#literally love talking about rocks and soil and how life interacts with the world

[lilybug-02]

On a scale of one to ten how much are you interested in begs and wildlife 

My major is Environmental Geoscience and I have watched every animal documentary known to man.

I LOVE BUGS AND WILDLIFE.

[urbilaterian]

(Nobody becomes an Environmental Science major without falling at least a little bit In Love with Big Mama Earth)

So.

What do you Love about Earth?

There are a million things I could talk about here, but one thing i find so beautiful about our world is the sheer depth of complexity

If you take any patch of land or any piece of habitat, big or small, seemingly empty or packed with life. If you look hard enough, you'll almost invariably discover that it contains an endlessly deep web of influences and interactions!

Any piece of soil is an impossibly complex mixture created from the actions of a thousand different organisms, large and small, acting on the chemical cycles of the air, the water, the rocks

And the rocks themselves are incredibly dense with information! From charting the literal history of our environment, to the preserved final moments of creatures that lived tens of millions of years ago, to affecting how we humans live on the land right now.

And this pattern holds true almost anywhere you try and look, whether that's large-scale weather systems or food webs I first learned about in primary school.

No matter how far you zoom in or out, there is always just so much more to see, and I dont know if I'll ever get over that fact.

[jonathanalumbaugh]

Weekly Digest

Dec 16, 2017, 3rd issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Published weekly(ish).

Read

Whoever your graphic design portfolio site is aimed at, you have to remember that people’s time and attention is limited. Employers, to take one example, may look at dozens of portfolios in the space of 10 minutes. So you only have a few seconds to really grab their attention and enthuse them.

—8 great graphic design portfolio sites for 2018

Paying for more than 3,500 daily drinks for six years, it turns out, is expensive. The NIH would need more funding—and soon, a team stepped up to the plate. The Foundation of the NIH, a little-known 20-year-old non-profit that calls on donors to support NIH science, was talking to alcohol corporations. By the fall of 2014, the study was relying on the industry for “separate contributions to the Foundation of the NIH beyond what the NIAAA could afford,” as Mukamal put it in an e-mail to a prospective collaborator. Later that year, Congress encouraged the NIH to sponsor the study, but lawmakers didn’t provide any money. Five corporations—Anheuser-Busch InBev, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Heineken, and Carlsberg—have since provided a total of $67 million. The foundation is seeking another $23 million, according to its director of development, Julie Wolf-Rodda.

—A MASSIVE HEALTH STUDY ON BOOZE, BROUGHT TO YOU BY BIG ALCOHOL

When Starbucks (SBUX) announced that it was closing its Teavana tea line and wanted to shutter all of its stores, mall operator Simon Property Group (SPG) countered with a lawsuit. Simon cited in part the effect the store closures might have on other mall tenants.

Earlier this month, a judge upheld Simons' suit, ordering Teavana to keep 77 of its stores open.

—America's malls are rotting away

The Dots claims to have a quarter of a million members and current clients include Google, Burberry, Sony Pictures, Viacom, M&C Saatchi, Warner Music, Tate, Discovery Networks and VICE amongst others.

—Aiming to be the LinkedIn for creatives, The Dots raises £4m

The Cboe's bitcoin futures fell 10 percent Wednesday, triggering a two-minute trading halt early Wednesday afternoon.

—Bitcoin futures briefly halted after plunging 10%

Through a very clever scheme, the people behind Tether can continue to send Bitcoin into the stratosphere until it reaches a not-yet-known breaking point. 

—Bitcoin Only Has One Way To Go If This Is True

—Bitcoin Price Dilemma: Bull and Bear Paths in Play

—Botera – Free Font

"He is being a huge assh*le and avoiding you so it literally forces you to be the one to break up with him because he's too much of a coward to do it himself. GOD, I HATE GUYS."

—"Breakup Ghosting" Is the Most Cowardly Way to End a Relationship

—Britain rejected the EU, and the EU is loving its new life

“Although the science is still evolving, there are concerns among some public health professionals and members of the public regarding long-term, high use exposure to the energy emitted by cellphones,” Dr. Karen Smith, CDPH Director and State Public Health Officer, said in a statement.

—California Warns People to Limit Exposure to Cellphones

There is a way CSS can get its hands on data in HTML, so long as that data is within an attribute on that HTML element. 

—The CSS attr() function got nothin’ on custom properties

“The recent coverage of AI as a single, unified power is a predictable upshot of a self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley culture that believes it can summon a Godhead,” says Thomas Arnold 

—Former Google and Uber engineer is developing an AI 'god'

Here are two facts: 1) Throughout the tail end of Matt Lauer’s tenure at NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America beat it in the ratings, and 2) In the two weeks since Lauer was kicked to the curb for sexual misconduct and replaced by Hoda Kotb, Today’s viewership has surpassed GMA’s by a considerable margin.

Here are two opinions: 1) No one ever really liked Matt Lauer, but tolerated him as you would a friend you’ve known for 20 years but have nothing in common with anymore, 2) Hota Kotb makes everything better.

—A Funny Thing Is Happening to Today Now That Matt Lauer Is Gone: Its Ratings Are Going Up

The game challenges you to build an empire that stands the test of time, taking your civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age as you wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders.

—Get the newest game in 'Sid Meier’s Civilization' series for 50% off

Amazingly, despite the mind control and hypnosis, the girl resisted being totally drawn into her father’s “cult of three.” But she suffered from self-loathing and took to self-harm as a coping mechanism.

—Girl’s father tortured her for a decade to make her ‘superhuman’

The most searched for dog breed was the golden retriever.

—Google's top searches for 2017: Matt Lauer, Hurricane Irma and more

"A few months ago, I started collecting stories from people about their real experiences with loneliness. I started small, asking my immediate network to share with their friends/family, and was flooded with submissions from people of all ages and walks of life.

"The Loneliness Project is an interactive web archive I created to present and give these stories a home online. I believe in design as a tool to elevate others' voices. Stories have tremendous power to spark empathy, and I believe that the relationship between design and emotion only strengthens this power.

—Graphic designer tackles issue of wide-spread loneliness in moving campaign

While the Windows 10 OpenSSH software is currently in Beta, it still works really well. Especially the client as you no longer need to use a 3rd party SSH client such as Putty when you wish to connect to a SSH server.

—Here's How to Enable the Built-In Windows 10 OpenSSH Client

In America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. 

—How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

Today was "Break the Internet" day, in which many websites altered their appearance and urged visitors to contact members of Congress about the pending repeal (see the gallery above for examples from Reddit, Kickstarter, GitHub, Mozilla, and others).

—How Reddit and others “broke the Internet” to support net neutrality today

“He’s the Usain Bolt of business for Jamaica,” Richards said. “For each Jamaican immigrant, Lowell Hawthorne is me, he’s you. He was the soul of Jamaica, the son of our soil, and all of our struggles were identified with him.”

—How the Jamaican patty king made it to the top — before ending it all

—How to break a CAPTCHA system in 15 minutes with Machine Learning

After the trap has snapped shut, the plant turns it into an external stomach, sealing the trap so no air gets in or out. Glands produce enzymes that digest the insect, first the exoskeleton made of chitin, then the nitrogen-rich blood, which is called hemolyph.

The digestion takes several days depending on the size of the insect, and then the leaf re-opens. By that time, the insect is a "shadow skeleton" that is easily blown away by the wind.

—How the Venus Flytrap Kills and Digests Its Prey

Back at The Shed, Phoebe has arrived. She's an intuitive waitress who can really get across the nuances of our menu, like how – by serving pudding in mugs – we're aiming to replicate the experience of what it's like to eat pudding out of a mug. 

—I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor

In order to create a candlestick chart, you must have a data set that contains open, high, low and closevalues for each time period you want to display. The hollow or filled portion of the candlestick is called “the body” (also referred to as “the real body”). The long thin lines above and below the body represent the high/low range and are called “shadows” (also referred to as “wicks” and “tails”). The high is marked by the top of the upper shadow and the low by the bottom of the lower shadow.

—Introduction to Candlesticks

The object in question is ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid from another star system currently zipping past Jupiter at about 196,000 miles per hour, too fast to be trapped by the sun’s gravitational pull. First discovered in mid-October by astronomers at the Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii, the 800-meter-long, 80-meter-wide, cigar-shaped rock is, technically speaking, weird as hell—and that’s precisely why some scientists think it’s not a natural object.

—Is This Cigar-Shaped Asteroid Watching Us?

I tried out LinkedIn Career Advice and Bumble Bizz over the course of a work week and compared them in terms of how easy they are to use and the kind of people they introduce you to.

—I tried LinkedIn's career advice app vs. dating app Bumble's version and discovered major flaws with both

“The Bitcoin dream is all but dead,” I wrote.

—I Was Wrong About Bitcoin. Here’s Why.

—Jessen's Orthogonal Icosahedron

In the study, depressed patients who got an infusion of ketamine reported rapid relief from suicidal thoughts—many as soon as a few hours after receiving the drug.

—Ketamine Relieved Suicidal Thoughts Within Hours in Hospital Study

We are trying to create an Open Source Website that searches through an open database of Interactive Maps focused on learning in a linear way. It leverages all of world’s knowledge in a unique way. It takes the Wikipedia model of curating knowledge but applies it to curating links in a meaningful and visual way.

—Learn Anything White Paper

"It was a very new word [in 1841]," Sokolowski said. "[Noah Webster’s] definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today. His definition was, 'The qualities of females,' so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness. We do see evidence that the word was used in the 19th century in a medical sense, for the physical characteristics of a developing teenager, before it was used as a political term, if you will."

—Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2017: 'Feminism'

The Wall Street Journal issued a new note on its style blog earlier this week, suggesting the publication not write about millennials with such disdain.

"What we usually mean is young people, so we probably should just say that," the new WSJ note reads. "Many of the habits and attributes of millennials are common for people in their 20s, with or without a snotty term."

—'Millennials': Be Careful How We Use This Label

As of writing, the CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) is at $16,743 levels. The world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has appreciated 0.72 percent in the last 24 hours, going by CoinMarketCap data.

—No Stopping? After New High, Bitcoin Price Eyes $20k

People who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors.

"Perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention," the researchers wrote.

Interestingly, how neurotic someone was didn't affect how they interpreted mistakes.

—People Who Constantly Point Out Grammar Mistakes Are Pretty Much Jerks, Scientists Find

Hydrogen particles are made up of an electron and a proton. Exciton particles, then, are made up of an electron that’s escaped and the negative space it left behind when it did so. The hole actually acts like a particle, attracting the escaped electron and bonding with it; they orbit each other the same way an electron and a proton would.

—PHYSICS BREAKTHROUGH: NEW FORM OF MATTER, EXCITONIUM, FINALLY PROVED TO EXIST AFTER 50-YEAR SEARCH 

For reasons that people are now trying to determine, this weekend the internet turned its collective gaze to a short story called “Cat Person.”

Response to the story has varied from praise for its relatability to flat dismissal to jokes about how everyone is talking about a—Who’da thunk it?—short story of all things.

—The reaction to “Cat Person” shows how the internet can even ruin fiction

—Regular Icosahedron

—Repeal Day Poster – Summit Brewing Co.

[Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK] pleaded guilty to charges that he etched his initials, “SB,” onto the livers of two transplant patients with an argon beam in 2013. Bramhall admitted the assaults in a hearing in Birmingham crown court on Wednesday, according to several news outlets.

—SB WUZ HERE: Surgeon pleads guilty to burning initials into patients’ organs

I get what you’re doing. Really, I do. You’re trying to shit on people’s musical tastes to either appear more well-versed in music than them or you just want to see the shocked look on people’s faces as you besmirch their favorite band. And listen, I don’t blame you for either. They’re both fun activities that I partake in on the reg. If you name me a band you like, I will find a hundred different ways to judge you on your taste. If the band happens to feature a white guy with dreads, make it three hundred. But The Beatles, dude? The fucking Beatles? You are really scraping the barrel if you are knocking people for liking The Beatles, you moron. 

—Shut Your Dumb, Stupid Mouth about the Beatles Being Overrated

—Sonakinatography I Movement #III for Multi-Media

The font the menu is written in can convey similar messages; for instance an italic typeface conveys a perception of quality. But using elaborate fonts that are hard to read could also have another effect – it could alter how the food itself tastes.

A study conducted by researchers in Switzerland found that a wine labelled with a difficult-to-read script was liked more by drinkers than the same wine carrying a simpler typeface. Spence’s own research has also found that consumers often associate rounder typefaces with sweeter tastes, while angular fonts tend to convey a salty, sour or bitter experience.

—The secret tricks hidden inside restaurant menus

On Allison Benedikt, Lorin Stein, and the perils of extracting universal principles from fairytale endings...

“My career, at the time, was in his hands,” Allison Benedikt wrote at Slate this week, about the beginning of her relationship with John Cook, her husband of 14 years. They were colleagues at a magazine when they first kissed, and he was her senior. That kiss took place “on the steps of the West 4th subway station,” Benedikt writes, and Cook did it “without first getting [her] consent.” The piece is an intervention into the conversation on office sexual harassment, with Benedikt fearing “the consequences of overcorrection” on this issue.

—So You Married Your Flirty Boss

“We encourage the use of Teslas for commercial purposes and we’ll work proactively with these customers to find charging solutions that work best for them,” the statement said.

—Tesla Tells New Taxi, Uber Drivers Not to Use Its Superchargers

The deep web refers to anything you can’t access in a search engine, either because it’s protected behind a password or because it’s buried deep within a regular website. The dark web is a subsection of the deep web that you can only access with a special browser like Tor to mask your IP address.

—Things You Can Do on the Dark Web That Aren't Illegal 

—This Graphic Explains Just How Crazy The Cryptocurrency Bubble Is

One such study published in the journal Neuroimage and highlighted on PsyBlog actually found that some forms of daydreaming cause measurable changes in the brain. This suggests that, done right, daydreaming actually requires attention and control.

—This Is the Correct Way to Daydream, According to a Harvard Psychiatrist

"VR can be stored in the brain's memory center in ways that are strikingly similar to real-world physical experiences," said Stanford's Bailenson, author of the forthcoming book "Experience on Demand," about his two decades of research on the psychological effects of virtual reality. "When VR is done well, the brain believes it is real."

—The very real health dangers of virtual reality

Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected. For the teacher, respect for children means giving them whatever one has by way of knowledge, teaching them to distinguish real knowledge from mere opinion, and introducing them to the subjects that make the mind adaptable to the unforeseen.

—The Virtue of Irrelevance

—You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think 

Watched

—Jessen's Orthogonal Icosahedron

[ecotone99]

[RF] A world beneath your own

Do you ever feel like you're missing out? Like everyone else knows something you don't?

Maybe you're walking down the street and you see two people laughing and time slows down as you pass them, and they look at you like you're a freak. Or maybe you're driving down to Aldi to get the weekly shop, and you glance out of your driver's window and see a young couple holding hands - a girl you might have fallen in love with. Or you spy a family through a living room window watching television, or at the dinner table joking and discussing.

And sometimes you find yourself in this strange, isolated world full of tall pine trees with their middles illuminated by cutting street lamps. And nothing feels real. And everything speaks the language of concealed danger, and the shadows claw through the sunlit days like demons waiting to be set free. Of anger. Of hatred. Of revenge.

That is the world I live in.

I never go on Reddit, or online to speak. I think it's all just a way of escaping. It's not real. It's all just a sick fantasy world; lost people running away from the dark and the cold outside, pretending the four walls they're currently confined to isn't a prison. Denying the fact that they're a wild animal caught in a trap.

If you get past the gloss and the glass and posters of people smiling and all the sparkly high heels, what you're left with is the mud and the soil. The concrete and the grey and the dog shit.

I make myself laugh.

The thing is, God is dead. Nietzsche said it, and now it's all true. There is no meaning. Nothing matters. It's all sex and money, and the rest is just a distraction. Even though, there are some of us who feel something else. That power matters. Dominance. Control. I am one of those select few.

You may have seen me walking around somewhere in the middle of the night once. You may see me buy a sandwich from Tesco on a Friday night, or on Tuesday getting something else to eat. Maybe I'll eat a pizza, or cook myself a lasagne. I'm a bad cook though.

Sometimes I make myself laugh.

It's difficult to snap yourself out of a delusion. We all have them. Sometimes it's hope: I will be happy one day. Someone will come. Someone will see me in pain. Someone will love me. Daddy will come home. Mummy won't drink anymore. And sometimes it's a cynical view to distract you from your will to power. Whatever it is, it is all a delusion, a distraction from raw reality; raw truth.

Raw truth isn't nice. It's actually pretty ugly. See what I did there?

People prefer to be comfortable, and I understand that, but as I say, some of us want something more. Some of us don't want to watch Netflix and go on Reddit and be distracted. Some of us want to seek the truth no matter what the cost. Even if it means death, and I admit, that is scary for anyone. Death is the unknown. The world beyond.

I knew a girl once in my secondary school who committed suicide. I was in love with her. We used to look at each other in the hallways and in class. I was obsessed, and I cried for weeks because I was too shy to talk to her. It was painful. Then I moved away and two years later I found out over Facebook that she had taken her own life - her hair mysteriously dyed an out-of-place orange. She hung herself using a belt and a door knob. I'm still uncertain how people do that. What was she thinking? Where did her mind go?

Sometimes I crack myself up.

Freud was clever. He wanted to seek the truth. That's why he invented his theories. The unconscious. That sneaky clandestine aspect of the brain. All the things we do in dreams. The jealousy and the huge monsters and the infinite corridors. The tornados and the massive tsunamis and the destruction and the chaos. The terrifying potential lies dormant behind the eyes of consciousness, festering away like rotten fruit, attracting flies, creating bad smells. Polluting the world.

It's a fucking strange world we live in today. Such a lonely world.

I told myself when I was 19 that I had to murder someone. A vision of me appeared beside my bed - a vision of the man I knew I could be; my self-actualised manifestation. He told me that I was weak. That I was succumbing to depression and nihilism. He told me what I needed to hear, but didn't want to acknowledge. I needed to kill someone in order to feel in control of my life again. And not just anyone.

The thing is, about murder, it's a lot less glamorous in real life. Murderers aren't particularly evil people or smart people or even sneaky people. Anyone can go out in the dead of night and stab a homeless person, or a prostitute, or shoot a jihad dead in the dusty plains with a rifle. They're easy targets. That's not how you achieve control and self-actualise.

Some of the most notorious serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, they murdered out of a sexual fascination. It was also about power, but polluted with delinquency and sexual degeneracy. Not pure. Not righteous.

I don't necessarily have an interest in being righteous, but the idea of killing for sex or of killing an easy target doesn't excite me. I feel like killing for justice, for raw truth, for ultimate power over someone else too weak to seek the truth, that is the pinnacle of masculine achievement. That is how you reach the divine state of being. Some call it enlightenment. It's different for everyone.

The mind is like an onion, and reality is just an image of what you project based on the level you happen to be on. Once you've peeled away all the layers, all you're left with is black. You become blind. You lose all your senses except smell. You smell everything; the sweat, the shit, the snot, the rain, the lights, the darkness, the kitchen, the eyeballs, the skeletons.

People lose their personalities and become primates. They lose their faces. Their skin melts away along with their identities. They then become objects - physical manifestations of matter that interact with other bits of matter. Almost as if they could have been splurged out by some white matter gloop machine and painted by a Warhammer nerd. Porcelain dolls. Rag dolls.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and laugh at my handsome face as it contorts into something that manages to scare me.

Before I decided to kill someone, I used to steal, and vandalise buildings. I'd wake up at 2AM and instantly jump out of bed with my pre-assembled rucksack equipped with a spare set of clothes and big rocks. Then I'd take the pitch black footpath to the town and, with my hood down, hurl the rocks at WHSmiths, McDonald's, Wilko's. And then I'd leave a message to the police: "I am the Zodiac... You will decode this message if you wish to find me... If you do not post the details to your Facebook page, I will strike again... And do something different."

You may have seen me before. Me and you might have shuffled past each other on a crowded train once, or maybe I asked you where a specific item was in a supermarket three years ago, or maybe you taught me at school, or maybe I am the friend of a friend of a cousin that you've never heard of. And maybe you have some connection to me or my victim. Part of you wants to reach me and talk to me. Part of you is as lonely as I am.

When you drop a plate and it smashes on the floor, you feel defeated. But what if the plate drops you on the floor and feels defeated, and you smash into 50 ceramic chunks? What if my mind is broken? It's not. Sanity doesn't exist. That's just another lie people tell themselves as they flick through Twitter or post an ironic meme on Reddit.

I can pinpoint exactly at what age when I fell down the rabbit hole.

I was 17. My only parent, an alcoholic mother who abused me, neglected me and treated me like shit, decided to abandon me, so I left home, aged 16. And then at some point I stopped denying. Living on my own in supported accommodation with rats, literally and metaphorically. I stopped picking my nose and I started picking my brains. I started imagining my mother burning alive, her flesh reappearing only to disintegrate again as she screamed in agony.

I gazed upon the abyss; the singularity. Pure, unadulterated truth: pain in its most horrific form. Boundless anxiety and primal fear - loss - terror - horrific depression - burning rage - hypochondria. Then total despair. I wrapped myself up like a newborn baby in my duvet and weeped into the carpet floor for hours. I couldn't take it.

I had been mistreated. My childhood had been tainted with lies and lost opportunities. I would never recover.

I looked through Facebook and saw pictures of people laughing; knowing what I didn't the whole time. Knowing a sense of security and not doubting themselves and who they are. "Ha, fuck their stupid comfortable little identities." I was jealous, deep down, but there was no way back. Not anymore.

It was at this point a sense of odd peace descended on me; a moment I termed the Dawn of My Awakening. The eye of the storm. I thought back to everyone who had ever wronged me, made fun of me. It's not like I was bullied heavily in school, but after school, the people in the social housing, they were so horrible. They ripped me up. I was nothing from that point onward.

I thought I'd cried all the tears I could. I honestly thought I was a psychopath.

Sometimes I make myself laugh.

That is when I entered the next layer of the onion. Those people I walk past in the street - they are murderers. All the smiling people, and even the ones who don't - the inwardly serene people. It's subtle, you have to catch it. You see it in the ease of their actions, the minor flourishes of a hand or the lack of twitching lips. Stability. The foundations of which cannot be anything but the fulfilment of unconscious desires: the sex, money, power part of the brain that ticks and chimes like Big Ben. The private resounding in the brain. The reptilian.

The reptilian sentinels with their menacing diamond-shaped pupils and cold personalities that allow them to walk all over humans like me. The lizards with their slippery elongated tongues with lisps that lash out like cracking whips. The screaming children and the reversing cars that shield them in the sunshine halls of suburbia. I hate them all.

I hate the parks and the children and the houses and the cars and the volleyball players. I hate the computers and the iPhones and the sunglasses and the law degrees and the depressed parents who yell at their children outside community centres. I hate the warm days when it's so easy to pretend everything is going okay, and I hate the posters of the smiling people. I see behind their eyes the neglected skeletal figures of Hell. I hate the adverts about shampoo and sitcoms like Big Bang Theory. I hate the fashionistas and the pretentious Starbucks employees, and the fat girl who works as a cashier who is always laughing way too loud.

I hate it all.

Don't infect me with your la dee dah land of grown ups. Don't lecture me with maturity you've constructed out of your own neglected ambitions. Don't fist bump me the hand you used to masturbate to girls on Facebook, or neglect your responsibilities as a man with a video game controller. I don't care about you, or /this/.

In truth, I am a lonely animal who lives off of small pleasures, so if you see me, offer me a friendly smile. Maybe open a door for me. Don't be angry at me. It's not entirely my fault. The dice of fate were loaded. If you are kind, I won't harm your children. I won't hunt productive members of your society. I won't hurt the economy. You'll do this for me. Otherwise we're going to have a disagreement. Otherwise, I'll think about taking action. But for now, I'm dormant. And I will stay that way. For now.

I take my job as a clinical psychologist very seriously. The days of feeling self-conscious when I don my dark-brown trench coat are long since gone. The imposter syndrome fades into the background along with the rest of the distractions.

I care about my clients I deal with, which are mostly young men dealing with aggression and depression. I feel for them. I relate to their stories and their pain and their anger. I wish I had a magic wand to make it all better, but I don't, and so I have to deal with reality. I tell them as much truth as I can afford. I tell them they need to get off their backside and fend for themselves because nobody else is gonna do it for them in this cruel life.

These are the children of alcoholics, abandoned by their fathers, by their families, by society.

I zoom out and listen to the silence and gaze up at the full moon in February. I imagine the waves crash against the cliffs as they once did in my childhood. The feeling of salty freshness bashing against my ears. That is just enough to soothe my anguished soul until the next big thing knocks me down like a sack of potatoes. Like a smashed dinner plate.

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