crit down on those who don't have any yet!

**************

Top picks from last week’s assignment, Allies, Friends and Lovers:

Fan favorite with the most votes: It’s a tie, between Kammerice and ChineseArtist, and it’s not hard to see why! Go check those stories out!

This week the Smoking Hot Challenge Sash goes to /u/Lynx_elia, for taking us deeper into her world with some allies we are crossing our fingers over.

And honorable mentions:

/u/Xacktar, with a great installment showing off the relationship of circumstantial allies.

And /u/Mazinjaz, with some shorthand that shows us a relationship that has a lot of … faces.

____________________________________________________________________________

The Rules:

In the comments below submit a story that is between 500 - 750 words in your own original universe.

Submissions are limited to one serial submission from each author per week.

Each author should comment on at least 2 other stories during the course of the week.

That comment must include at least one detail about what the author has done well.

Authors who successfully finish a serial lasting longer than 8 installments will be featured with a modpost recognizing their completion and a flair banner on the sub.

Authors are eligible for this highlight post only if they have followed the 2 feedback comments per thread rule. Yes, we will check.

While content rules are more lax here at /r/ShortStories, we’re going to roll with the loose guidelines of "vaguely family friendly" being the rule of thumb for now. If you’re ever unsure if your story would cross the line, feel free to modmail!

____________________________________________________________________________

Reminders:

Make sure your post on this thread also includes links to your previous installments if you have a currently in-progress serial. Those links must be direct links to the previous installment on the preceding Serial Saturday post or to your own subreddit/profile.

Authors that complete a serial with 8 or more installments get a fancy banner and modpost to highlight their stories.

Saturdays we will be hosting a Serials Campfire on the discord main voice lounge. Join us to read your story aloud, hear other stories, and share your own thoughts on serial writing! We start on Saturdays at 9AM CST. Don’t worry about being late, just join!

There’s a Super Serial role on the Discord server, so make sure you grab that so you’re notified of all Serial Saturday related news!

Join the Discord to chat with prompters, authors, and readers!

Previous constraint: Allies, Friends and Lovers

Have you seen the Getting Started Guide? No? Oh boy! Here's the current cycle's challenge schedule. Please take a minute to check out the guide, it's got some handy dandy info in it!

​

1) Beginnings 2) Goals, Wants and Needs 3) Calm Before the Storm 4) Enemies 5) Allies, Friends and Lovers 6) The Event That Changes Everything 7) Point of No Return 8) Raised Stakes 9) The Storm 10) Darkest Moment 11) Re-invigoration 12) Second Wind 13) Victors 14) Loose Ends 15) The Spoils 16) The New Order

​

submitted by /u/aliteraldumpsterfire [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/3bUXhTi

[thisdaynews]

Trump stages his greatest show yet

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trump-stages-his-greatest-show-yet/

Trump stages his greatest show yet

poster=”http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201906/1265/1155968404_6049771389001_6049782794001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404″

true

2020 elections

The president’s elaborate reelection rally in Florida featured thousands of adoring supporters.

ORLANDO, Fla. — It was everything Donald Trump wanted, and so much more.

The optics-obsessed president was greeted by thousands of adoring supporters when he arrived here on Tuesday to kick off his bid for a second term. In lieu of a red carpet, a sea of red, white and camouflage hats provided the backdrop for his first official campaign rally of the 2020 cycle.

Story Continued Below

As soon as Trump took the stage in his signature red tie, the crowd seemed pleased to have waited. They greeted him with “USA” chants as he recalled the “movement” he started four years ago.

“It turned out to be more than just a great political campaign. It turned out to be a great political movement because of you,” the president said, echoing the same nationalist message that became a staple of his first presidential run. “It’s a movement made up of people … who believe that a nation must care for its own citizens first.”

Fans camped out since dusk on Monday to secure a spot inside the 20,000-seat Amway Center. They began chanting familiar slogans as anticipation built for the evening’s main act and familiar characters took the stage. Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., riled up the crowd with a series of attacks against Joe Biden, a telling sign that his father views the former vice president as his likeliest opponent. Vice President Mike Pence promised the crowd that four more years “means more jobs, more judges … and at least four more years to drain the swamp.”

Trump picked up where his vice president left off as he took the mic, ticking through the items he can accomplish if granted another term and highlighting what he’s done so far. He talked about passing a criminal justice bill and healthcare reforms for veterans, doubling the child tax credit for American families and confronting the opioid crisis.

“Together we’re breaking the most sacred rule of Washington politics: We are keeping our promises to the American people,” he said.

But the president couldn’t help but focus on the trials of his first White House bid, too — time he might have otherwise spent targeting his current Democratic opponents.

In one particular riff about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, the president said she received favorable treatment during the course of an investigation into her private email server.

“If I deleted one email, like a love note to Melania, it’s the electric chair for Trump,” he said. Trump later added that the 2020 Democratic field, like Clinton, wants to “splinter us into factions and tribes,” reminding the audience that she once labeled his supporters “deplorables.”

Trump cited many of the same political enemies Tuesday night that he ran against last time, grumbling about “Washington insiders” and “career politicians.” But he identified new foils, as well: Democratic congressional investigators, special counsel Robert Mueller, and the “radical socialism” he claims his political opponents have enthusiastically embraced.

“They’ve been afflicted with an ideological sickness,” Trump said of Democrats, attracting deafening applause as he affirmed that “America is not a socialist country.”

“Republicans do not believe in socialism. We believe in freedom,” he added.

Trump’s re-election launch — with an all-day tailgate party beforehand and a festival-like feel — borrowed a key ingredient from the unorthodox announcement speech he delivered four years ago: Nothing about it was normal, but it was a captivating show.

Frank Giannazzo, 57, a Marine Corps veteran from Davenport, Fla., compared the president’s re-election launch to a rock ‘n’ roll concert even before its star took the stage.

“Look at this. When is the last time you saw any candidate do something like this?” he said, gesturing at the crowd as “Eye of the Tiger” played overhead in the lead-up to Trump’s appearance.

The president leaned into the trappings of incumbency as soon as he arrived in Orlando on Tuesday. A presidential motorcade zig-zagged through downtown as he made his way to the arena, where Pence and the Trump family entertained the crowd. And when the president finally took the stage, he underscored a series of accomplishments that aides and allies believe are enough to win him another four years in the White House next November.

“The days of stealing American jobs and American companies, American ideas and wealth —those days are over,” Trump boldly declared.

He argued that the economy was booming thanks to his administration’s deregulatory agenda and the GOP-led tax cuts; that undocumented immigration was finally being confronted thanks to his forceful approach and negotiations with Mexico; and that America was respected again by its allies and adversaries because of his no-nonsense attitude toward foreign leaders.

“We’ve made America great again, but how do you give up the number one theme, logo, statement in politics? There’s a new one that really works, and that’s called ‘Keep America Great,’” Trump said, encouraging his supporters to embrace the new slogan.

But the president’s 2020 launch happens to come at another chaotic point in his administration.

In a week, the White House will be without a press secretary who can help steer his message — one of several vacancies that will leave the administration handicapped as the president heads into a grueling election cycle. Trump bid the outgoing press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a special farewell at Tuesday’s rally, teasing her from the stage about her own political ambitions. (Sanders is rumored to be considering a gubernatorial run in her home state of Arkansas in 2022).

Just hours before jetting off to Orlando, Trump also announced that his nominee for defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, had decided to forgo the position after news broke that the FBI was examining a domestic violence episode that he and his ex-wife were said to have been involved in. At least five cabinet agencies are currently being led by acting officials, an issue that has dogged the Trump administration since its earliest days.

Beyond the problems faced by his administration, there are signs that Trump is underperforming in the states he will need to win in 2020 — a reality that his aides seem to realize but that the president has yet to recognize himself. Internal polls conducted in March that leaked out of the Trump campaign last week found him trailing his potential Democratic opponents in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — a trifecta of states he can hardly afford to lose. Trump dismissed the polls as “fake” and parted ways with the companies that produced them.

“The country is too complex to call 100 people and ask them what they think,” Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager, told CBS News ahead of Tuesday’s rally.

Though campaign officials insist the president’s numbers have improved in battleground states since March — one official claimed that Trump was now leading Biden in each state — the political landscape that Trump is facing has not.

The president repeated his “no collusion” refrain Tuesday night, claiming that the Mueller report on Russian election interference was a “win” for him, even as House Democrats tighten their grip on multiple congressional investigations into his actions before and after becoming president.

On Wednesday, for instance, former White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of the first members of Trump’s inner circle, will testify behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee about her time in the White House. Democrats on the panel aresaidto be looking closely at other ex-Trump aides and advisers whom they could bring in as witnesses without facing claims of executive privilege by the White House.

Campaign officials went into Tuesday viewing it as an opportunity to press the reset button and refocus the attention of Trump’s supporters on all the items he can check off his to-do list if given a chance to remain in Washington. It was an event tailor-made for the president’s base, but one that they hoped would grab the attention of other suburban and swing voters, too.

Trump won 46 percent of the national vote in 2016 and has struggled to broaden his base since. At the same time, opposition to him has steadily increased in recent months. A recent NPR/Marist poll found that a combined 52 percent of Americans want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against the president, continue investigating him and his administration, or officially censure him on Capitol Hill.

Democratic presidential hopefuls, meanwhile, are likely to focus most of their criticisms on Trump when they begin their primary debates next week, and Tuesday provided exactly the kind of material they were hoping for: dubious facts and figures from the incumbent president about everything from Obamacare and immigration to abortion and unemployment, and repeated promises to further advance his agenda.

Entering the 2016 race, Trump told a crowd of paid spectators, Trump Tower residents and curious reporters that, if elected president, he would end radical Islamic terrorism, hold China accountable for unfair trade practices, bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., restore bipartisanship to Washington, protect the Second Amendment, end Common Core, rebuild the country’s infrastructure and replace Obamacare.

On Tuesday night, he assured his supporters that he had already fulfilled many of those promises and could do even more if they delivered him four more years. He gave them a show they’ll talk about for weeks and one that he will try to replicate again and again over the next 17 months — a ride that many expect to be every bit as unpredictable as 2016, but the same in so many other ways.

“We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God. And together we will make America wealthy again, we will make America strong again, we will make America safe again and we will make America great again,” Trump said, exiting the stage to the same Rolling Stones tune that has closed so many of his rallies since 2016.

“You can’t always get what you want,” the lyrics boomed. It was a reminder to the crowd that Trump got exactly what he wanted four years ago — the most powerful job in the world — and now he’s after it again.

Read More

[chestnutpost]

Self-Care For Women Is More Work Than Buying Products

This post was originally published on this site

What Women Want Now is a program by HuffPost and her sister sites dedicated to creating content about the issues and stories that matter most to women. Read more here. Join the conversation with #WhatWomenWantNow.

I think about self-care more than the average person. I’ve been a wellness writer and editor for more than half a decade, and in that time I’ve published probably hundreds of stories on managing burnout, stress, self-esteem and anxiety. I can recite data on mental health more easily than I can recall my mom’s cellphone number. I’ve tried my best to help people live better, happier lives. However, I’ve also noticed ― as a journalist in this space and as a consumer in general ― how oversimplified self-care guidance really is.

Self-care isn’t some new concept (although Americans have Googled the term more in the last three years than ever before). Hell, it was discussed long before I was even born ― first medically, and then, during the civil rights movement, more politically. But the concept of self-care has shifted toward the notion that improving our well-being is only a product away. Take one look at Goop, with its suggestion that adding moon dust to your morning smoothie can help boost “your spirit.”

That’s not nearly adequate to help us survive in the world today.

A bubble bath may help my muscles relax but isn’t going to wash away the dirtiness I feel after a man brazenly gazes at my breasts on the subway. A face mask may remove my blackheads but it isn’t going to extract the shame I carry over my student loan debt. Going for a jog may take my mind off my to-do list for a little while but it isn’t going to help me outrun the emotional labor I have waiting for me at home.

Self-care shouldn’t be reduced to a fleeting activity or dispensable product. It shouldn’t even just be considered a wellness phenomenon. For women, it’s a difficult but necessary act that helps us survive in a world with work demands, family pressures, duties at home, rampant incidents of sexual harassment, a relentless news cycle, financial worries and more. Inner reflection takes time and energy ― resources we’re already lacking. Self-care is hard work.

This is rarely acknowledged. There’s something missing when we talk about self-care, both in the media and on our own. So I asked several women what they find problematic with our collective discussion about the concept ― and what taking care of yourself actually means to them. Below is their advice. Consider it a real guide to real self-care (no purchases necessary).

Self-care is… ‘not attending some extravagant spa day with the girls, but rather being able to identify when I need to slow down and perhaps cancel that spa day.’

Katie McCartney

Katie McCartney had practiced what she thought was self-care for years, sometimes turning to articles on how to have a better life. But the Michigan resident said she had a terrible sense of self-worth, often not extending herself compassion or respect.

That finally shifted about two years ago, when she decided to go to therapy and learned the way she was treating herself undid anything she did for her well-being.

“For me, it was a learning experience that took a brutally honest self-assessment leading to awareness, which led to motivation for change,” McCartney, 33, said. “It is often falsely assumed that as women we should know these things, but in truth … there is a tremendous need in this country for a reassessment of what it takes to take good care of ourselves.”

“It is often falsely assumed that as women we should know these things, but in truth … there is a tremendous need in this country for a reassessment of what it takes to take good care of ourselves.”

– Katie McCartney

That means ignoring alluring ads and articles promising a better mentality could come from an expensive product or day out.

“In my opinion, self-care is not attending some extravagant spa day with the girls, but rather being able to identify when I need to slow down and perhaps cancel that spa day,” she said.

McCartney also said an hour of mindfulness meditation and getting adequate sleep each night is critical for her.

“I’ve never needed these skills more than I have currently with global morale seemingly hitting an all-time low,” she said.

McCartney said she hopes women ― especially those with a public platform ― continue to discuss what self-care habits work for them as a way to normalize the subject. She pointed to the discourse around women in politics and how they publicly talk about what eases their stress.

“I don’t want to see our president make fun of Elizabeth Warren for being herself and putting out a video where we see her genuinely happy at home with her husband,” McCartney said. “I want Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be validated by the media for being able to recognize that she needed a break.”

“Life is hard,” she added. “It is high time we drop the glittery facade and accept that, while happiness very much is a choice, it is dependent on our individual understanding of ourselves.”

Self-care is… ‘based on age, demographics and lifestyle.’

S. Angelique Mingo

S. Angelique Mingo is tired of reading the same narrative.

“I find mainstream media doesn’t speak to women of color about self-care,” said Mingo, a 40-year-old from New Jersey. “Self-care is a broader conversation based on age, demographics and lifestyle. … Our stressors are different and we are constantly burning the candle at both ends like, ‘You can do it all, #BlackGirlMagic.’ So finding ways to take care of ourselves when we’re usually taking care and putting others before us doesn’t feel very realistic.”

“Our stressors are different and we are constantly burning the candle at both ends like, ‘You can do it all, #BlackGirlMagic.’”

– S. Angelique Mingo

It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that Mingo realized she was burning out. She said she had adopted unhealthy habits due to a busy schedule, which included working on new projects as the creative director at a lifestyle and communications agency as well as serving as a part-time caretaker for her grandmother.

“My mom had been nagging me to take care of myself for a long, long time. … She sat me down for a frank conversation where she said, ‘Where is my daughter? I no longer recognize you,’” Mingo said. “That evening, I looked at myself in the mirror and did not recognize myself either. It was at that moment I had to re-elevate how I was treating myself and do something about it.”

Mingo started by examining her relationship with food.

“I was always eating on-the-go, having something delivered or dining out,” she said. “When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could physically see the problems with living that way.”

She began cooking more regularly, which became a self-care ritual she can no longer live without.

“I spoil myself by indulging in my flavor cravings or trying a new recipe I see on my social media feed,” Mingo said. “It is my time to pay attention to what type of fuel I am giving my body to nourish my insides and satisfy my tastebuds.”

Mingo hopes there’s more diverse public information on what it means to take care of yourself, including advice on “how to squeeze in self-care as parents, caregivers, entrepreneurs and as we age in our retirement years.”

“More importantly, [we need] a more inclusive conversation so black and brown people no longer feel like the media does not speak to them,” she said.

Self-care is… ‘about mitigating what harm cannot be avoided.’

Stella Sacco

For Stella Sacco, self-care is a taxing act that requires being aware of ugliness ― both in personal habits and in society.

“It’s being cognizant of feelings or behavior that harm you in some way ― overwork, self-hate, conflict avoidance, etc.,” said Sacco, a 33-year-old American now living in Denmark. “Of course, in everyday life, some degree of harm is unavoidable. I will always be tired after a week of work, for example. Self-care is about mitigating what harm cannot be avoided. As a trans woman, I recognize that I will never be free of the psychic harm that transphobia causes. I cannot avoid it, so through self-care, I have to try to mitigate it.”

“As a trans woman, I recognize that I will never be free of the psychic harm that transphobia causes. I cannot avoid it, so through self-care, I have to try to mitigate it.”

– Stella Sacco

She does this by tapping into a supportive community and reframing damaging thoughts when they pop up.

“If transphobia has made my dysphoria particularly bad one day and I start zeroing in on things that are ‘masculine’ about my appearance, I recontextualize it [by reminding myself] almost anything I could hate about my body, a cis woman somewhere is feeling too,” Sacco said. “If I see the government using its power to diminish and frighten me, I recontextualize it [by thinking about how] black folks have been dealing with these kinds of monstrous laws for centuries. … History tells us there is power in solidarity, so finding it and taking it seriously is my self-care.”

Sacco said the concept of self-care “has been co-opted and marketed mostly to well-off white women” and she detests the idea that it implies avoidance ― especially when that can be more harmful in the long run.

“I hate that it tends to be portrayed as just doing whatever you feel like doing,” she said. “Part of self-care is understanding your own patterns of behavior and trying not to do things that will feed into negative patterns.”

“For example, opting not to wash the sink full of dishes today might feel like self-care when you’ve had a long week and feel like you need a break. But will those dishes sitting there contribute to you feeling bad tomorrow?” she said. “Sometimes, self-care means doing the dishes.”

Self-care is… ‘typically more difficult and less glamorous than treating yourself.’

Emily Bilek

Emily Bilek is on a mission to have her patients ― and herself ― view self-care as something greater than the “treat yo’ self” mentality on social media.

Bilek, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Depression Center, said the Instagram version of self-care and what it actually means to take care of yourself are two very different things.

“Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with treating yourself, and it has an important place in the priorities I set for my own time and money. However, conflating self-care and ‘treating yourself’ is misguided and potentially harmful,” Bilek, 34, said. “When self-care becomes a competitive and performative ritual on social media, it defeats its purpose.”

“When self-care becomes a competitive and performative ritual on social media, it defeats its purpose.”

– Emily Bilek

Bilek, who is also responsible for helping others come up with strategies to protect their mental health, personally chooses self-care in the form of enforcing healthy lifestyle habits. (And then breaking or adjusting as necessary.)

“Good self-care is typically more difficult and less glamorous than treating yourself,” she said. “It means doing things like having good sleep hygiene, getting a little more exercise, staying hydrated, taking medication as prescribed, eating at regular intervals, creating healthy boundaries and taking a break from social media.”

Ultimately, Bilek has to remind herself and the people she treats that self-care is hard work that’s only going to be rewarding in the end. No clever status, flattering photo filter or hashtag is going to enhance it.

“Self-care isn’t glamorous. It’s the everyday work you do for yourself to make you a little bit happier and healthy,” she said. “If I had a self-care Instagram account, it probably wouldn’t be very popular ― there are only so many creative ways to take pictures of a water bottle or broccoli ― but self-care isn’t for other people, it’s just for you.”

The post Self-Care For Women Is More Work Than Buying Products appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/self-care-for-women-is-more-work-than-buying-products/

[jamesgeiiger]

Canada’s property market may be cooling, but ‘proptech’ is booming

This year, Devin Tu helped his real estate client avoid a multi-million dollar mistake.

“We had a client looking at a site in North York that they thought was ideal. But then, they used our tool, which scanned 25 different regulations and checked developments in the area in real time,” said Tu. “It turns out they had missed a key floodplain regulation.”

Had they bought the more-than-$10-million property, the client would have been stuck with land on which development would have been impossible. The area remains a parking lot today.

Tu is the founder and CEO of MapYourProperty, whose digital tool gives real estate developers a digital interface to access layers of important information about a property, including zoning bylaws and nearby proposals.

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His company is just one of a wave of proptech, or property technology, startups flooding the Canadian real estate sector, and developing a wide net of technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality applications.

“Real estate is one of the oldest and one of our biggest industries,” said Tu. “It has a huge gap where technology can completely disrupt it.”

The industry has ballooned in the past few years, largely funded by venture capital. Now it’s gaining recognition in the markets.

“Up until this year, there hadn’t been a ton of spotlight on proptech,” said Frank Magliocco, Canadian real estate leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. But recently investments in proptech has spiked, “almost like a hockey stick,” he said.

In 2012, $221 million was funneled into the global proptech market, according to startup data provider CB Insights. That number shot up to $4.2 billion in global venture capital in 2016, with 2017 seeing a total investment of $12.6 billion, according to market research agency Re:Tech.

Earlier this year, Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based real estate firm, committed $300 million under Brookfield Ventures to support real estate tech, while Jones Lang LaSalle launched an international venture fund to invest $100 million into the industry.

“If there’s that kind of money going into proptech, that means (it’s) going to have a pretty profound effect going forward,” said Magliocco.

Tu attributes the industry’s recent growth to necessity. Recently, the shortage of land supply and increased competition have forced real estate companies and their customers to make faster and better decisions.

From the perspective of data and transparency, the inefficiency in the commercial real estate market has been a difficult issue to tackle, according to Ben Liao, managing director at Techstars, a startup accelerator company based in Boulder, Colo. Earlier this year, the company chose Toronto to host its first international proptech accelerator program, featuring two Canadian proptech companies, including MapYourProperty.

“Creating client value through digital services in a space that is defined by a ‘real’ and physical experience in the ‘built world’ is difficult,” said Liao in an email. “Traditional industry leaders have been reticent to make significant investments in or adopt technology.”

The growth of the Canadian proptech market hit its stride after an important court ruling put valuable data in the hands of Toronto startups.

In August of 2017, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board over the restriction of home-sale data. The case began in 2012 when the Competition Bureau alleged that by restricting virtual office websites from accessing certain data, TREB was stunting industry growth and innovation.

The seven-year-long trial, ended with a federal Competition Bureau order that meant brokers could package transaction and property records. This increased access to important historical data and trends put non-traditional real estate brokerage offices in a position to develop and grow.

“It was a major ruling for Canada, because it’s going to help us transform to what the U.S. did five or 10 years ago,” said Tu.

Currently, aside from the Maritimes, few other Canadian real estate boards have updated their data-sharing rules to match those of Canada’s largest real estate board. In September, TREB made its first alliance with the Oakville, Milton and District Real Estate Board, in order to give both boards a more comprehensive market view.

Now, some are calling Toronto the “Silicon Valley North” of proptech.

The city is home to a diverse set of global leaders who participate in the real estate market, with major property investors such as Colliers International, Brookfield and Oxford Properties all headquartered in Toronto.

“Toronto is North America’s fastest-growing tech market, creating more technology than the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and Washington, D.C., combined last year,” said Liao.

And, according to Tu, the technology talent is here, and accessible. In Silicon Valley, hiring experts is expensive, while elsewhere “there just aren’t enough.”

However, not everyone believes that proptech’s big moment has arrived.

Christopher Alexander, Re/Max executive vice-president and regional director of Ontario-Atlantic Canada, says the industry’s embrace of blockchain, AI and machine learning are still a few years out.

“I think next year is a bit too early, but if I was to bet on any of those things, I would say blockchain,” said Alexander. He believes blockchain has the potential to create change in the industry because of the way it’s structured to “give consumers security with their money.”

According to Royal LePage president Phil Soper, proptech will change the way people buy homes, but that won’t eliminate the role of advisors.

“Our AI talks people through their search process, and when they’re comfortable, the AI directs them to an advisor so they can dive deeper into the transaction,” said Soper. “We think we can reduce cycle time, we think we can make the process more enriching. But we don’t see it replacing humans in the transaction.”

Magliocco says that while he sees pockets of proptech development happening in 2019, “the big stuff won’t be happening next year, but we’ll be seeing it soon.”

Nonetheless, with new policies, investment and talent to back him and other proptech entrepreneurs, Tu says he’s excited for what’s to come.

“Fintech was 2018,” said Tu. “I think proptech is going to be 2019.”

igalea@postmedia.com

Canada’s property market may be cooling, but ‘proptech’ is booming published first on https://worldwideinvestforum.tumblr.com/

[mikemortgage]

Canada’s property market may be cooling, but ‘proptech’ is booming

This year, Devin Tu helped his real estate client avoid a multi-million dollar mistake.

“We had a client looking at a site in North York that they thought was ideal. But then, they used our tool, which scanned 25 different regulations and checked developments in the area in real time,” said Tu. “It turns out they had missed a key floodplain regulation.”

Had they bought the more-than-$10-million property, the client would have been stuck with land on which development would have been impossible. The area remains a parking lot today.

Tu is the founder and CEO of MapYourProperty, whose digital tool gives real estate developers a digital interface to access layers of important information about a property, including zoning bylaws and nearby proposals.

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His company is just one of a wave of proptech, or property technology, startups flooding the Canadian real estate sector, and developing a wide net of technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality applications.

“Real estate is one of the oldest and one of our biggest industries,” said Tu. “It has a huge gap where technology can completely disrupt it.”

The industry has ballooned in the past few years, largely funded by venture capital. Now it’s gaining recognition in the markets.

“Up until this year, there hadn’t been a ton of spotlight on proptech,” said Frank Magliocco, Canadian real estate leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. But recently investments in proptech has spiked, “almost like a hockey stick,” he said.

In 2012, $221 million was funneled into the global proptech market, according to startup data provider CB Insights. That number shot up to $4.2 billion in global venture capital in 2016, with 2017 seeing a total investment of $12.6 billion, according to market research agency Re:Tech.

Earlier this year, Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based real estate firm, committed $300 million under Brookfield Ventures to support real estate tech, while Jones Lang LaSalle launched an international venture fund to invest $100 million into the industry.

“If there’s that kind of money going into proptech, that means (it’s) going to have a pretty profound effect going forward,” said Magliocco.

Tu attributes the industry’s recent growth to necessity. Recently, the shortage of land supply and increased competition have forced real estate companies and their customers to make faster and better decisions.

From the perspective of data and transparency, the inefficiency in the commercial real estate market has been a difficult issue to tackle, according to Ben Liao, managing director at Techstars, a startup accelerator company based in Boulder, Colo. Earlier this year, the company chose Toronto to host its first international proptech accelerator program, featuring two Canadian proptech companies, including MapYourProperty.

“Creating client value through digital services in a space that is defined by a ‘real’ and physical experience in the ‘built world’ is difficult,” said Liao in an email. “Traditional industry leaders have been reticent to make significant investments in or adopt technology.”

The growth of the Canadian proptech market hit its stride after an important court ruling put valuable data in the hands of Toronto startups.

In August of 2017, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board over the restriction of home-sale data. The case began in 2012 when the Competition Bureau alleged that by restricting virtual office websites from accessing certain data, TREB was stunting industry growth and innovation.

The seven-year-long trial, ended with a federal Competition Bureau order that meant brokers could package transaction and property records. This increased access to important historical data and trends put non-traditional real estate brokerage offices in a position to develop and grow.

“It was a major ruling for Canada, because it’s going to help us transform to what the U.S. did five or 10 years ago,” said Tu.

Currently, aside from the Maritimes, few other Canadian real estate boards have updated their data-sharing rules to match those of Canada’s largest real estate board. In September, TREB made its first alliance with the Oakville, Milton and District Real Estate Board, in order to give both boards a more comprehensive market view.

Now, some are calling Toronto the “Silicon Valley North” of proptech.

The city is home to a diverse set of global leaders who participate in the real estate market, with major property investors such as Colliers International, Brookfield and Oxford Properties all headquartered in Toronto.

“Toronto is North America’s fastest-growing tech market, creating more technology than the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and Washington, D.C., combined last year,” said Liao.

And, according to Tu, the technology talent is here, and accessible. In Silicon Valley, hiring experts is expensive, while elsewhere “there just aren’t enough.”

However, not everyone believes that proptech’s big moment has arrived.

Christopher Alexander, Re/Max executive vice-president and regional director of Ontario-Atlantic Canada, says the industry’s embrace of blockchain, AI and machine learning are still a few years out.

“I think next year is a bit too early, but if I was to bet on any of those things, I would say blockchain,” said Alexander. He believes blockchain has the potential to create change in the industry because of the way it’s structured to “give consumers security with their money.”

According to Royal LePage president Phil Soper, proptech will change the way people buy homes, but that won’t eliminate the role of advisors.

“Our AI talks people through their search process, and when they’re comfortable, the AI directs them to an advisor so they can dive deeper into the transaction,” said Soper. “We think we can reduce cycle time, we think we can make the process more enriching. But we don’t see it replacing humans in the transaction.”

Magliocco says that while he sees pockets of proptech development happening in 2019, “the big stuff won’t be happening next year, but we’ll be seeing it soon.”

Nonetheless, with new policies, investment and talent to back him and other proptech entrepreneurs, Tu says he’s excited for what’s to come.

“Fintech was 2018,” said Tu. “I think proptech is going to be 2019.”

igalea@postmedia.com

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2CCGu7s via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[ramrodd]

After France and Veterans Day, are there any intelligent and/or highly educated people who support Donald Trump?

You may be a hard-wired crypto-Nazi if you love Atlas Shrugged like Paul Ryan or Paul Rand and/or you remain a dedicated Trumpster as a military lifer after Veterans Day

COMMENTARY:

A dialogue with Louis E. Walker, an example of the sort of lifer who scared me out of the Army, around the issue: “Yeah, your boy did a hell of job in France. That’s what I have been trying to explain to the Army community at the Tradoc level the nature of the crypto-Nazi elements in the GOP Deep State.  Most of the white male small buisness owners like Trump throughout America resent paying a nickel for the common defense. If a white male Indiana businessman can trace an unbroken heritage of avoiding military service since Lincoln, the chances are he and most of his business associates feel the same way. They basically feel that ANY military service is basically an extended summer camp that you grow out of by the time you complete business school and get a real job.

Now, I’ve started a fight with Louis E. Walker with the expectation of getting thrown of Quora for violating their standards for debate base on the sissy-world IT values of people who acquire their leadership skills from Atlas Shrugged, TED Talks and the Harvard Business School guru of the Dilbert Performance Model Robert MacNamara used to run Vietnam.  This is a technique of process theology intervention as a Organization Development model employed by Frank “Be All You Can Be” Burns. He and I are the only two process theology gurus in the world and he’s dead, This is called a “Kami Kazi” intervention. In order to get people’s attention in dysfuntional culture, you blow yourself up doing something so totally disruptive of the existing paradigm that they vote you off the island. I mean, this is what Jesus did and the difference between him and the expectations of the 2nd Temple Hebrew in Jereusalem AND the difference between Him and Mohammad, the difference between the Cross and the Sword. That’s the purpose of this dialogue to anyone who wants to break free of the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam and go where no man has gone before.

Including, if not especially, Oliver Stone.

If you review my Linkedin Profile, you will that I have had a career of getting fired from job to job. It’s why I got into venture capital. You can really get rich employing process theology without having to lie, cheat or steal and, if I could have put my dad through JumpStart Training/Army Family Building when he was demobbed in July 1946, he might have become successful in business and not been forced to re-up with the Army Chief of Staff to feed his family and put me through college. But this technology didn’t become available until Frank “Be All You Can Be” Burns created a career path for himself that allowed him to do total immersion research in, basically, Black’s Beach Coed Naked Beach Volly Ball human potential culture and bring it, appropriately, into the Army cultue of 5th wave High Performance, and create the Army of One. If you are in the high-cycle deployment of the modern military community, especially the Army community, Army Family Team Building began in the Long Bihn Jail in when Frank Burns was the warden and began to apply exactly the same social engineering of community organizers like Barack Obama and Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez and social entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Geore Meaney to improve the quality of the prisoner’s experience of the prison community and to refocus the individual energies on marketable skills as a strategy for reducing the violence. And that’s exactly what Gordon Sullivan realized the Army needed to fix itself after Vietnam and he authorized Task Force Delta to be the in-house human potential laboratory.

I was doing exactly the same thing as a process theology guru in finance and small business consulting. The biggest success I can point to in terms of Kami Kazi interventions was with getting Jim Kimsey motivated to become something more than being the court jester of the Capital Hill saloon owners like AOL.

I don’t offer solutions. I provide a process for do-it-yourself solutions for fun and profit and/or to meet the needs of the service. Just like Frank “Be All You Can Be” Burns. “The Tools of Transformation” in the publications on #transformingamericafirst Tumblr archives describes how that particular Kamikazi intervention occurred. I got thrown off AOL 6 times before I got bored with the IT guys running AOL who blew up the AOL-TimeWarner gig: I tried to warn Kimsey, but his ego was a lot like Louis E. Walker, a standard issue lifer, OD in color, air cooled, self-propelled military Peter Principle version of Dilbert in command.

So, if I get thrown off of Quora on the date of this post, it’s because I lost a knife fight with a master military bureaucrat in a class in unarmed self-defense. I’ve done what I can to make it impossible for Quora not to enforce their own policies and cheerfully hold me down while Louis E. Walker cuts out my heart with all the surgical skills of his shake-and-bake medical officer hands of the Chicken Corps Rambo. He likes to post a slander of somesort, knowing it will hit my email and I will respond, knowing that he covered his tracks by deleting his insult and then complaining to the IT hacks in Quora about PC violations that offend him.

I’m like Br’er Rabbit, Louis E. Walker: getting thrown off of Quora is my wtay of saying “Fuck you, shit for brains, and the shake and bake jug dance you represent. You are acting just exactly the way Newt Gingrich, the Che Guevara of the GOP Deep State, wants you to act for the maximum ROI of the Koch brother’s Dark Money.

Just remember, Army community, Louis E. Walker is endorsing Trump’s typical small businessman attitude towards the military as perfectly captured by Trump’s  no-shows in France and at Arlington.  The guy that laid the wreath at Arlington for Trump is Robert  Wilkie, head of the Veterans Administration, whose job it is, like John Kasich in the 80s, to cut the $180 biilion in needless fat in the VA budget, just like Whitaker with Mueller’s budget.

It isn’t an accident that “soldiering on” is an insult in the performance model of the Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “Scientific Management” at the core of the Harvard Business Model and the purpose of Dilbert. as the HR prototype for the Quora IT PC Police.

ORIGINAL RESPONSE

From 1975 until July 1978, I was involved in a US-Soviet aerospace IPO made possible by Nixon-Brezhnev “Detente” and Nixon’s design for airline deregulation. It provided a replacement for the DC-3 in service to small - medium, short-haul markets. and small communities associated with Earl Butz Agribusiness model based upon the family farm and farm communities like Rushville Indiana and light industrial communities like Columbus IN, Mike Pence’s hometown. In 1975, I was not as aware of Nixon’s domestic program as I can now describe it, but I was working the system as hard as I could to become filthy rich in a Elon Musk kind of way.

One day, Fred Smith of FedEx walked into our offices at Dulles IAD and said he wanted to buy our aircraft to replace his Falcon 30 jets that were too small for his markets and our aircraft allowed him to double his capacity while remaing in a FAA/CAB operational status of general aviation. The DC-3 is the moment commercial aviation advanced from basically pony express to man on the moon. It is at the apex of the economies of scale for general aviation and at the entry level of what has become the sperm whales of the US Air Transport System, a strategic fushion of Free Enterprise and socialistic structures. One of the reasons Marxism failed is because it can’t do the economic magic Free Enterprise does, routinely.

Anyway, Fred put a letter of intent for 30 aircraft, the US YaK-40 based on the YaK-40 mission design and aeronautics and packing it with American labor and parts and get it out, cheap, to Commuter Airlines feeding people like US Air and Southwest Airlines. It was a little bit of smoke and mirrors, but the order sat on the threshold for a practical venture capital public offering in any equity market.

We were looking for $300 million in $3 million dollars at a time. Part of the culture of the Army Command and General Staff College are professional commentary by previous graduates, such as George Patton, who told the Parable of Rock Soup to illustrate to staff officers trying to put a project together how to do it. It’s a very Will Rogers kind of tale, back when homeless veterans were called Hobos. A hobo goes to a farmer’s kitchen door and asks if he could draw some water so he could make some “Rock Soup”. “Rock Soup? what’s that” and the short version is that the hobo ends up with a can full of water, rock and some meat and vegetables, maybe some bacon grease, that the farmer’s wife added for flavoring.

My dad told me that story and we were putting this thing together from different boxes of jigsaw puzzles, erector sets and moonshine. FedEx needed to explain the novelty of FedEx to the FAA so they could build it into the regulations that they shared with the CAB as a federal mechanism for creating commerical air service from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 787. And the Space Shuttle. SpaceX. All this neat stuff is a direct result of strategic planning beginning just about as long as it took Billy Mitchell to get court-martialed for demonstrating the efficacy of aircraft like the DC-3 as an instrument of national security and the common defense. Me and my Boss/Partner were the K Street who explained to the FAA Forecast Branch that FedEx’s systemic novelty was that it is organized around ZIP Codes instead of railroad right of ways, which were the original Air Mail Route System, coast to coast. As near as I can tell, FedEx, UPS and Southwest are the only American commercial air service based on ZIP Codes: all the rest are using the same performance technology Robert McNamara used to fight Vietnam. I gave the FAA the language it needed to accommodate FedEx’s transition from Falcon 30 jets to 747’s.

In the final analysis, Vietnam came down to a contest between Marxism and the Harvard Business model and Marxism won. So, when anyone from Harvard tells me how clever Trump is, such as Scott Adams, I turn aside, to put it politely. Quora Moderation has just scolded me for putting it on the record my opinion of bake and shake medical and JAG officers with Rambo pretensions who are wont to ‘mansplain’ how the grownups understand the world as revealed by Spanky.

At the time we were looking for $300 million, Trump was beginning to nose around the same markets to bankroll Trump Tower. There wasn’t much liquidity in equity markets for a number of reasons, the defining factor being the end of the spending for Vietnam and the inflation that LBJ’s methods of financing the war created. Some people will remember Ford’s WIN program (Whip Inflation Now) and the Stagflation Carter inherited from LBJ and Nixon’s semi-stalled Affirmative Action domestic program which set a process in motion to transform the Military Industrial Complex to an Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix that DIDN’T anticipate the Internet or electronic trading. (Ross Perot talked Donald T. Reagan into installing electronic trading on the NYSE that began to come on line in 1979, but the pros on the floor didn’t have any idea what a revolution electronic trading was until it hit them in the face in 1982.)

But in 1977, FedEx went public with an $80 million IPO and sucked all the liquidity out of the markets, everywhere and Trump and I were looking for the same spare change.

I left the project in 1978 over conceptual differences and did this and that, including hypnotizing Jim Kimsey one night in one of his saloons in an effort to recruit him as the venture capitalist for the X=Avia project (ICX Aviation-AviaExport) to do for us what he ended up doing for Steve Case. Then I went to work for a minority-owned consulting firm providing resources to clients of the Community Services Administration, SBA, HUD and HHS. Carter’s domestic chief, Stuart Eizenstat, had adopted Nixon’s Affirmative Action design pretty much whole cloth and was really able to get it going because a difference between Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s was that the white male Republicans were like Rush Limbaugh and wanted to get on the corporate career track and join his daddy’s country club while white male Democrats were engaged in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements were community organizers like Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and social entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos.

And, in 1980, the Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action process transforming the Military Industrial Complex into the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix was getting real traction. And, as part of this, Eizenstat arranged for the federal, state and municiple guarantees that Equitable needed to finance Trump Tower as an element of the gentrification mandate of the Nixon-Moynihan design, that is, to get money into existing communities across the full continuum of housing to avoid the displacement of the Urban Renewal projects of the LBJ’s Great Society. Southwest DC is an example: they bulldozed everything east of the harbor, and displaced several generations of black culture. Nixon’s gentrification model was to make the capital available in communities like that to renew themselves in a preservation kind of way. Here, in DC, the Latino Economic Development Community is a legacy of the social entrepreneur side of that equation at the grass roots level.

I reviewed the entire CSA portfolio in 1980 and, when Reagan won, I took it to the head of his transition team, Charles Z. Wick, and made the pitch that I had a method for keeping the GOP in the majority in the Senate forever. I didn’t get into the details of how Eizenstat’s intent was to employ Trump Tower as the anchor for urban renewal in the community surrounding the building— pretty much how it’s played out. I looked at a similar project in the Bronx a couple of blocks from where the Clinton Foundation is and told them they needed to create a similar anchor. (They wanted to create a mini-neighborhood Disneyland and I understood the aspiration but the needed a commercial property like Trump Tower to support that aspiration.) People were really just feeling their way into the concept behind the Coalition for Non-Profit Housing and Economic Development here, in DC, yet another legacy of the success of Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action.

An operating assumption of Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action is the process theology of the Democratic Socialism embedded in the US Constitution and the operational paradign of the Free Enterprise economics of American constitutional capitalism as it reflects the economics of Jesus and Adam Smith.

Anyway, I didn’t get into these details with Charles Z. Wick, but what I wanted was to be the job in the Schedule C political slots in Reagan’s administration of Administrator of the Community Services Administration. He liked the sound of the idea, so he asked me about my resume and, as I was running through it all, he broke out in a rant like Rush Limpdick riffing on Title IX and told me I was on a crypto-Nazi black list because I was a Vietnam loser and had done business with the Soviets. I had run right into the leading edge of what has become the GOP Deep State and here I am, explaining how “highly educated and intelligent” “Trump supporters” is a contradiction in terms, 37 years later.

The Trump Tower is a monument to Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action and it was extremely important to the morale of New York City at the time. America was as run-down in 1968 as it is now and Nixon promised to renew the America of the Silent Majority in his campaign.

Trump Tower is that promise being fulfulled.

Reagan had everything he needed in 1981 to complete the transition to an Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix without the internet or electronic trading and to establish a permanent moon colony by 2001, just like the movie, but the agenda of the Powell Manifesto became the dominant paradigm and the crypto-Nazi Deep State apparatchiks like Grover Norquist, John Kashich, David Stockman and Matt Whitaker that came to town with Reagan began to dismantle the Democratic Socialism of Eisenhower’s 1956 Presidential Platform and replacing it with the Tory Socialism of the 19th Century Oligarch capitalism and class warfare of Reaganomics and the Fascist sophistry of zero-sum, gold-based, laissez-faire Free Market supply-side economics of present Venezuela, Soviet Marxism and the Harvard Business model.

People who believe they are intelligent, especially Harvard MBA graduates who identify with Tucker Carlson, and are Trump backers need to understand that the political tactics of obstruction and subversion introduced by Newt Gingricn and implemented by McConnell and Ryan have a material cost.

If the Democrats had kept the majority in either or both chambers of Congress throughout Obama’s administration and/or Hillary had been elected and kept what she inherited from Obama, the GDP would have hit 8% sometime between 2015 and this midterm. This bull market is not a leading indicator. It’s based entirely on deficit spending but without any particular existential anchor. It’s just money making a brief transit of the markets from the treasury to the Koch brother’s trust funds, as a proxy for the GOP Deep State.

What you got is Trump voters who consider themselves intelligent because, like Brett Kavanaugh, they got an expensive education and work really hard like good little boys and girls, when the reality is they are just greedy and making too much money to really think things through.

Now, I always reluctantly admired Trump for his success with Trump Tower. I use him as an example of The Entrepreneur in the American sense of the word as an element of the process theology of Organization Development: The Entrepreneur

Structures of Affirmative Action: The Community as a Capitalist Tool

If these people who believe they are really intelligent, especially because they have expensive educations made possible by hard work and the status of a third generation legacy, divided their time between trying to sabotage progressive capitalism and actually employing capitalism to fix the problems they deny exist, someone like Trump would have been out of syndication ten years ago.

Instead, his ratings are better than Jim Acosta.

In the final analysis, the question: Are there any intelligent and/or highly educated people who support Donald Trump?, is a contradiction in terms.

EDIT: Additional commentary in response to a REPLY by Jb Coram.

Honestly, I hope it continues for you.

There is something that you can understand in that regard; Bob Dole’s 1986 Tax Reform vacated several strata of wealth that caused the collapse of the junk bond markets and the crises in the Savings and Loans industry that led to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was the largest transfer of wealth from the America middle class to the upper US economic strata in history. That set off the recession that came back to haunt GHW Bush in 1992 and contributed directly to his defeat at re-election.

Trump Towaers was essentially financed by the Nixon-Moynihan-Carter Affirmative Action processes that had been set into motion by Nixon to transform the Military Industrial Complex to an Aerospace Entrepreneurial Matrix. The Carter people arranged for the guarantees for The Equitable to finance Trump as part of the larger gentrification agenda Nixon had inherited from LBJ and improved upon. Trump Tower worked exactly as desired for urban renewal and was very important to the morale of NYC in turning itself around from bankruptcy in the 1980’s and was reflected by the City’s response to 911.

Trump’s personal business model, such as it was, depended upon the structures of Affirmative Action, moving forward, and Dole’s Tax Reforms was the first step by the crypto-Nazis who came to town with Reagan to dismantle Affirmative Action and replace it with the Tory Socialism and class warfare of Reaganomics and the 19th Century Oligarch economics of the Harvard Business model and Supply Side economcs.

RE: FORBES: Alexander. 7 March 2018

The hole in Trump’s net worth is a direct result of this deconstruction and, in a broader context. why Atlantic City never got any traction and Trump’s casinos went bankrupt: all the capital the banks and investors put into the urban renewal of Atlantic City was sucked out of the same holes created by Dole’s Tax Reforms and redistributed to the 1% that benefited from the Resolution Trust Corporation.

The current bull market and business activity you are enjoying are based almost entirely on deficit spending and the economic froth in the markets that these cash flows create. I. personally, believe it is illusionary.

The fact is that the 2017 Trump Tax Reforms are based on exactly the same assumptions as Dole’s 1986 Tax Reforms and the “de-regulation” he like to brag about has essentially removed all the structures Bush and Obama created to prevent the complete economic collapse that the mortgage frauds created in 2008.

The fact is that I am hoping that the bottom doesn’t fall out of the economy the way it did for Trump’s net worth in 1990 after a similarly strong upward curve in 89.

The fact is that I think that Trump avoided featuring the economy in his midterm message because the smart money doesn’t know what’s happening and he didn’t want to draw attention to some very dubious indicators.

The politicians that complained about his lack of focus on the economy, the Ryan-McConnell crowd that obstructed Obama from continuing to resurrect the economy literally don’t know shit about economics. I mean, Ayn Rand is Paul Ryan’s intellectual mentor and Eddie Lampert is doing to Sears what Reaganomics has been doing to the middle class since 1986. Tory Socialism works fine for the top 1% of the economic pyramid, but you, buddy, maybe not so much.

The 4.1% GDP growth Trump brags about includes a huge wave of new inflation that the current metrics have been designed to conceal since 1981 and, more to the point, if the Democrats had kept either or both chambers of Congress in 2010 and Clinton had been re-elected and just not touched anything, I think the GDP would have begun expanding at closer to 8% sometime after 2014 and definitely in before the mid-terms in Clinton’s first term.

So, my prayers and thoughts are with you and your continuing success. I hope I’m wrong but Trump is all smoke and mirrors and much of the mechanisms for this exist in the off-shore economic shadow the Paradise Papers illuminate partially.

In the mean time, you have the satisfaction of pissing people like me off by your politics. I hope it sustains your satisfaction.

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York 2017

Red Bull Music Academy returned to New York this year for yet another well-curated series of performances, lectures, club nights, and workshops. As is tradition now, TMT sent a few writers to cover some of these events, which included a hip-hop piano bar show, Brazilian bass music, a showcase for one of our favorite labels, an interdisciplinary performance piece/meditation, and a couple lectures from two vital artists of our time. --- Solange: An Ode To Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool After the late performance of An Ode To had ended, Solange Knowles took some time to speak to the audience about the piece she had just performed for us, her development as a musician, and the space she had just occupied for her work. Referring to the Guggenheim Museum’s atrium, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “temple” that has been home to countless exhibitions and performances of significance, Solange spoke of wanting to “immerse my work in the daylight,” of “having a show where I can see the faces” of the people there to see her. This quality of light was one of the most striking things about Ode: the combination of bright sun from the building’s skylight (both of the show’s performances were scheduled in the afternoon) and flat, even museum lighting gave the work a context that immediately made it something different than just “Solange playing in a museum.” And it was true, you could see everyone’s face in the small crowd that was brought in, dress code and all (those in the audience who did not heed Knowles’s request to dress in all white were few, and easily spottable). This, and the fact that much of those in attendance were seated on the ground just feet away from the band, gave the event an incredible sense of intimacy; in staging and tone, An Ode To felt almost private, a personal work by a young artist both in development and at the top of her game, wildly talented and still growing. This piece was a substantial step in that growth: billed in the program as “an interdisciplinary performance piece and meditation,” Solange took elements from A Seat At The Table and rebuilt them, framing them in new ways — often stripping the arrangements down to their absolute minimum, at others exploding them with a new, startling sense of size. The core band was skeletal, augmented by two backup singers and a recurring cast of dancers and horn players — and though the music was the center of the performance, Solange seemed just as committed to exploring the work physically, leading her ensemble in precise, often beautiful choreography (done in cooperation with dance coordinator Eloise Deluca) and expressive a capella breaks that were, more than just a compliment to the songwriting, as much a piece of the work as her music. Photo: Stacy Kranitz / Red Bull Content Pool At times it felt like Solange was ripping open her album and re-examining it on a microscopic level, and the evening’s trajectory from its hauntingly minimal opening numbers to the explosion of feeling in her dual performances of “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “FUBU” (through which Solange walked through the crowd to sing directly to those gathered, causing at least one man she approached during the show I attended to have a complete ‘Oh my fucking god solange is standing right next to me’ meltdown — one of the few instances where the close-quarters of the room served to amplify the singer’s goddess status) felt like an investigation of what exactly the limits of this music were. Embracing the atrium as a necessary component of the performance — having her players descend down the ramp to the performance area, hiding her horn section under its walls, or more concretely using the chamber’s space to amplify the echo of basslines, solitary snare hits, or the complex three-part vocal breaks, almost dub-like in their hugeness — Solange built something site-specific and yet with resonances beyond this set of concerts. This, and Solange’s ability to fill the historically white space — figuratively and literally — of the Guggenheim with persons of colors (whether her entirely black and brown band or the vast majority of those in attendance) resonated as both an assertion of Solange’s power, and the ability for change within music to ripple out as broader, Earthly changes, and in some way an echo of the work’s broader exploration of expression voiced against its opposite. –Dylan Pasture --- Sacred Bones 10 Year Anniversary Photo: Colin Kerrigan / Red Bull Content Pool Sometimes I want to be devastated. The morning of the Sacred Bones 10 Year Anniversary showcase, I drew the ten of swords. How fitting. One for each year. The ten of swords is about hitting rock bottom and falling apart. Mine depicts a bull stabbed in the head. One sword even pierces the eyes. Usually I read this card as a warning. Get outside your mind before it eats you alive. I know I should have at least tried to be more vigilant. Instead, I turned to my friend and said that it felt perfect for Sacred Bones. What I mean is, I entered Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse thinking about collision. A giant moon hung from the rafters. I became aware of the space as malleable and tried not to understand. I wanted to feel it. Emotionally and viscerally. How else can I describe the experience other than to call it spiritual? Perhaps it has to do with juxtaposition. Like being ripped in half while watching Uniform and again while watching Marissa Nadler. Both strangely meditative. Uniform wrought havoc in the form of relentless noise. Like a vicious cycle indicative of how frustrating and limiting it can feel to live inside a body as the entire world burns. How everything seems impossible, at least everything but clawing up the walls and screaming into a void. Nadler described that void. Glimpsed it and shed light upon the center when she sang, “I can’t go back, I don’t wanna go back, to that house or that life again.” I felt my heart break like a window thrown open in the middle of a storm. Like I was listening alone in my bedroom. Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool I want music to fuck me up and scrape me out and leave me wondering where to go. This is why I love Sacred Bones. Watching The Men play with all of their original members, I thought about how it felt to discover Sacred Bones when I was on the radio in college. I had just begun listening to more dissonant and intense music, and pretty much anything released on Sacred Bones would freak me out. And I loved it. I still love it. Jenny Hval wore black velvet with a hood. She wore a black wig. She said we would all become family through blood ties. She moved through fog. She received a haircut while singing. She snaked her arms around her collaborators. The line between song and manifesto disappeared, which left me considering the body and the idea of ceremony. Magic as political. I had been inhabited and transformed. Part of me was somewhere else. Blanck Mass made the ritual of noise and light so huge that it was like the whole space had been swallowed. Zola Jesus ended the show with kinetics. I mean, pop so shattered and frenzied I felt hypnotized. Oscillating between the cathedral and the rave. Between gothic and cosmic. It was an ideal culmination of the energy swirling all night inside Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse. Like a vibration powered by obsession with darkness and weirdness. I felt a shift inside my body upon leaving. Simply existing was totally different. –Caroline Rayner --- Piano Nights: Gucci Mane and Zaytoven Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool It’s a cliché meme for someone to say “I am the American Dream,” and in an era with such little room for systemic romanticization, such a proclamation is also politically problematic at best. Nevertheless, Gucci Mane is the American Dream. If you’re like me, or any of the numerous other hip-hop devotees who’ve eventually come around to Guwop, the first time you heard him, you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. “Mumble-rap,” as it’s now called today, may be stylistic affectation for some, but there was no such phrase back when Gucci started doing it; probably because not since Rakim had a rapper put so many words together so poetically while sounding so close to falling asleep. In some parallel world, an alternate version of myself would never dare to use Rakim and Gucci’s names in the same sentence, but here we are. Rap is “mumble-rap,” the phrase itself is an anachronism functioning primarily as an age identifier of the writer who writes it, and this 31-year-old writer has watched Gucci Mane perform some of his most popular songs in a swank cocktail bar on the Lower East Side, accompanied by his producer Zaytoven on live piano. Photo: Carys Huws / Red Bull Content Pool Forget arrest records, jail bids, shootings, rap beefs, Twitter meltdowns, Harmony Korine courtings — forget all that, because it’s not what I’m referring to when I say Gucci Mane is the American Dream. I’m not talking about the American Dream of the bootlegger turned politician or the drug dealer turned real estate mogul. I’m not talking about the American Dream of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or DiCaprio’s. I am talking about the American Dream of American music. Arguably our greatest cultural achievements, jazz, blues, rock, and hip-hop music were all originally perceived as amusical by the critical powers that be and eventually recognized as expressions of “higher art,” whatever that may be. I’m not trying to absolve myself here. When I first heard Gucci Mane, I might not have gone so far as to say it wasn’t hip-hop, but I definitely didn’t hear what others heard, simply because I had never heard anyone rap like that before. I literally didn’t understand what he was saying. I can only speak for myself , but I’ve personally witnessed yesterday’s proto-“mumble-rap” become today’s instantly sold-out black-tie affair of the millennium — dress code for the event called for attendees to wear their “finest formal wear” — and as far as I’m concerned that’s the American Dream. –Samuel Diamond --- A Conversation with Alvin Lucier Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool Perhaps the best story told at Alvin Lucier’s intimate gathering in the basement of Red Bull Arts was his response to the question of what, if any, recent versions of his legendary work “I Am Sitting In A Room” have been most meaningful to him. As Lucier described it, after a concert performance of the piece at MIT, a 10-year-old boy came up to the man and declared: “That’s cool!” The boy then later went home and recorded his own version of the work on his laptop and emailed it to the legendary composer. This, Lucier said, was a version he liked a lot. Watching Lucier speak, it seems much of what gives life to his work — even at its most conceptually adventurous — is this very down-to-Earthness, an embrace of the everyday, the generosity of spirit and lack of pretense that allows the experiments of a child to stand alongside that of a “legitimate” performance venue. Elsewhere, Lucier explained that he wrote his own text for Sitting in lieu of adapting a poem because he didn’t want to use anything “high falutin’.” Though possessed with perhaps one of the most refined imaginations in experimental composition, he insisted that he was uninterested in “theory.” In Lucier’s words: “My decisions are real.” Through a life-spanning conversation moderated by Red Bull’s Todd L. Burns, Lucier returned to this theme in many forms. When discussing his coursework as a Professor (preserved, in some form, in his text Music 109) he spoke of trying to “demystify” music for his students, of telling them he was not interested in their opinions, but in their “perceptions.” And as he dove into his own use of perception in his work — whether in using the echolocation of bats as a reference for his use of delay, or how his refracted Beatles arrangement “Nothing Is Real” was meant to capture the sense of remembering “where you were when you heard a song for the first time” — one had the feeling of an artist trying to demystify the senses for himself, grounding the mysterious in something sturdy and real. Evocatively describing how those bats use sound to travel in the dark, Lucier slipped us a kind of statement of purpose: “You can’t cheat if you’re trying to survive.” Threaded through these discussions of technique were lovely anecdotes of the artist’s large and impressive circle of acquaintances, dishing on everyone from John Ashbery and Nam June Paik to Morton Feldman and, of course, John Cage, who was revealed to have apparently inspired (and/or peer-pressured) the first performance of Lucier’s brain-wave piece “Music For Solo Performer” into existence. Though anecdotally anchoring himself among many of the greats of 20th century art, Lucier left the intimate group gathered to listen to him on an appropriately humble, un-elevated note. When asked by an audience member if music had a “spiritual meaning” for him, he answered, simply: “No.” –Dylan Pasture --- Fluxo: Funk Proibidão Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool This year’s Red Bull Music Academy takeover of NYC began with the announcement that MC Bin Laden, the headliner for the inaugural evening’s Brazilian bass event, would not be able to perform for reasons out of his and the festival organizers’ control. I found out from a friend that this meant he’d been denied entry at the US border, presumably an exercise of ideological power by immigration officials. RBMA itself embodies corporate accumulation of cultural capital, a late phenomenon toward which discerning ravers maintain a healthy ambivalence, suspended between cynicism and the notion that maybe, particularly if the artists can gain control of it, this type of power could be better than the kind that preceded it. The announcement, emailed via the ticketing agent the day of the event, brought a latent global power strata to the fore that framed the event: the admittedly neoliberal post-nation-state RMBA agenda versus the utterances of the deep-state monolith, which you only find out about through texts from a friend who knows a friend of someone who was at the border. And so RBMA NYC 2017 began. Even with MC Bin Laden not present, though, the Fluxo event was stacked with a formidable range of Brazilian bass DJs and emcees, strung together under the banner of maximalist sonic valence with NYC party mainstays Venus X and Asmara, Detroit ghetto house forbearer DJ Assault and the indefinable entity that is Chicago’s Sicko Mobb, who themselves are Red Bull-sponsored artists. Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool After being encouraged by the coterie of Red Bull chaperones near to the door to enjoy my evening, I entered the venue to find Sicko Mobb bobbing and jack-balling amidst one another on stage, Ceno wearing a bright red T-shirt with “BALMAIN POWER” printed in shiny bold Impact font across the front. My friend and I quickly situated ourselves behind a car whose interior was rigged with overzealous strobe lights, one of several props situated throughout the venue that upon reviewing the event literature I realized was intended to be a simulation of “the neon-lit car stereos lining the local block parties [in the favelas of Brazil] known as fluxos.” Despite being obfuscated by a thick wall of smoke-and-strobe that would give Dean Blunt a run for his money, Lil Trav and Ceno breezed through a seemingly arbitrary selection of their metallic, sweet-sad bop songs, still a sound without any real parallels in hip-hop: “Own Lane” and “Go Plug” from the Super Saiyan Vol. 2 mixtape, throwbacks like “Fiesta,” “Hoes Be Goin’,” and “Round and Round.” In lieu of a DJ, an associate played tracks from an iPhone, and following in the tradition of cutting songs short he simply stopped the playback at random points, the music giving way to the sound of smoke and low chatter in the absence of DJ wheel-up sounds. DJ Assault took the stage shortly thereafter, living up to his name by starting the set out at a casual 145 bpm and playing “Let Me Bang” almost immediately after getting on stage. The venue was only beginning to fill as he warmed up the crowd, plunging headfirst into the obscene territory of booty music blended together with cumbia and proibidão. Obscenity and disorientation seemed to be forming as obvious mantras seeded by the party organizers as I went into the port-a-potty nested inside the warehouse and found it was resonating on beat with the bass, which only served to highlight that there was no respite from the building disorientation of the space. Venus X and Asmara played the mid-event set, rolling out a hip-hop-heavy set that felt somewhat obligatory to the context of the party, and MC Carol did not take the stage until very late, at which point the crowd was not well-positioned to entertain a set of emceeing. We left and hung out in the park, and talked about the slightly off feeling we were left with, and wondered if it was the party or us who was off. –Nick Henderson --- A Conversation with Werner Herzog On Music and Film Photo: Stacy Kranitz / Red Bull Content Pool [This lecture review is to be read in the voice of preeminent German filmmaker Werner Herzog: I do not care if this offends him or you; it is critical.] I was not sure if I would be able to make it to the lecture on time. As it was being held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in one of the many areas of Manhattan with notoriously limited street parking, I elected to take the Long Island Rail Road, which picked me up directly behind my day job in Garden City. Inevitably late, the train did not leave me enough time to reach the venue via public transportation, and because this would have required that I transfer between multiple subways and a bus, I instead hailed a taxi in front of Penn Station. I knew this meant I would have to pay more, as these cabs are permitted by the City to charge extra for the premium pickup location, but I did not care. I had somewhere I needed to be and no way to get there sooner. Looking at my phone during the 50-block cab ride, I learned President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. Also, the publicist facilitating Tiny Mix Tapes’ coverage notified me that the doors were closing. I was dismayed but not altogether discouraged. When I arrived at the event, a discussion with Werner Herzog on music and film, the gentleman admitting ticketholders and press-listees told me the lecture had only started about five minutes ago. My name being confirmed, I proceeded up the museum steps to a dark auditorium where I was ushered to an empty seat not far from my point of entry. I saw erected on the stage a faux living room similar to Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns set, but more fully furnished, with couches and a film-projector screen hung above and behind them. At stage right, shrouded in cinematic shadow, stood a tall man looking up at the screen. When the film clip ended, the lights came on revealing him to be Herzog. He seated himself on the couch at center stage and spoke with a nebbish film-critic-type about music in films, his and others. He indicated he chooses the music for his films almost exclusively by feeling. He cited Fred Astaire’s dance routines as a prime example of the marriage of music and cinema, though in far less romantic terms. He reminisced about teasing Popol Vuh founder Florian Fricke during a friendly soccer match over his interest in New Age thinking and going home badly bruised for it. He said he hadn’t heard the phrase “krautrock” until just a few days earlier. In the Q&A portion of the event, he found occasion to reassert his argument that Elon Musk is acting foolishly in his pursuit of Martian colonization, that humanity would be better served conserving and protecting its home on Earth. He admitted that though there is no purposeful allusion to so-called spirituality in his films, some of his early religious teachings most likely had a lasting effect on his viewpoint and that he always strives to evoke a sense of poetry with his filmmaking to “elevate” the thinking of his viewers. On my way out, a Red Bull employee offered me a drink from a tray holding multiple colored cans. I took one at random; “Acai Berry”-something, she called it. “Save it for the morning,” she said. Thanking her, I cracked it open and exited to the cultured darkness of New York City’s Upper East Side. –Samuel Diamond http://j.mp/2qxIPYU