#maybe the 4 month regression won’t hit so hard

[whentherewerebicycles]

the baby just fell asleep for his first unswaddled nap!!!! took him about 15 min to settle down (and who knows how long he’ll sleep before he wakes himself up) but this is progress!! I’m hoping to slowly fully transition him to unswaddled daytime naps over the next week or two and then we’ll see if we can manage dropping the swaddle at night.

[let-me-touch-your-soul]

a loveless letter

I’ve been wanting to write you a letter for years now but I just haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts into words and I never knew when would be the perfect time to write. I was waiting for us to end so I can have the whole picture to reflect on but I no longer see an end in sight for us and this letter is probably going to be very messy with no plot at all, so just bare with me for now until I can write a better, more chronological letter. And let me just preface this by saying this is in no way me putting any blame on you, this isn’t me trying to call you out and paint you as the bad guy. This is just my side of our story. 

We met when I was 4 years old, and all you were to me was my friend’s older brother, nothing more nothing less. I don’t know where exactly I crossed the line or you did, but you are no longer just that. You are now someone who stole my innocence and gave me a warped perception of this world and the word ‘love’. There is so much to say but let me try to start from the beginning. 

When we first started talking outside of family functions, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I have no perception of time so I just like to say it all started when I was 12, but I’m pretty sure it was before that. We started talking and at that time you were just some guy I was interested in; it wasn’t even remotely close to a crush yet, I was just hyped about getting some sort of attention from an older guy. Don’t know where the lines blurred but suddenly you were making sexual advances to a little girl, someone who had no idea what some of the words you were saying meant, someone who was just learning about the horrors of the world, someone who was already getting their childhood and innocence stolen from them. 

I just went along with everything you said and wanted because I didn’t want to disappoint you and didn’t want you to stop talking to me. I became obsessed with the attention you were giving me, well my body. As someone who suffered with an altered body image for as long as I can remember, I was basking in the attention you were giving to the physical parts of me, no matter how objectified and dehumanized it made me feel at times. I lied about the number of people who had touched me and about all the experiences I never had, (I was only 12 so how could you even think I had other people touching me in my most intimate places?), just so you wouldn’t think I was as innocent as I was. You made me grow up too early. 

As we kept talking, my heart slowly made its way to the surface and I caught feelings, despite us both discussing it would be ‘no strings attached’. I thought I was the only one with these flutters and I was way too embarrassed to say anything about the way I really felt so I never brought it up, I just went along with everything you said. After all, I was still just a shy little girl who had no idea what she got herself into. But then one night, you told me you loved me. I still remember that moment vividly, as if it happened just yesterday. It was the night before my first day of school (6th grade) and I was charging my phone in my parent’s bedroom, telling you goodnight, and you replied with “goodnight, love you”, and with shaking hands and a heart going a mile a minute I replied with, “goodnight, love you too”, smiling so hard my cheeks started going numb. That was the beginning of the end of me. 

Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure at that time if I really did love you, but I still said it back because I didn’t want to lose you, but after all these years I think I can safely say that somewhere along the line I did fall in love with you, with what exactly I don’t know, but I did love you. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, there is so much more left of this story, this is barely the beginning. 

You made me believe you loved me. We texted all day and night, meaningless conversations filled with sexual tension. You were the first boy I showed my body to, the first boy I kissed, the first boy who held me and touched me, the first boy I shed tears for, the first boy I had feelings for and said “I love you” to. 

I remember seeing you with different girls on your snap everyday and remember hearing about you from other girls you were doing the same thing to them as were doing to me, and with every girl I lost a piece of myself. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t jealous. I knew you weren’t mine, you made that pretty clear from the beginning, and I was never the jealous type. But, I was hurt. I thought I was faulty. I couldn’t blame you, because you made it clear from the beginning that you didn’t want anything exclusive, this was all just fun for you, a passing time, so with no one to blame I blamed myself. All the other girls were much older than me, and prettier, and skinnier, so if I was just prettier and as skinny as them maybe you would show me more attention right? I started changing myself. I ate less and threw up more. I started wearing tighter clothes and starting drinking and smoking, because that would make me more cooler and desirable right? Wrong. You still looked at other girls, and I couldn’t change myself anymore, I was on the brink of losing myself, love. All for you. But you never noticed. You never cared enough to know. 

I remember getting drunk one night and texting you that I loved you but felt as if you didn’t love me. Do you remember that? You replied back in the morning saying you did love me. It was all baseless though. It was very clear you only said that to not be painted as the bad guy, but I still took your word for it and never brought it up again, and neither did you. I think that was the last time the word “love” was uttered between us. Did I ruin it? 

I also can’t help but bring up how all our conversations happened within apps that couldn’t be seen by others unless specifically searched for. After all, who would even believe you were talking to lil ole me. Were you ashamed of me? Embarrassed to be seen talking to me? Well thats exactly what it seemed like. You made it very clear we were to be kept a secret, not a single soul should know you were talking to me. So I kept quiet. Didn’t tell a single soul about the boy who held my heart and crushed it along with my innocence. 

I tried to distance myself from you. I wouldn’t answer your texts, but at times my longing got the best of me and I couldn’t stop myself from responding back to you. We would go months without any contact and every time it was you who would hit me up first and I would lose the battle within me and respond and we would be back to square one, texting as if nothing changed between us. I think I found comfort in that familiarity of knowing exactly what to expect when talking to you. Our dynamic never really changed over the years, did it? I still can’t decide if thats a bad thing or a good thing. 

I tried to move on from you, I really did. But no one, nothing, lasted and I always ended up going back to you one way or another. I tried to fill the hole you left in me with drugs and drinks and boys who also only wanted me for my body. After all, that was all I knew. I didn't know love outside of what I could offer with my body. You taught me I wasn’t anything beyond my body and I never stopped to question it, and sometimes I still regress back to that little girls mind, and I’m still forced to exist in the body I destroyed for you, in the body I still let you use from time to time.

There are times when I think I am completely over you and nothing you do affects me anymore but then you text me again and all the feelings I had for you over the years come rushing back and I feel like I’m 13 all over again falling head over heels in love with you. But honestly, I think I just find comfort in the familiarity of you. We’ve been in this push and pull situationship (what else is there call us?) for I think over 6 years now, and I’ve honestly just come to accept that it probably won’t be a solid ending to this anytime soon. I tried so hard to end it and move and forget about you, but the truth is that I am too weak when it comes to you. Now, I have no idea whatsoever why you keep coming back to me when there are so many other better prospects out there for you and I try not to think too deep into it because I don’t want to create false hope and hurt myself any more than I already have. I gave you all my teenage years, and I am still giving them you. We grew up with each other and these years are just something neither of us can take back and I’ve come to just accept this and try to live with knowing there will never be anything more to us, no matter how hard that acceptance is for me. 

I told myself that going away to college was going to be a fresh new beginning for me and that I would completely cut you off. We all know that didn’t go as planned. I had sex with you for the first time this summer. Did you know that was my first time lol? Yeah I literally have never had anyone touch me like that except for you. I don’t think I can ever come clean about that to you because that’s just too much power in your hands over me with that information. I’m sorry for lying and making you think I was more experienced than I actually was, but I guess now you know why I did it. 

I think for me to be able to fully move I would need to hear your side of everything from you. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get the closure I need directly form you so I guess this is why I’m writing this, as a way to get some type of closure for myself. I never plan on telling you any of this because being vulnerable is just not something I have in me, especially to you, so I guess we both will just be living in the dark about this without any answers for the rest of our lives. 

Sometimes, and I know this sounds hilarious and dumb, I wonder what the future holds for us. I wonder if we met at a different point in our lives, where we were both older and wiser, would we have been able to be more than what we are now, whatever we are now. I’ve held feelings for you inside of me for so long I really don’t think it will ever go away; I’m just going to have to find a way to live with them for the rest of my life. I just want to end this by letting you know that if you ever change your mind about me and us, and want there to actually be an ‘us’ exclusively, I will say yes to you without hesitation. You hold pieces of me I will never get back, pieces I don’t even know if I want back, and I don’t think if I will ever be able to devote myself so someone else with the same intensity I devoted myself to you. I used to be able to see a future with you, and I would like to blame that on my naive, young brain. Thank you for teaching me that not everyone who comes into my life will reciprocate the same feelings as me and that love is only a figment of one’s imagination. I sincerely hope you never feel what I felt and that you find someone who loves you back the same way you love them. I hope you are happy and content with wherever you end up in life, just don’t forget me. :)

[atouchofgreen]

Weed & Mental Health (adolescent)

Mom and Dad,

In the recent months I have experienced cognitive decline that I attribute to my use of weed cartridges. I started smoking weed cartridges when I was in my senior year of high school, and  became addicted. I hated it but for some reason I couldn't stop I smoked daily. Although I took month long breaks often, I continued to smoke in college during my first 2 years. Towards the second semester of sophomore year, I used legal delta 8 carts instead of delta 9 carts. The only negative aspect of using up to my sophomore year was my lack of motivation and any minute cognitive changes went away following abstinence. I should have quit or asked for help. In high-school I asked for help by leaving my stash on the laundry machine and gave a singular puff to mom one time (she thought it was an e-cigg though). In highschool in my AP Chemistry class, I saw a kid at the end of class do a hit from a similar weed cart in front of his friends. It would have been so easy for him to get caught, he was standing up giggling with his back turned but the teacher was on the computer and didn't notice. I recognized then that this kid was so alone with his addiction that he did it in front of his friends at school out of pain and solidarity. He had an expressionless face most of the day and seemed distraught, I knew from the grapevine he smoked a lot. He was like me, addicted, and did a hit in school subconsciously screaming for help. After class I asked coach Jacobs his thoughts on using weed. He said, sitting on his computer desk chair with his hands behind his head, " I think after 25 half a joint does the same damage as having a martini, but before then its really bad for you physically, mentally, and your development as a human being. You should wait until after your brain is fully developed to try anything." I remembered this for the rest of my life. I didnt have the courage  to directly ask for help but I needed it and should have asked anyone. I couldn't quit it although I should have had the courage to do so. I tried quitting many times but I was too far down the drain mentally. But now, I am scared for myself. I quit completely following moving jethin in because I was noticing cognitive decline in myself. It was terrible. One morning, I woke up and nothing entered my brain its like I was a zombie. That is why I quit. I hoped I would regain my functionality like before, but to no avail. My iq seems to have dropped 10 points at least. My short term memory has regressed so much that learning new information is difficult for me. Reading is harder and to recall something takes me much longer than before. I have a harder time making long term plans and imagining things. I had a hard time with understanding and expressing English as well though this has been improving. My mind is nothing like it was before. Now, my memory, pattern recognition, recall, imagination, has diminished to a much lower degree. I was fine last year and the year before that, my mental health and cognition were good, but recently it seems like a switch turned off for me. When I walk in the world I don't absorb information the same. I don't abstractify what I am seeing as easily, and my short term memory is really shot. Its like I'm just walking in the world blind deaf and dumb. I am scared I won't be able to pass my classes even though compared to highschool these classes are an absolute breeze relatively speaking to when my brain was sober. I can't do quick calculations anymore and I am acutely aware that my senses are just senses. Seeing touching hearing are just that, I can't calculate the same way i used to to create a coherent experience of what's going on around me. I don't have appreciation for life anymore. I  am telling you all of this now because i have really experienced cognitive decline and I am extremely depressed, unhappy, and anxious. I am afraid that my prefrontal cortex and hippocampus is permanently damaged. Weirdly, I've had a dull ache in my head ever since I've quit, in the middle and front of my brain, that's been getting slightly better with time. The slight discomfort or pain is always there its terrible. It also gets better temporarily when I cry, meditate, or sleep for an extended period. I hope that after a few months this dull pain would subside and my mental capabilities would return. Even my dreams are less complex and have less emotion. All of this is what I talked to that therapist about.  It's not like I am sad ALL of the time, but a lot of it. But I am pretty sure my mind will never be what it was before. I experienced life to its fullest extent while I was not using any drugs, and now that I've been sober for 2 months now and my mind is not returning close to what it was. I still feel like a zombie when exercising, and I develop a deep sense of sadness right after I work out because i recognize my short term memory and mental capability are weakened which makes it hard for me to make good memories and I get anxious about my future. I am pretty emotionless, even fear is hard for me to experience. When I am unhappy, at times I break out into a sob, but because my emotions have dulled probably from the weed, I only start to sob momentarily and then return to a face of stoicism. This makes it hard to achieve catharsis for my sadness and it gets bottled up inside. I don't really mind the mental health difficulties from quitting weed - that can pass over time with proper behavior - but it's the cognitive difficulties that makes me afraid. I am afraid that I will never be able to view the world the same way that I used to before weed. I am afraid that I won't be able to become a doctor unless my brain heals over time. I have read many studies about the use of marijuana during adolescents. Although there is conflicting research, my experience suggests the worst for me - that what I am experiencing may be permanent. I also read that smoking weed during adolescence can delay prefrontal cortex maturation, meaning I would never be able to absorb information and process it  the same way ever again. If only I had read the dangers of early marijuana use earlier and understood I would have quit immediately. It is entirely my fault my life is like this now, I was too weak. Both of you have given me everything and helped me the most you could. Especially Dad. Dad, I feel so bad because you have lowered your expectations of me so much. If I hadn't started smoking, I know I would be a completely different person.  Mom and Dad, I have been thinking about committing suicide for some time. I've been thinking about it at least once a day actually for a few months. Its not that I think life and the world is terrible and bad, I actually think the opposite. Before smoking I loved life and loved myself. I could feel the world like a thumping heartbeat or a quivering harp playing soulful music. I feel like killing myself because my current and future experiences will be inorganic. My brain structure/chemistry probably changed forever and I don't want to live with this brain anymore. I cant understand everything going on around me thus I can never understand the world the same way like I used to. I feel like i can't learn new things, everything I do now is because I am just accessing what I learned before starting to smoke weed and during freshman and sophomore year of college. My emotions have waned. I can't calculate complex things anymore and put it into context sufficiently. I can't move my body and think strongly at the same time. Right now, meditation and thinking about my long term memory is my only friend. My short term memory is shot which affects my learning and ability to make meaningful experiences or connections. It's like I have pseudodementia though not as bad. The only joy I get is accessing my long term memory and talking long walks in places and with people that used to bring me joy. I loved Turkey so much and the time we spent I go there in my head all of the time. I love Africa, I love India, I loved my friends at swimming and during highschool. But if that's all I am living for I don't know what the point is. I curse myself everyday for making the mistake of smoking weed or not quitting when I could have. I could've become a beautiful person had I continued developing normally. I am so sorry for being a bad son. I am so sorry that you came from India to America to have a child that fucked up like me. I am sorry for the stress this places on both of you. You both did nothing wrong in raising me, I just fucked up. I am sorry for how this may affect your work dad. And I am sorry for being a liability for the family. While I am drowning I don't want you both to drown with me. Maybe I can get a job somewhere or go into the military. At this point cognitively, unless my brain is capable of rewiring itself (maybe that's what the dull persistent ache is in my head) I don't think I can learn the information necessary to safefully treat patients. My therapist said it would take 3-4 months to a year to feel normal again but I don't know what I will do if I can't return to baseline. I used to live with such a thirst for life and understanding but if that doesn't return I feel like I am dragging life down and owe it to my memory of what life was before weed to take my own.  Currently my plan is to wait a year and a few months before seriously thinking of committing suicide if I don't heal because the pain I am feeling is so immense. I want to live life FEELING everything organically regardless of what it is. Also my smarts are gone and that gave me tremendous joy. I know what life was like before using weed and I know how it should feel. But I cannot properly life, my sense of self, empathy, and life around me currently. I am walking around blind deaf and dumb I don't know if I want to live this way for the rest of my life. I would have loved to become a doctor.

I just don't know what to do anymore, I don't want to kill myself and I don't think I will have the balls to frankly but that saddens me even more if I can't feel or process what I am experiencing for the rest of my life. Life is too short to waste, any life really even if I'm dumber than what I used to be. I think of people who are paralyzed, people who have cancer, who have nobody left to care for them, people who are homeless and have physical ailments. They don't give up, but their minds are still natural. I am young and the only reason I am thinking of this is because I don't want to go the rest of my life with derealization of the world around me. I don't want to live the rest of my life blind deaf and dumb. No new experiences since the latter parts of my weed addiction have given me any meaning in life compared to what I had learned before smoking weed. I am grateful I got to experience and learn the meaning of life from my perspective and others when I was younger, thank you for that. I love you both so much. I am sorry and don't worry I am not going to kill myself its just that I am angry with myself, angry with my cognitive decline, and angry that I can't experience what life ought to be currently. I am hoping for better in the future though. I just thought you should know.

Love, Your son

Before Weed: 

I am telling you this because I am scared for myself although it may be too late. Before I tell you what I've been going through, I want to tell you about my life experience up until junior year of highschool. Although I wasn't exactly extremely smart from your perspectives, I was acutely aware of my surroundings. In school I was more focused on how things were organized and what every single person in the room was thinking and what their plans were rather then what they were teaching. It's like my brain was calculating 20 things at once and i was living existentially all the time. I was incredibly happy just to be alive. I could recall the exact positions of people and things around me, what I was thinking, and the sutle muscle movements of people over a reasonable amount of time. I used to know what people were going to say before they said them, and know someone's personality outlook on life, habits mentality etc.  just by watching for 10 seconds to an incredible degree of accuracy. The longer a person was in my focus I learned more about them exponentially. I could learn things very well and had a memory based on the things that I was focused on that was so precise and better than almost everyone I had ever met. People in high school who knew me well knew this and would be shocked how i could know things about them. Some things like sexuality and gender insecurities, presence of autism/ Asperger's as a child, family life back home, and who liked who, I could tell about people after observing them for a little. I had  respect from people at school and some teachers because they knew what I could learn about a situation or people just by being in the same room. I could learn new words in the blink of an eye if I heard it just once, I was constantly calculating. With dad, I could not learn what he tried to teach me though just because I was so scared of him that my focus wasn't there and panic was always set in I was scared to be beat frankly (i wasn't scared of the pain but just scared what it meant which was hard for me to fully realize because I would slightly repress the memories and I don't like to do that). But it's from him I learned how to analyze people and the world. But he is one of the only people I've ever met where I could not track his mind to a satisfying degree. For most people I would now what they were thinking, what they were incubating in the back of their head, and their current plan of action in a glance by looking at the eyes and body. I could not do this with dad because his mind is faster than mine it was too hard to keep up. He has mind palaces that are so structured and he can jump around his mind so easily I couldn't keep up with the mind palaces he created and how he navigates them. It was harder for me to do this with people who had a very high iq but I would practice everyday and would cherish analyzing introverts for practice. I walked on a street with a hundred people I would make an observation about each of them and could later recall exactly what I saw and what I was thinking. My kinesthetic sense was very good so physical distances was easy for me to calculate and remember. I truly believed that before starting weed I would become a doctor because all my strengths coincided with it. This ability, although most ppl might be able to do it, peaked for me right before starting weed. I was very much in tune with spirituality and enjoyed reading storybooks, meditation, and socializing. I was never focused on myself but what was around me, I kept my thoughts and feelings in a box in my mind to help me learn as I recorded what others were doing and thinking. I had balls - I asked out girls in highschool, and honestly wasn't afraid of much because both of you enabled me to experience life by taking me everywhere.

[nordic-language-love]

Language Learning Log 2021 - Week 3

Norwegian

Read 1x article

Watched 5x Distriktsnyheter (Nordnytt x2, Midtnytt x2 & Nordland) broadcasts

Watched 2x Valpeskolen episodes

Wrote 2x journal entries

Wrote about myself and the book I’m currently reading

italki session (45 mins)

Speaking practice: talked about books, dialects, being ill and sexism

Mysteriet om Nils ch 34 exercises 3-7 + ch 35 reading

Worked on a music vocab list and 3x food vocab lists

Japanese

JFZ ch 6 exercises + briefly looked over ch 7 grammar

Kanji practice: drilled family vocab and adjectives

Writing practice: wrote sentences with 欲しい and 欲しくない

Duolingo: Hiragana 2, Family

Norwegian

I really like this new italki tutor! I feel like I got a lot out of this week’s session, learning new vocabulary and being challenged to talk about things I wouldn’t normally talk about. This coming week I’ve got some conversation practice with one of my other tutors booked, but I’m kinda tempted to mostly stick with my new tutor. But conversation practice is still useful, so maybe I’ll treat myself to one session a month? We’ll see.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of writing this week. It’s not been super structured, but I do feel like it’s coming to me more easily than it used to. I don’t feel like I have to look up vocabulary constantly, and I actually surprise myself with how much vocab I know sometimes. I still make dumb mistakes with grammar sometimes, but I almost always realise it’s wrong immediately after writing it and go back and fix it.

Speaking of vocab, I worked on some vocab lists this week. They’re not finished so I won’t post them just yet, but I consolidated vocabulary I learned from Familiekokkene and made a list about music. Hopefully I’ll get those finished off this week or next week, but we’ll see.

Last week’s goals

Write 2x journal entries [2/2] ✅

Finish exercises from Mysteriet om Nils ch 34 [5/5] ✅

Watch 5x Distriktsnyheter broadcasts [5/5] ✅

Listen to 1x Norsken, Svensken og Dansken podcast [0/1] ❌

Practice speaking on at least 4 days [4/4] ✅

Make at least one vocab list of words learnt from Familiekokkene [1/1] ✅

This week’s goals

Mysteriet om Nils ch 35 exercises

Watch 4x Distriktsnyheter broadcasts

Listen to 1x Norsken, Svensken og Dansken podcast

Spend Monday and Tuesday preparing for Wednesday’s italki session

Write 2x journal entries

Read 3x articles related to coronavirus + note down new/useful vocabulary

Japanese

I had a nice moment doing Duolingo this week. I was revising hiragana 2, which introduces a few simple words that include hiragana taught in that skill. I’ve never bothered trying to learn those words, but this week I recognised some that I’ve learned recently (あまい, すき and ほしい - sweet, like and want). It was so exciting!

Speaking of Duolingo: one of my goals for this week was to complete the next skill along the tree. I decided instead to spend more time improving the skills I’d already done and consolidating/learning vocabulary. I was planning on doing one skill a week because that’d take me exactly to the fifth checkpoint, but I don’t think that’s a good goal for me really - I’d just end up rushing through it and not learning much and getting overwhelmed.

I worked a little bit more on family vocab this week and started learning kanji for a few simple adjectives (old, new, hot, cold), as well as writing some sample sentences to drill them home. I still need to spend time going over it and consolidating it, which is what I plan to do this week.

Last week’s goals

Duolingo: Activity 1 ❌

JFZ Chapter 6 activities ✅

Write sample sentences with vocab learned from recent Duolingo lessons and JFZ ch 6 ✅

Watch 1x Pokémon episode [1/1] ✅

This week’s goals

Learn adjectives kanji from JFZ ch 6

JFZ ch 7 reading + videos

Write sample sentences with family and adjectives kanji

Duolingo: reach level 2 of Restaurant skill

Watch 1x Pokémon episode

Productivity

I’m really trying to increase my exercise again. It’s so tough because I’ve gone from being more or less a professional athlete where I wouldn’t even count a training session if it was under 2 hours long to barely motivating myself to do even ten minutes. It’s been a downward spiral of not training, trying to get my shit together, noticing how much I’ve regressed because I’ve not been training, not wanting to train because it makes me feel bad, regressing more... and so on. So I’m going to force some sort of routine on myself, with the promise I don’t have to go hard; I just have to turn up. Half-ass some easy yoga, train the same three intermediate tricks, follow a 10-minute youtube workout video, whatever. Just move. It will improve my mental health, which is frankly disastrous atm.

I’m also getting back into reading again. The past 4 months or so have been pretty dry, so it’s nice to be doing more again. And I've been feeling a little bit more inspired to write, which is nice. Hopefully I can keep this up. Again, I’m keeping my expectations fairly low because my mental health is garbage, and because at the end of they day they’re just hobbies, and while it’d be nice to do them more I’m not going to force myself to do them if I don’t feel like it for the sake of hitting goals.

Last week’s goals

Stretch on at least 3 days [3/3] ✅

Decide which book to read next and read 150 pages [182/150] ✅

Train pole/hoop on at least 2 days [2/2] ✅

Do some form of writing on at least 2 days [4/2] ✅

This week’s goals

Stretch on at least 3 days

Train pole/hoop on at least 2 days

Practice fire fans and/or sword

Finish reading my book

Decide which book to read next + read 10 pages

Do some form of writing on at least 2 days

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Best of 2019

What a year. By the time 2019 ended, I had seen over 130 new movies. It's actually probably closer to 150 but I lost count. There are a few titles I missed, such as The Dead Don’t Die, The Fanatic and Honeyland so obviously, this is not an all-encompassing, definitive list of 2019’s best, but it should give you a good idea of which films you need to check out if you haven’t already.

I usually like to save the #10 spot on my list for a movie that’s just for me. Normally, this would mean a giant monster movie, an off-beat creation nobody else saw, a comic book movie that spoke to my particular tastes or maybe a Canadian movie I know didn’t get the opportunity to shine like it should’ve. This year, that’s not happening. Trimming my list down to 10 was hard enough. I certainly wasn’t going to sacrifice one more to make it just 9. Let's dig in.

10. The Farewell

It’s been weeks since The Farewell and I’m still thinking about it. If I was put in the same position as Billi, I'm not sure what I'd do? Is it better to tell someone that's dying that their days are numbered, or should you spare them from that burden? Is it really them you’d be sparing, or is keeping the secret for your own selfish needs? Writer/director Lulu Wang asks serious questions about culture I had never contemplated before. There’s a lot for you here and even more if your family comes from mixed backgrounds.

9. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

I heard some complaints about Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) not being the main character of this film by Marielle Heller, from writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. It was the right choice. The plot has a cyical reporter meet Rogers and through their relatively brief interaction, learn what we knew going in. It delivers a moving character arc without having to stain its subject with flaws we didn't want to see. The quasi-meta presentation is what elevates it into top-10 status. That extra touch means it does a lot more than simply re-iterate what we saw in the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?.

8. Knives Out

Knives Out is one of the most entertaining films all year. There are no profound moments of meditation, no earth-shattering realizations about yourself, just a mystery to be solved. All the suspects are so intriguing they could be the stars of their own movies. Put together in the same house as a dead body and you’ve got no idea who did it. Its screenplay is excellent. The twists are juicy. Everything ads up in a satisfying manner. Rian Johnson is already working on a sequel. I can’t wait.

7. Apollo 11

There are few holdovers from the list I made halfway through the year, which either says something about the strength of the second half of 2019, or the weakness of the first. Either way, you’ve got to see Apollo 11. It’s the closest thing to going back in time and being there when man landed on the moon. The tension and anticipation are overwhelming. Knowing what happened doesn't matter. The way the footage is assembled is nothing short of incredible. Why this documentary wasn't present at the Academy Awards is beyond me.

6. Uncut Gems

Adam Sandler should’ve been nominated for an Oscar. He wasn’t. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it's because of his association with all of those brain-dead Happy Madison Production comedies. His history with cinema shouldn't matter. The movie is what matters. The fact is, this was the perfect role for him. It isn’t even that Sandler’s doing something different, it’s that he’s being used to his full potential. If you weren’t glued to the screen, eager to see what’s coming next, this movie would have you jumping out of the window screaming - anything to escape the anxiety the Safdie Brothers serve up with devilish grins.

5. The Lighthouse

Next on my list is The Lighthouse. Right away, the aspect ratio and black-and-white cinematography lets you know you’re in for something different. You have no idea. What I love so much about this film is the way it handles madness. At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I could tell you if Robert Pattinson’s character was crazy, if Willem Dafoe’s character was the nutty one, or if they both were. It shows you just enough to make you doubt your own sanity. It’s also unexpectedly funny, which makes it feel oddly genuine. In one scene, Robert Pattinson's Ephraim Winslow gets a hold of the lighthouse's logs. In it, his boss, Thomas (Willem Dafoe) recommends Ephraim be disciplined for masturbating excessively. Considering Thomas has been cavorting with some kind of tentacle creature up in the lighthouse (at least that's what I think I saw, I'm not so sure anymore), all you can do is laugh. What kind of loony bin is this turning into? One I'm looking forward to revisiting.

4. 1917

Shot in a way that makes it all look like one take, 1917 is a technical marvel. It hooks itself up to your circular system and steadily replaces your blood with pure, undistilled stress. As you're about to flatline, it stops and gives you a breather. A shot of a meadow untouched by the ravages of war; a reminder of what the soldiers are fighting for and of how utterly devastating armed combat is on humanity as a whole. Gorgeous cinematography, powerful emotions, magnificent production values.

3. Joker

Along with Godzilla: King of the Monsters (a movie they basically made for me), this was my most anticipated movie of the year. To get ready, I watched Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, two Scorsese films Joker director Todd Phillips drew a lot of inspiration from. For some reason, it seems as though many critics took offense to the similarities. Sometimes I understand differing opinions from mine. This time, I don’t. It’s a great film that warns of the dangers of letting people like Arthur Fleck (brilliantly performed by Joaquin Phoenix) fall through the cracks. Left unchecked, he discovers that by doing terrible things, he becomes a “better” version of himself. It’s not a drama. It’s a horror movie that spins the familiar Batman archenemy in a new direction but also stays true to the character. There are several scenes in this movie that are going to be permanently imprinted in my brain. Those stairs. Need I say more?

Runner-ups

Avengers: Endgame

Even if every single Marvel movie going forward is awful, this caps off the whopping 22-chapter saga epically. A couple of aspects bugged me enough that it could only manage to make the runner-up list but it's a terrific film.

Booksmart

The funniest comedy of the year. I think back to Amy and Molly using their hairs as masks and still can't manage to hold back a few chuckles months later.

Toy Story 4

This one was hard to cut. The only flaw I could find was that it isn’t on the same level as 3… even though they’re both 5-star movies.

Midsommar

I’ve heard the extended cut is even better than the original. I wish I’d had the chance to see it in theatres.

Jojo Rabbit

Audacious and heartfelt. I loved those scenes of Scarlett Johanson being a mom. Her agent might've dropped the ball getting her cast in Ghost in the Shell but she sure knew how to pick great work in 2019.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino brings us back to a time when Roman Polanski was simply a good director instead of a convicted rapist, movie stars were untouchable, and the death of someone’s wife under mysterious circumstances was nothing to raise eyebrows about. It’s not a movie that screams “here and now”. If anything, it’s regressive. That said, I cannot deny the experience I had watching it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kinda thing and I doubt even Tarantino could pull it off again. I wonder how many people went in knowing what happened to Sharon Tate like I did.

Marriage story

It’s nothing but raw emotion and powerhouse performances in this drama about two people you love going through a divorce. I always make it my goal to watch movies all the way through without any interruptions. Several times throughout, I was tempted to hit "Pause" so I could catch my breath.

Internet lists are everywhere. You know why, don’t you? They suck you in and when you get down to it, most don’t require all that much effort to put together. Except when I make them, apparently. These bi-annual lists always turn out to be difficult to put together. 2019's proved particularly arduous. I’m fairly sure that my #3 movie belongs there. Out of all the movies on this list, it’s probably the one I’m going to go back to most often. The other two? I’d say that technically, one may be better than the other but I think the other one is “more important” so that gives it the edge. What I’m trying to say is, they’re all winners and on a different day, I might even swap them around.

2. Little Women

I have only seen three of the seven silver screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and I don’t expect any of the others to top this one. The secret ingredient to this one's success is Greta Gerwig. Writing and directing, she does so much more than merely translate the classic to movie form. She re-arranges the story to give the events a greater punch than they would if they were shown chronologically and puts a little more emphasis on a couple of key moments (that tear-jerking Christmas, for example) to crank up the emotion. She also makes it more modern without having to change anything about the setting or characters. Admittedly, the back-and-forth between the past and present is a little jarring at first - makes you wonder what Greta Gerwig could’ve done had she been given the de-aging budget Martin Scorsese was given - but that’s where the performances and costumes come in. It takes mere moments before you get what the movie is doing. I’ve said it already but it made me cry.

1. Parasite

To make this list, I didn’t go through all of my past reviews and check which ones were rated what. I thought back to which movies gave me the most vivid memories, which ones gave me the biggest reactions. I’m still not sure how I feel about the final final moment but there’s so much about Parasite that I admire. This would be a great one to watch with others just to see their reactions to the reveal about the bookcase.

[ice-cream-nekogirl]

Thank you Mr. Yamada

Summary: You’re undergoing some serious stress involving grades and schoolwork, and when Aizawa proves less than helpful, you end up confiding in an oddly sweet and comforting Present Mic.

We’ve all talked smack about a teacher before right? Lol cuz this has some of that... and even good teachers make mistakes by telling us things we don’t want to hear... 

I wanna dedicate this to Mental Health month, because I know students have struggled with school and it can take a toll on our mental health, and not just school, but with work and life in general so... this might be my favorite fic so far. Cuz I’m sure we’ve all had those wonderful teachers who have actually helped us during some times where we really needed it.

And no there’s NO romance at all in this fic, Reader just has a crush on Present Mic but it don’t go no further than that. This is purely platonic anf fluffy fic featuring a teacher just helping out a student because teachers are supposed to help students. And I can see Present Mic being an emotionally intelligent dude since his intelligence is at 5/5, smarter than Aizawa cuz he’s only 4/5... XD

Sorry Aizawa lol...

And I shamelessly alluded to Mean Girls quite a bit in this one I just love that movie XD

BTW SORRY FOR ANY OOC-NESS!!

Featuring: Favorite Parakeet Dad!!

You're never gonna be alone! From this moment on, if you ever feel like letting go, I won't let you fall, You're never gonna be alone! I'll hold you 'till the hurt is gone.

-”Never Gonna Be Alone” by Nickelback

“*You… have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand the rights I have read to you?*” 

In English class with your favorite teacher, you had recited the Miranda rights in often stated in America from police when they arrested villains and criminals during the lesson of differences in hero laws in Japan and America. English had gotten easier for you, and you liked to think you were slightly better at it than most of your classmates were.

“YES! Perfection (L/N)! Always the first one to answer right on the dot!” Yamada made sure to loudly praise you in front of the class, because while he didn’t want to play favorites like your homeroom teacher did, he felt that it was necessary since you looked like you needed a little support lately.

“T-Thank you, Mr. Yamada.” You somewhat shyly thanked your English teacher after receiving such praise, not entirely oblivious to some looks your classmates were giving to Yamada. They weren’t jealous or anything, but the loud pro-hero certainly made it a point to make you sound like the best student in this class.

Needless to say, it kind of made you happy since you had been struggling lately in your other classes. Especially with Aizawa. 

Speaking of which…

You were distracted and feeling kinda groggy the entire time in the Hero course, sighing as you tiredly stared off into space and barely registering anything Aizawa, or was it Iida talking? Whoever it was, you weren’t really listening, you were thinking of something else and trying to not think about how bad you were doing in class.

After seeing everyone improve on their quirks and overcoming their own issues, just… really made you feel like you were doing the opposite. And you hated it…

Everyday you tried your hardest, pushed yourself even if it made your muscles ache and your bones hurt the next day. You worked with your quirk as much as you could, even trying to carry a larger portion of water to try and control it as much as you could. Your parents worried that you were going overboard and trying to go beyond your limits, but you really just wanted to get better like everyone else. Not just to feel proud of yourself, but to make everyone around you proud. Even if it meant working yourself tired, and even if it meant forcing yourself to keep everything inside so you could focus on what mattered.

However…

For a while you had really been pretending to be okay until class ended and lunch break had started. Before you could get up to leave to the cafeteria, Aizawa stopped you.

“(L/N).”

You sighed to yourself, closing your eyes and preparing yourself to reluctantly go over to your teacher. What did you do this time? “Yes?” Despite your mood, you made sure to sound polite.

“I need your parents to sign this.” Aizawa gave you a report with a few marks on it, which was detailing a list of things you apparently needed to work on. “Let them know that you’re failing.” The words hit you like a school bus as you inhaled deeply.

“Failing?” You asked incredulously, even though you believed it based on your gradually worsening performances and lack of focus in class lately. He nodded, but it almost seemed as if he didn’t want to tell you this.

“That’s right. I’ve been seeing you regress during physical training. Your supermove also needs more work and thought put into. You barely managed to get your hero license because you had your classmates help you out. I don’t know what’s been distracting you, but you need to work on that because it’s getting in the way of your progress.” Every critique he gave you felt like arrows to your back as you kept your composure.

“I see that you’re struggling, but that’s why I’m telling you what you need to work on, because I know you have potential, but lately you haven’t been living up to it. You don’t want to waste it by letting your vulnerabilities show.” Aizawa wasn’t exactly trying to sound harsh, but he was being honest with you to let you know what he was seeing from you.

“How would you know what vulnerabilities are?”

You steadied your breathing while your teacher talked, resisting the urge to storm out and ignore him like you had been the past couple of months.

“I can help you. You’re here to become a hero, and it’s my job to make sure that you become one. And you can’t be a hero if you’re not trying to catch up to the others. But I know you’re stronger and smarter than this, so I’m going to give you more study sessions and training sessions to help you improve.” He offered you help, but all you heard was him accuse you of not trying to catch up.

“I understand. Thank you, sir, I needed to hear that.” You smiled politely albeit a little sadly. That was a complete lie, you were aware that you were struggling and the way he said all of that just made you feel like shit.

But you still smiled despite the emotions that were brewing inside you but you’ve been pretending to be okay for a good portion of your life so you knew how to keep the tears at bay. And you were NOT going to cry in front of your teacher, especially not the one you felt was bringing you down.

Aizawa looked at you pensively, as if he almost sensed that you weren’t being a hundred percent honest, so he asked you.

“Are you all right (L/N)?” Maybe he was a little harsh with his words, and he could tell that something was a little bit wrong, because he knew that your smile wasn’t real.

“No. No I’m good, I totally get it and I promise I will push myself hard, I know what I gotta do now. I just needed that little push.” You nodded, forcing yourself to sound more chipper as your fake smile grew. And you were thankful that you were good at acting since Aizawa seemed to believe your lies as he sighed a bit.

“Well good. I know you can do it. That’s why I’m pushing you.”

You almost missed the good intentions in his words, because you were too mad to even believe him. “Thank you again Mr. Aizawa. And if there’s anything else I can do to improve, just let me know and I will do it.”

As you smiled, you didn’t notice that your classmate Aoyama was there to eat lunch by himself and he saw right through you. He knew you weren’t being honest and that you most certainly weren’t happy after hearing everything yours and his teacher had told you.

“I will.” Aizawa said to you before you left the classroom in a bit of a huff…

SECONDS LATER…

“I HATE HIM!” You stormed off to scream in the bathroom, but you made sure that you were alone because you knew that ranting about this to the other girls wouldn’t allow you to vent. They would tell you a bunch of bullshit about how Aizawa was ‘trying to help’.

Why? Because they told you that the last time you tried venting about your troubles in class and didn’t help you at all. You loved those girls, but you wanted to slap them silly for dismissing how angry you were that day. So it was just better to vent to yourself, by yourself…

It’s not like they would understand anyway, they all seemed pretty pleased with themselves.

“He’s failing me on purpose I swear to God… that… that fucking jerk… why is it always me? Why am I always being the one singled out…? It’s not like I’m the dumbest and the weakest one in class…” You muttered and asked yourself when you thought about your other classmates who weren’t doing too good either, but they weren’t being called out for it.

Kaminari and Ashido were so much worse at taking tests than you were, and Mineta had a weak-ass quirk while your water quirk could at least pack a punch so why weren’t those three getting read like you were?

You have potential, but lately you haven’t been living up to it?

Did that mean you were losing your potential?

Wasting it and letting your vulnerabilities show?

Weren’t you a human first and a hero second?

Can’t be a hero if you’re not trying to catch up?

But weren’t you trying your damn hardest every goddamn day?

Who does Mr. Aizawa think he is? You wondered as you retreated from the mirror and locked yourself in one of the bathrooms stalls to sit down with your hands in your head, unable to stop a flood of tears from streaming down your face as you began wondering if you were overreacting.

At least, until the rest of your intrusive thoughts came to haunt you.

‘He’s right you know. You’re only mad because he’s right! And do you see Midoriya, Bakugou and Todoroki? They’re doing things you could never do! Congratulations, you’re going to fail and never become a hero cuz the only things you’ve succeeded in this class at all          is being weak, slow AND stupid. Your teacher sees it and your classmates can see it!’

The saboteur in your head taunted you as you cried quietly to yourself and trembled where you sat. God what were your parents going to think when you tell them you’re failing?

And on top of that, there was no way you were going back to class looking like this. You refused.

It’s not like anyone was going to worry or even notice that you weren’t in class because clearly, you were the weakest link in class. You felt that it was better if everyone just did their things without you. You were useless right now, and you were being completely honest, you didn’t want to see any of your classmates right now.

How could they relate to you? They were all doing so much better than you anyway, and they were all stronger, smarter and more talented than you were.

There was no way they could understand…

4 HOURS LATER…

You didn’t want to leave the bathroom, not when it was the only place of privacy where you could hide. Honestly, you were considering just staying in there for the rest of the day, and somehow sneak into your dorm-room and then stay in there for the rest of the night. No one would bother you, and most importantly, you wouldn’t bother anyone either with your pathetic problems.

However, realistically, you knew that couldn’t happen and you were getting kind of bored being all alone in this smelly room and with your phone on low. As much as you didn’t want to, it was time to get out for just a little bit and keep skipping class and fake an illness like mono if you have to; you weren’t going back to class, you absolutely refused.

Sighing, you slowly opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom with a heaviness in your chest that was begging you to go find someplace to sleep in an attempt to make this shitty day go away by closing your eyes. It was already close to the last class of the day, but you had no plans on showing up. Sure you’d get in trouble for it later, but at this point you barely cared anymore. All you wanted to do was stick to your plan and sneak back to your dorm-room so you could be miserable in peace.  

“(L/N)?”

Your favorite teacher’s voice made you freeze in your tracks and gasp audibly in shock. Just like that your body reacted on its own as you started shaking nervously but kept your back turned even though Yamada’s enthusiastic and loud voice was impossible for you to ignore.  

“There you are! Eraser’s been looking for you for a while! Said your classmates didn’t know where you were at! In fact, I think they’re all looking for you!”

Aizawa was worried about you? You honestly couldn’t imagine why, and you didn’t believe it. But just thinking about that was making you quiver more, fists clenching as your lips trembled and tears built up in your eyes, spilling down because there were too much for your eyes to hold back. There was nothing you could do, you wanted to just walk away or even run but how could you do that to Yamada? When he was the only teacher that you felt gave you the most praise when you clearly sucked at everything.

“Haha I can’t wait to see his face when he sees that I found you! And he was worried… but I knew you had to be around campus somewhere~. After all you’re not the type who would skip class, though to be honest you haven’t really been-”

Before he had a chance to finish his sentence you finally turned to face him with your lip quivering and tears running down your face as you sniffled. He quickly shut himself up as the smile on his face immediately fell and contorted into an uncharacteristically concerned frown. Looking directly at him, you saw what looked like worry in his eyes through his glasses. Yamada was usually such a loud man who was almost always smiling that seeing him so quiet and frowning was almost unnatural to you.  

“Hey… (Y/N)… what’s wrong?” He asked you in a rare, soft and very concerned tone. Something not many had the opportunity to hear from the loud-mouthed, carefree pro-hero.

As hard as you tried to keep it all in, everything just poured out of you. Word vomit at its best.

“I… I’m failing the hero course… and I-I’m… I’m trying SO hard… but it’s not enough… I-I haven’t been improving a-and… t-the more I think about it… the more I think t-that I… I should have tried harder… I should have studied harder… worked harder… but… it’s just so hard…” You shut your eyes as tears fell to the ground, unable to hold back the sob that crept out of your throat and made your shoulders shake up and down from the remaining cries that you apparently weren’t finished getting rid of yet. Apparently, you weren’t finished crying yet, and now the concern Mr. Yamada showed you was enough to trigger the overwhelming disappointment with yourself into making you cry in self-pity. 

You hated it.

Frankly, Yamada was alarmed by the sight of a student crying, but there was no way he was going to leave you alone. He knew what you were talking about too, he had noticed that you hadn’t been as energetic lately, nor did you seem happy at all. Sure, you paid attention in HIS class, but he knew that’s because you were confident in there. However, based on what Aizawa had been telling him about you and the rest of his students and from what he’s seen in your overall demeanor, he knew you had fallen into a slump and this was a result of bottling up all your stress. Now it was all pouring out and it practically broke his heart seeing you like this.

“M-M…M-Mr. Aizawa… h-he… he knows I’m weak a-and s-stupid… he’s not saying it outright, but I know he knows it… and he’s right… n-n-nno matter what I try, nnnnn-nothing works… I’m guh-getting worse… e-eh-ev-everyone’s getting better… e-e-everyone… b-but me…” You choked out tearfully in between sobs, barely able to even talk as you opened up what had been eating you up from the inside out.

“What? No! That’s not true! Trust me, Eraser and I talk all the time, and he does NOT think you’re weak… and if everyone’s getting better, then you are too! You’re a part of their class after all, they’re just improving in their own ways, and you are too!” Yamada has seen students break down before, but not quite like this where he was face-to-face with one, so he wasn’t entirely sure how to make you feel better. He wouldn’t give up though, not on his student.

“B-But… but it’s true… I-I… I’m not improving… I-I’ve… I’m regressing… i-in the tests, t-the combat… I-I keep losing… f-for me and m-my partners I’m p-paired with… a-and t-the gym… God the fucking gym… I-I can’t… I’m getting slower… I can’t run fast… e-even though I push myself as hard as I can I just c-can’t… l-look at me, I’m pathetic and weak, I’m weak, s-slow and stupid… I-I can’t ru-run fast Mr. Yamada, I-I c-can’t fight back, I can’t buh-b-be a hero, I-I’m the weakest link in my class, I-I’m ridiculous and sss-sllow…”

Dramatically and breaking down almost completely, you started running in place as if to emphasize your weakness in running as you continued to cry and unload the same intrusive thoughts that tormented you. You almost didn’t notice Yamada awkwardly walking closer towards you even if what he was seeing right now was hard to watch. An upset, anxious student overwhelmed by anxiety and self-doubt who was falling apart before his eyes.

“Stop it… S-Stop saying those things! Come on now… you can’t say that to yourself… you can’t treat yourself like that… come here…”

He shook his head at what you were saying about yourself, opening his arms out as you found yourself gladly letting yourself into your teacher’s hold as he gently put his arms around you in a soft hug while you clung to him and unabashedly cried your heart out. Yamada was an affectionate and hands-on kind of man in general, but as a teacher he didn’t want to cross his boundaries with a student. However, he cared about you very much, and you looked so upset that he couldn’t just let you cry and suffer all by yourself like this. As a teacher AND a hero, he felt like it was his job to comfort a distraught student who was clearly under a lot of stress. You might have been Aizawa’s student, but you were just as much one of his students as you were Aizawa’s!

“It… I-It’s s-ssso huh-hard… I-It’s just so… fucking… hard… I… I… I-I’m s-ss-sso tired of tuh-trying so hard a-and not d-doing anything right M-Mr. Yamada… n-nothing I-I do is… m-making me better… I-I… I-I’m g-getting w-w-worse…”

You’ve really done it this time. Crying like a child in front of your favorite teacher. And yet, hugging him felt so nice. So warm and comforting.

“I know… I know it’s hard… hey, hey it’s okay… I’ve got you… don’t hurt yourself sweetie, take deep breaths for me now, okay? Breathe…” He said in the softest voice you had ever heard him use as he held you while you clutched his costume, and he didn’t mind. Rocking you gently, he kept hushing you as you cried, your shoulders still trembling as he made sure to speak softly and gently to soothe your frazzled nerves as you followed his advice, trying to steady your rapid breathing by taking a few deep inhales and shaky exhales through gritted teeth. Inhaling sharply in an attempt to try and breathe again as you focused on the warmth coming from your teacher’s arms, slowly it was working.

“Good, that’s it… very good, shhhhh…” He praised you once he felt you slowing yourself down, knowing that you were in serious need of emotional support right now, and everything he was doing so far was working for you. You felt very safe at the moment, and not judged at all. Yamada was very patient with you too, he let you slow down so you could catch your breath and breathe properly, and he only spoke when you had eventually stopped shaking as you kept taking deep, steady breaths until you were calm enough and stopped hyperventilating.

“You’re trying very hard. Being a hero ain’t easy… but you’re not alone ya know? Ya see, while you might not think so, you’re trying just as hard, if not, harder than anyone else is! I’ve seen your effort, and your passion… Eraser’s a bit too much sometimes BUT! I’m sure he can tell you’re trying your best…”

“Mr. Aizawa doesn’t care about me, or how hard I try… he never has… all he cares about are the strong ones in our class… He only cares about Shinsou, Midoriya, Bakugou, Tsuyu, Yaoyorozu and Todoroki… all my friends… but not me… cuz I’m the weakest one… I’m sure he’s just ready to expel me anytime he wants…” Your tone was bitter, yet still fresh with sadness and your lack of self-esteem and distorted view was talking for you. Even though at times you felt as if Aizawa didn’t care about you, and it wouldn’t surprise you if he didn’t.

“Ha! He gives off that impression, doesn’t he?” He laughed a little bit, trying to lighten up your mood a little bit as you were calm enough to pay attention to him, blinking slightly as it pushed some stray tears down your face. “Eraser’s good at pretending he doesn’t care about his students… the thing is though he’s a total pusher, he pushes people, just like that teacher in Mean Girls. And he especially pushes his students BECAUSE he cares about them and he knows that they have a LOT of potential! And he definitely cares about you! I know he does! He definitely doesn’t think you’re weak!” That didn’t really do much to make you feel better since you already heard that from Aizawa. But surprisingly Yamada could tell that it wasn’t doing much to convince you.

“He just forgets that he can come off as a total hardass sometimes and that you kids are still kids who are gonna react differently compared to others. But don’t let that make you feel as if you’re not improving, because you are! You’re one of my best students! And I’ve seen the way you use your quirk. You’re really strong! You’re just in a little bit of a slump that’s all, nothing wrong with that though because every hero goes through slumps. I sure have! Every teacher in this school has! Including Eraser and even All-Might!” Yamada used his normal tone this time, enthusiastically saying oddly sweet and gentle words of encouragement to you.

At first you were surprised once you registered all of that, but you understood what he was saying. Basically, that none of the heroes were perfect, and that there wasn’t anything wrong with that. You yourself were far from perfect and prone to making a lot of mistakes and you struggled with things differently than your classmates might have, including anxiety, self-hatred and self-doubt.

Yet, Yamada still didn’t judge you, and he wasn’t judging you for being upset over this, if anything, his words just made you realize that while you weren’t perfect; there was nothing wrong with being imperfect because it happens to everyone, and that regardless of the slump you were definitely in, it didn’t make you weak.

“Look it’s perfectly normal to go through these slumps. We might be heroes, and we might be humans with quirks, but under the costumes and the hero titles we’re still just humans, the quirks are just bonuses, and they don’t change the fact that we’re humans at our core. Even if we chose to be heroes, we can’t forget or ignore our humanity AND our wellbeing, now can we? Our humanity is the basis of our heroism, don’t you think?” He asked you, raising a brow as you looked up at him almost adoringly. Sometimes you swore everyone forgot how smart Yamada was, but you didn’t, you thought he was wonderful.

In fact, you thought he was the most brilliant hero in the school, and you were absolutely marveled by him, especially right now. He told you everything you wanted and needed to hear. So, you nodded your head at his question, making him smile again.

“Don’t ever feel bad for being human. You know your limits and what your own personal issues are, it doesn’t mean you’re weak. And I know you get anxious and doubt yourself sometimes, but those don’t make you weak either. You are NOT weak and it’s OKAY to not feel okay sometimes, it does NOT make you weak. In fact, I believe you’re going to be one of the stronger heroes when you graduate and you’re going to be one of the most fantastic pro-heroes of your age! So, don’t think you’re weak or pathetic (L/N). Don’t you think that for one minute, okay?” He spoke gently again, and sounded slightly firm for a moment there, but it was still gentle and comforting as he grinned at you until a smile finally found its way onto your lips.

It was like a validation you never knew you needed, and just hearing him reassure you like this just made you tear up again as they freely fell down your face.

Sniffling, you whimpered and hugged him again in gratitude. Yamada was rather surprised at the sudden hug, but he quickly and gladly returned it with a big smile on his face, tearing up just a little bit himself; he was beyond happy that you seemed better now and that he was able to help you when you needed it.

“Okay… I won’t… I promise I won’t sir… thank you… but, you know… you actually gave me something else I didn’t know was what I really wanted…”

“Oh? What was that?”

“A hug…” You admitted somewhat shyly, since for a while you’d been desperately wanting a hug and couldn’t find it in you to ask some of your friends that because it felt so awkward. But thankfully, Yamada had given you what you had been wanting and needing. And admittedly, you’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t have a bit of a crush on this man, even though you knew that it wouldn’t be possible because of the age gap, yet a part of you dreamed nonetheless for when you became of age.

As for Yamada, he was surprised by this and yet he still smiled while he hugged you. It was times like these that made him remember that this is why he became a teacher aside from a being a hero.

“I was happy to help (Y/N). And if you ever need to talk to someone about this or if you’re ever having another bad day, intrusive thoughts or anything else, you can always come to me okay?” He asked you softly, and you nodded in his hug with a warm smile, loving every minute of this and prayed that this could last just for a little while longer…

Sadly you didn’t get that wish.

“What’s going on here?” Aizawa’s voice startled you and Yamada as you both yelped and jumped a little bit in your hug, and slowly you pulled away to rather awkwardly turn to face the other pro-hero, whose eyes slightly widened upon seeing you.

“(L/N)?” Your own eyes widened, but you quickly looked away with a nervous look once you felt Aizawa’s eyes on you, staring at the ground as anxiety started creeping up on you again.

“Where have you been? You didn’t show up to class since lunch.” He asked you in a rare tone that almost sounded gentle. And worried? That really surprised you, but you weren’t exactly comfortable enough to answer him yet.

“Eraser! Perfect timing! I found (L/N)! And she’s okay!” Yamada cheerfully said and looked over at you. “You are aren’t you (L/N)?” However, he had to ask you that just to make sure that you were okay. And because it was Yamada speaking to you, you looked away from the ground to meet his eyes and you found yourself able to smile again at him.

“Y-Yeah… it’s been a while… but for once I can say that I am legitimately okay. Thanks to you Mr. Yamada.” You said, a bit bashfully but sincerely, not taking your eyes off your English teacher as he grinned happily, much to Aizawa’s subtle annoyance. Of course, he was relieved that you were okay, but he clearly saw that you weren’t looking at him.

“It was no problem! Anytime okay?” Yamada said to you sweetly, he was very genuine with you. And yet, he couldn’t help but kind of rub this in his friend’s face a little bit. Aizawa wouldn’t admit it, but it was working only a little bit, especially since his own student was being more open with his friend than him.

“(L/N) Are you all right?” Your teacher asked you, seeing your reddened eyes and the remnants of tears on your cheeks; at that moment he realized that you had been crying. You couldn’t tell that he had become rather concerned now since he had never seen you cry before.

However, as mad as you were at your homeroom teacher, you did eventually look at him before you wiped the dried tears from your face. “I’m sorry Mr. Aizawa… I skipped class… on purpose… I know I shouldn’t have … but, I… I wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t in a good place enough to come back....”

For once, you did see the care and concern in Aizawa’s now soft-looking eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’m your teacher. I know you’ve been struggling. I would have helped you if you told me that you needed it concerning your well-being.” He sounded like he was scolding you, and he was a little bit but now it was clear that he was more worried than upset with you.

You ALMOST wanted to cry again, but you didn’t now that you had gotten everything out with Yamada and felt better about yourself a little bit. Although you were feeling kind of guilty now for hiding everything else from Aizawa, it was time to get everything out with him too.

“That’s just it… I got in my head. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to you about this, with how bad I’ve been doing… I didn’t want to seem like I desperately needed help because I thought I could deal with this on my own.” You averted your eyes again, biting your bottom lip a little bit.

“And I have to be honest, I was hurt… I was hurt by your words today before lunch, it felt more like I was being judged than being given constructive criticism, like I was being told I wasn’t good enough, and that I wasn’t trying when I was trying my absolute hardest… when I’ve had plenty of people tell me that before… the minute you said that, I… I hated you in that moment… I wanted to punch you in the face… You were the last person I wanted to talk to about what was bothering me…” Almost shamefully, you covered your eyes with your fingers, unable to see the look of very subtle shock on your teacher’s face, as Yamada tried his hardest to not snicker, and it wasn’t working.

“I’m really sorry sir but I was just so hurt and angry that I could not bear the thought of asking you for help because I felt like I was just going to get judged again… but hiding wasn’t the right way to do it either… so I’m sorry… I never should have worried you.” You grabbed your arm nervously, guilt etched over your features even though you were finally being honest with Aizawa, just as you had been with Yamada.

Although you didn’t see it, Aizawa had the grace to look guilty. This wasn’t the first time he’s hurt one of his student’s feelings, and yet it never ceased to make him feel awful about it. Especially if it was enough to make one just avoid class altogether and cry by themselves. Worst of all, you refused to ask for his help because he hurt your feelings that badly.

“I appreciate your honesty (L/N). But you know that it’s never my intention to judge my students right? My purpose is to help you and your classmates improve and learn. I suppose I was too hard on you, and for that I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt your feelings.” He looked and sounded guilty, and for once you actually smiled at your homeroom teacher. Now you could register his words after clearing your head a little bit.

“I know… I’m sorry I took it so personally.” You felt bad though, even if you knew that your feelings were valid.

“Don’t be. I wasn’t really gentle with what I told you. I should have approached you better.” Aizawa owned up to not really being that nice in what he said to you, and you nodded in agreement, glad that he was taking responsibility for having hurt your feelings.

“Yeah your approach kinda sucked.” Despite that you gave a small chuckle and it surprised to see your own teacher give a low chuckle. Albeit, it was mostly because he was glad to see that you looked happier than you had been in months. He might not have been gentle about your struggles, but he knew you were struggling and it concerned him; he just didn’t know how to approach you about it the right way.

“You know that you’re going to still have to make up for all the classes you missed though, right?” But Aizawa still had to be your teacher, and this time, you weren’t sad to hear that from him as you nervously smiled.

“Of course… I saw that coming… I feel a little bit better to do that.” You said softly, even though you might not have been one hundred percent yet, you felt so much better after confiding in Mr. Yamada. And actually pretty inspired after he helped you and talked to you about taking care of your own mental health. “In fact, I’ve made a major decision after today.”

That however, surprised both Aizawa and Yamada, but they let you talk anyway to hear what you had to say.

“I’ve decided that I definitely want to work harder with my studies. The kind of hero I’ll be… will be one who looks out for people. Pick them up when they’re down. After all… it’s super important. Mental health is overlooked. I want to be that kind of hero for people who struggle like me.” You suddenly came to that conclusion after your talk with Yamada. It didn’t make all your issues go away, but his care for you during your breakdown gave you enough strength to get back up again and inspired you to think more about that.

“I’m going to fix all my mistakes, work on my super-move and rely less on my classmates. And I won’t let you down next time Mr. Aizawa. Because whoever you pair me up against, I’m going to kick their ass.” A smirk made its way to your lips, looking more confident and happier than earlier. Which pleased your teacher as he gave you a small smile, obviously happy himself that you finally looked more certain about yourself than you had been in months.

“I know you will.” Aizawa felt confident in you now after seeing the energy return to your eyes as you actually smiled wide at your teacher.

“I’ll see you both tomorrow. Mr. Aizawa. Mr. Yamada. And thank you again… thank you Mr. Yamada. I won’t forget this ever.” You bowed to them both, and Yamada couldn’t help but look very proud of himself when you gave him a second thank you, much to Aizawa’s annoyance.

“Of course (L/N)! I was happy to help!” Yamada’s enthusiastic tone bordered on a brag when he saw how peeved his friend looked, especially when their student smiled happily and politely left the two of them with a soft ‘good-bye’ after being dismissed.

“She’s got more spirit now.” Aizawa saw that in you again as he watched you walk away. “I knew she would find it again.” He always saw your potential; you just needed a little bit of a push. It worked too because now you were more than motivated now. He just wished he could have been the one to help you when that put you in a slump instead. And he wished that he didn’t make you cry…

“And I helped!” Yamada had to say that though, just to rub some salt in the wound. And Aizawa hated that it was irritating him this much. “But you’re right… she looks very determined now.” He snickered a bit.

“What’s so funny?” Aizawa asked him very curtly as he tried to not look as annoyed as he was feeling.

“With that fire in her… I bet whoever she fights tomorrow… she’s probably going to pretend that they’re you and punch them in the face.” Yamada smirked somewhat deviously at him, but then he shrieked when the other pro-hero glared at him with those angry, red eyes of his. Because deep down, he hoped that wasn’t true.

And unfortunately, it was.

Because the next day you were paired up against Kirishima. You were so full of a new-found energy and motivation that you were ready for this, and the first thing you did was punch him in the face before fighting, and you quickly won the match once you used your water quirk to its max level now that you had the fire back in you.

“Anybody else want some?!”

You shouted after successfully pinning Kirishima down and you were announced victorious. Quite a few of your classmates were startled, and some (especially Mineta) were terrified, even Bakugou looked mildly shocked by the spark you had shown them all. But you almost didn’t notice their reactions, but you were feeling amazing now; like you could do anything.

Although you DID quickly apologize to poor Kirishima afterwards, a lot in fact and you immediately felt guilty for beating him. But the sweet redhead just smiled and shrugged it off and happily congratulated you on your win. Even he could tell that you got a fire back in your stomach and he was happy for you.

“That felt good.” You smiled widely as you approached your closest friends Midoriya, Uraraka, Iida and Todoroki.

“Wow! (Y/N) I knew your quirk was strong but you… you really showed off even more power today…” Midoriya looked positively awed, his green eyes wide and practically sparkling in marvel.

“A most excellent performance (Y/N)! I think it was your best one yet! I’m proud of you!” Iida somewhat dramatically praised you, but he was clearly happy when he saw that you had a spark back in you.

“Oui. The sparkle in your eyes is back~.” You were hella surprised when Aoyama had remarked on your energy, but you still appreciated it. Even if you had no idea that he was aware of your struggles as you smiled at the blonde boy.

“Yeah! Are you kidding? You were more than good! You really showed everyone that you’re not to be messed with!” Uraraka then cheerfully praised you with a big grin, almost like she was amazed by you as you couldn’t help but hug the girl. “Aww! Guys thank you so much!!”

“No. Not good. Brilliant.” Todoroki gave you one of his rare smiles that he had reserved for you, which made you giggle and blush at all the compliments and praise your friends were giving you as you thanked each and every one of them personally. And your smile grew when you fondly thought about Mr. Yamada. You owed this to him after the way he helped you. And you would never forget it.

However, you couldn’t help but notice that after your battle with Kirishima that Mr. Aizawa was awfully silent and a little sulky afterward…

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: GM 10 - SJS - Shoot

These back-to-back games against the Sharks marked the first time the Sabres have had a home-and-home series with a Western Conference team since 1995. They are now 5-0, UNDEFEATED, at home at Key Bank Center to start the season for the first time since the President’s Trophy winning season of 2006-2007. The Overtime winner also marked Jack Eichel’s sixth career OT game-winning-goal. That ties him with Derek Roy and Thomas Vanek for the most in franchise history (That stat courtesy of @SabresPR). There is some irony to that fact and Eichel’s two total goals this game considering the first period was a story of the Captain refusing to shoot the puck. We all know the stereotype of shoot guy. You high class folks down in the 100 level seem to act like it doesn’t happen down there but it does. There’s always someone yelling shoot, often times when it may not be wisest to shoot the puck. Tonight I was shoot guy. Tonight we all were shoot guy. Tonight was the right night to be shoot guy and I think Jacky boy knew it as he giggled at receiving the question about it in postgame. We’ll get back to that point. It’s worth discussing the way this team plays in tough situations. San Jose came out upset with themselves. They haven’t had a great start and Saturday night in NorCal Buffalo won the chest match. I don’t think it’s off-base to say the Sharks are a better team than the Sabres. Sure, they skew older these days, but they have the horses to win a Stanley Cup and all you can really do is get within striking distance of that chalice in this league. The other thing about this league is any team can win any night and for two games in a row on different coasts of the continent this Sabres team won. They’ve decided to keep that barn a fortress. Do I think they’re going to win the President’s Trophy like that last time they started 5-0 at home? No, but now they’re playing to their potential and that on a consistent basis might change the Spring narrative. Enough hype though, let’s look at the reality of this game.

They did not start hot like they have lately. In fact, they did a lot of flubbing out of the gate. Captain Jack was more-or-less one-on-one with a Martin Jones who WE KNOW is not so hot right now from three days ago less than a minute into the game. He passed the puck to Victor Olofsson who took an ill-fated shot in one of the more memeable moments of this season so far. This is not a new thing. Jack Eichel is a hungry boy for as long as he’s played organized sports. He plays to win but he also minds the team. Going all the way back to his rookie season we’ve seen this conflict between to pass or to shoot. In the early years he didn’t have great wingers so shoot please, Jack. More recently he has had good wingers and still he could shoot more. Like some kind of prophet the guys on this Sabres media team emphasized Eichel’s comments that he needed to shoot more. Ok: Coach says shoot more, your teammates say shoot more, YOU say shoot more, How about you shoot more, Jack? He did and it paid off but first we had to sit through a first period where the home team took more shots but it seemed like the Sharks got all the good chances. Dylan Gambrell scored his first goal on a redirect originating with Erik Karlsson on the blueline. It’s 1-0 Sharks a shade over five minutes in. It was hot and cold for the rest of the period. They got a powerplay and the Conor Sheary line, which was fire tonight, got a couple beautiful chances. As much as that powerplay looked hot again it yielded nothing. Want something else familiar? Marco Scandella gave up an ugly turnover in the defensive zone and nearly gave old pal Evander Kane a goal. I don’t care how well Henri Jokiharju is rehabilitating Scandella, bench him once Lawrence Pilut comes back! Tic-Tac-Toe Marc-Edouard Vlasic collected a Patrick Marleau assist to put the visitors up 2-0. It was not a fun first period.

Buffalo gets outshot in the second period mind you, but this segment they looked much more like the Kruger, connected, high-press team we’ve gotten used to this month. This was Jimmy Vesey’s best game as a Sabre so far, he and that Sheary-Mittelstadt pair were pushing hard. Vesey specifically had an expected goals and a corsi that was off the charts. The poor kid can’t buy a goal and he’ll continue to have to put up with punks like me until he does. The Sabres got a powerplay off a trip on Rasmus Dahlin and Jack Eichel shot to kill this time. The King of the Castle ripped a slapper from the circle, and it hit Martin Jones in the armpit. Luckily it had the power to keep going and so Buffalo got on the board. There was palpable relief in Eichel’s celebration looking heavenward. Had he not scored after the first period he had or worse, the team lost, that would have haunted him. You can tell because after a few missed chances in the first Ralph Krueger patted him on the back as if to tell him to keep his head up. The home team push picked up and Krueger made a strategic choice that may stick: he slid Jeff Skinner up to Eichel’s wing like last season. There was an immediate chemistry like old times. But the next decisive moment in this game came from Eichel’s other winger Sam Reinhart who tipped in a Rasmus Ristolainen rocket. The Captain’s super puck handling kept the puck in the zone just before the goal. Tie game 2-2. You could see Erik Karlsson was pissed as he went into the visiting locker room for the second intermission. With how the third period went in San Jose you knew this team was going to come back to win in the final frame.

Maybe anticipating similar third period festivities to Saturday night Buffalo picked up where they left off to start that final frame. Jack Eichel fought for the puck behind the San Jose net and got it out to Jeff Skinner in his office, right in front of the net. It was a 2018-2019 classic Jack to Jeff goal. The home side is now up 3-2 looking at a Sharks team they’re not really afraid at this point. While Jeff boy’s stunning smile lit up the Sabres bench Erik Karlsson plotted his revenge. But first we needed to be reminded we were playing one of those West Coast teams with one of those West Coast… styles. Yeah, let’s call boarding fools and starting fights a style. It’s no secret they play heavier hockey out west, but boarding Sam Reinhart is not a type of hockey. For everyone saying this team needs grit, take a look: there was a swarm. There was an ultimately inconsequential powerplay off the situation, but it makes you think what we have in terms of a physical response. Beyond the pugnacious side of Rasmus Ristolainen, Jake McCabe is never afraid to lay the hits and punch some faces. With Risto on the trade block Anthony Sciandra pointed out McCabe may not be taking the mantle of the overrated, beloved Sabres tough guy. McCabe does other stuff but the more I thought about Anthony’s sentiment the more it made sense. The Sabres got pushed out of the Ducks game physically. They didn’t fail the punk test this time and as far as I’m concerned that’s all I need them to do as far as the fighting game assuming they don’t lose their momentum from it. The Roaring Twenties line had a rare defensive lapse, particularly with Zemgus Girgensons not covering Karlsson and the Sharks tied the game up at 3. They smelled blood in the water and hemmed Buffalo in their own zone for segments of the remaining time in regulation. Ultimately Ralph Krueger would call a time out and they would hold the line until overtime.

This overtime period was damn near what I always want to see from their 3-on-3 overtimes. They possessed the puck for almost the entire extra frame. It was on a bungled line change when the Sharks got anything of a chance which ultimately got them no shot. It was on another line change when the Sabres registered what would apparently be the only shot on net in OT. Bodies flew at the net and sticks started slapping. The play began with Casey Mittelstadt bombing it in from the defensive zone to Rasmus Ristolainen who took the initial shot. It was a messy goal that originated with Jack Eichel. It looks like he gave the puck the momentum that carried it across the line and yes, before the goal was knocked off its moorings. The goal call would be reviewed but nonetheless the end result was a 4-3 win for the Buffalo Sabres to keep Key Bank Center their perfect home. That was all she wrote and that was it for the season for the San Jose Sharks whom the Sabres far and away have the best all-time record against.

Like, Comment and share this blog. These fun postgame reports are fun when the team is winning but sorry to say, they’re going to regress. I love the fun Sabres, but I don’t see them remaining atop this Atlantic Division. They have five games in ten nights now leading into the games in Stockholm, Sweden for the Global Series. They are setup nicely to fly inter-continental rather content with themselves. The next two games are a road trip to New York Rangers and Detroit, far from the fortress they’ve built down by the river in Buffalo. One of those teams you absolutely HAVE TO beat if you’re going to be taken seriously going forward. I’ll let you guess which one is which there. As we said earlier, any team can win any night in this league. If they’re going to be the team that continues to win on most nights they’ll have to lock down points much like they managed four against the Sharks. Those points are going to look great down the road, but they won’t be worth anything if they get buried in losses. I am a believer this team is for real at about 90% of the clip they’re running at right now. We have two very different tests later this week to see if I’ll be that fool again.

Thanks for Reading.

P.S. Oh, and the Leafs lost to Boston tonight too! Let’s treasure the little things while we got em, eh?

[theresawelchy]

Learning Data Science: 4 Untold Truths

Did you flirt with the idea of learning data science? You are not alone. This has been a really hot topic in the last few years and it will be one in the upcoming few, for sure. Yet, very few people actually become data scientists.

Why?

Well, part of the problem is that many aspiring data scientists don’t know what to expect from this field. Or even worse, based on the many misleading (sometimes scammy) “how to become a data scientist” articles, they have false expectations. And when they hit the wall, they get demotivated and quit.

In this article, I want to show you four untold truths that you should know about learning data science – and I have never seen them written down anywhere else before.

Untold truth #1: Learning Data Science is Hard!

Learning data science is not easy. It will take a lot of work, a lot of energy and a lot of time from you.

I have seen an ad recently in my Instagram feed that said: “Take this course and master data science in 1 month!”

And I was like: what the fudge!?

I’ve been practicing data science for 6+ years now. I’ve held senior DS positions (in addition to teaching). But I wouldn’t say that I mastered data science or analytics. I know for a fact that no one can master data science in 1 month. In fact, my personal estimation (based on students I worked with) is that from zero to the junior level the learning process will take ~6-9 months. (More about that in this free course: How to become a data scientist.

Learning data science is hard! A few online education platforms imply the opposite.

“Just change one word in this query. Run it! And boom, you’ve learned SQL…”

“Just watch this video course of the instructor running Python code, and you will know Python, too…”

“Just play around with this interactive chart and you will understand regression analysis immediately…”

Two years ago, I interviewed a guy for a junior DS position. He didn’t have any hands-on experience, but he learned SQL on a popular “just-type-your-code-into-the-browser” kind of online learning platform. (I won’t name the exact platform here. :-))

I gave him a computer with an SQL manager open – and a simple real-life task. He had to JOIN two SQL tables, then do a simple segmentation. He couldn’t solve the task! He ran into syntax errors, he couldn’t debug his code, he didn’t get the context, he couldn’t discover the data…

And that’s when I realized that many of these online schools give people only the illusion of data science knowledge.

You want to have real data science knowledge

You want to have real data science knowledge. But what does it take?

Well, first and foremost: (1) a lot of practicing (2) in true-to-life data environments. Don’t try to skip forward: take the time and the energy and set up your own data server!

Yes, sometimes (well, quite often in the beginning) you will mistype a code-snippet, your computer will throw an error and it will be very annoying. But this is how it works! We make mistakes, we learn from them and next time we will do much better.

And also take the time to practice a lot! When you practice, it’s okay to make stupid mistakes. For instance, it’s okay to accidentally mess up your previously built data pipelines and lose hours of work… (This happens from time to time with my students.) But again: we all do stupid things in real life data projects, too. At least, I did in my junior years — and it cost me a lot of extra work-hours. But I learned from that.

We make mistakes, we learn from them and we don’t make them again.

Note: How to practice? I shared a few ideas (and even more) in the above-mentioned free online course: How to become a data scientist?

Learning data science is not easy and it will take time. If you can’t accept this fact, then maybe this profession is not the best choice for you. But if you are okay with learning data science the hard way, this learning period of a few months will be one of your best long-term investments. (I’ll get back to this below.)

Untold truth #2: It’s not “Learning Data Science”, it’s “improving your Data Science skills”

The world changes really fast and it won’t get any slower. And I seriously believe that if one wants to keep up with the pace, the only way to do it is by focusing on improving skills.

Why? You might already have heard that according to researchers’ predictions, ~65% of today’s grade schoolers will hold jobs that don’t exist yet.

You might also have heard that the current estimated “half-life” of engineering related information is ~4 years. So 50% of the things your learn today regarding IT will be outdated in ~4 years.

soure: Shift Happens 2018

What does it mean for you? That the skills you acquire and improve are way more important than the actual information you learn.

It also means that “learning data science” is not about learning data science.

It’s about:

improving your coding skills.

improving your business skills.

improving your mathematical/statistical skills.

improving your data visualization, presentation, communication and other soft skills.

Learning data science is not about:

Learning a certain package of Python.

Learning the different industry benchmarks for this or that KPI.

Learning certain statistical models.

Learning how to use Google Data Studio or Tableau.

What seems important today, might be irrelevant in 5 years Because mastering, for instance, the Scikit-learn library or Google Data Studio might seem important today… but I bet that there will be a better machine learning package and a better data visualization software in 5 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that today, you should learn these things because they are part of the current data science and analytics ecosystem and also part of the learning curve itself.

I’m saying that you should keep in mind that when you learn these (or any other) tools, the important thing is not to cram in every little syntax detail or which button is where in the specific software – but to understand the big picture. Why does this tool work the way it works? What’s the underlying logic? How does this function work in other similar tools? Once you get these, changing between tools (even between programming languages) will be easy as pie.

And you will be much more prepared for the ever-changing future.

So to future-proof your data science career: focus on your skills and not on the information you learn!

Untold truth #3: Because it’s hard, Learning Data Science is a great investment

Let’s talk about career perspectives, too! Learning data science is a great short and long-term investment. I guess I don’t have to explain the short-term investment part.

Check out the LinkedIn Workforce Report for the US (August 2018)! It says: “Demand for data scientists is off the charts … data science skills shortages are present in almost every large U.S. city. Nationally, we have a shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills, with particularly acute shortages in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.”

Also, based on Glassdoor’s research, Data Scientist was ranked as the best job three years in a row in the USA.

source: glassdoor.com

Note: the above numbers apply to the US only – I don’t have hard data for the EU or any other parts of the world. But in my experience, in the EU we have the same trends.

High demand and persistent shortage puts data scientists into a really good position. It means:

Higher salary and better benefits

Better job security

Better work conditions (e.g. flexible hours, working from home, etc.)

Besides, data scientist is a well-respected job within the company (and in the outer world, too). You will be someone who your managers and colleagues want to listen to.

The point is: learning data science is a good short-term investment, for sure.

But is learning data science a good long-term investment, too?

My answer is yes and I have two reasons.

REASON #1: Just look at the data! In 2018 the shortage of data scientists in the US was 151,717 people. This number was ~140,000 in 2011. So in 7 years, the market couldn’t produce enough new data scientists to fill up the gap. (It even grew a bit.)

REASON #2: This is something that I’ve already mentioned in the intro. Many people want to learn data science… yet, not too many of them become data scientists after all. Why? Because learning data science is hard. It’s a combination of hard skills (like learning Python and SQL) and soft skills (like business skills or communication skills) and more. This is an entry limit that not many students can pass. They got fed up with statistics, or coding, or too many business decisions, and quit.

So the question is:

If yes, it will be one of the best career investments of your life.

Untold truth #4: Learning Data Science is not about learning Machine Learning, Deep Learning (or any other data buzzwords)

If you had to guess, what would you say is the most time-consuming part of the data scientist job?

Or in other words, what do you think you’ll need to work on the most when practicing data science and analytics for real?

Hint: it’s not Machine Learning.

The answer is… . . . …data cleaning.

Data scientists often say: “80 percent of data science is data cleaning. And 20 percent is complaining about data cleaning.” Okay, obviously, that’s a joke.

But when you get into your first data science role, you will see for yourself: it’s not about doing machine learning and predictive analytics 24/7.

Because to be able to run a proper ML algorithm you have to complete many other steps first:

data collection

data formatting

data cleaning

transforming your data to the right format

discovering and understanding the data

running other data analytics projects

data visualization

automating the above steps

and so on…

And believe me when I say: when you are working with real data, these things are just as exciting as the machine learning and predictive analytics parts.

What’s important then?

When you are learning data science, you should not focus on polishing your ML skills. Instead you should focus on:

being fluent with Python and SQL

understanding the business logic behind simpler analytical methods

being familiar with the basics of statistics

practicing and experiencing the pain of working with a raw and uncleaned data set

learning how to automate

and so on…

These things will help you to become a better data scientist and eventually get your first job — not another deep learning or artificial intelligence course.

So to summarize:

Learning Python and SQL –» important

Learning about Deep Learning –» not important

Learning the basics of statistics –» important

Learning about Artificial Intelligence –» not important

Practicing data cleaning, data formatting and automation –» important

Understanding “artificial neural networks” –» not important

At least, at the junior level… Later on (in 1 or 2 years), when your career moves forward, you will have to learn these above-mentioned, fancy machine learning methods on the job, anyway.

But for now: focus on the things that are important for your next step!

Conclusion

I know: being a data scientist, a machine learning guru, a master of deep learning… These all sound exciting. And you will get there eventually. (I mean, if you want to. For instance, I take much, much more enjoyment from working on simpler analytics projects that have bigger impacts on business. E.g. a sophisticated segmentation project rather than a deep learning project.)

But think about everything that I’ve written above: accept that learning data science is hard, focus on your skills, consider it an investment and learn the basics first!

If you want to learn more about how to become a data scientist, take my 50-minute long free video course: How to become a data scientist.

Also check-out my 6-week data science challenge: The Junior Data Scientist’s First Month video course.

Cheers, Tomi

[crystalgibsus]

How to Get Back to Working Out after a Break

Would you rather listen to this article? Use the player below, download it, or use iTunes. 

Getting back into a workout routine can seem more challenging than starting one for the first time.

Depending on how long the break from working out was, the results you worked so hard to achieve may have diminished; the momentum you built may have vanished. Rather than having “nowhere to go but up” like when you started working out the first time, it feels like you’re starting from a point of regression, and this can be frustrating.

But it doesn’t need to be.

Whether you’ve missed a week, a month, or several months of workouts doesn’t matter. This is where you are now, and what other choice do you have but to move forward?

How to Get Back to Working Out after a Break: Step 1

Don’t lament the situation. Don’t concern yourself with any results that have diminished. Don’t engage in self-flagellation. Don’t experience guilt for skipping a few workouts or even “letting yourself go.” This is not some dire situation worthy of your pity or frustration and there’s no need to catastrophize it. Heaping on guilt or frustration won’t help you get back into working out.

Recommended article: One Simple Hack to Stop Screwing Yourself Over

Life happened, you missed workouts, and you’re here now, ready to take the next step. That is all that matters. So shake off any sense of guilt or frustration and get to work.

How to Get Back to Working After a One-Week Break

If you were working out regularly for months and then missed a week of workouts due to illness, extenuating circumstances, or something more enjoyable like a vacation, that one week off can feel like a setback.

Let’s make this clear: an occasional week off from working out is not a big deal, so don’t turn it into one. If you work out regularly, consistently, then a few weeks off scattered over the course of an entire year, for example, is like taking a few drops of water out of a bucket. There’s no visual affect.

The best thing you can do is not get upset about missing a week of working out and pick up where you left off as if nothing happened. (This is assuming you missed a week from a minor illness, vacation, or something else. If you had surgery or experienced an injury, that’s a different story.)

You may be stronger or have improved performance after the brief break (because fatigue had more time to dissipate), or your strength may take a small hit (due to a reduction in coordination). Either way, it doesn’t matter. Start back immediately and do what you can. You may need to perform a couple workouts to return to your prior level, or you may perform better than you did before the break.

To summarize what to do if you miss one week of working out: resume normal activity like nothing happened and adjust the workouts if needed. If the weights need to be reduced with the strength training workouts, do it. A decrease in weight and intensity may be necessary if you missed workouts due to an illness, like a severe cold or flu. If you need to scale back the duration or intensity of cardio sessions, do it. It’ll return to prior levels quickly.

How to Get Back to Working Out After a 2-4-Week Break

After missing one week of working out, most people can resume activity as normal with little or no modification needed (unless there was an illness in which case some modification may be warranted). If you miss two to four weeks of working out, a recommended modification is scaling back the total volume of the first several workouts, and perhaps start back with weights that are a bit lighter than you were using previously, around 5-10% less is a good guide.

Scaling back the total training volume — performing fewer sets for each exercise or performing fewer total exercises per workout — will help you ease back into working out so you don’t get too sore. As an example, if you were performing four work sets for each exercise before the layoff, perform two work sets for each exercise and use lighter weights the first few workouts.

This way you get back into the habit of working out, you don’t overwhelm your recovery abilities, and you get comfortable performing the exercises again. After a week or two you should be close to your previous strength levels and can continue as if the break didn’t happen.

How to Get Back to Working Out If You Don’t Know How Long It’s Been Since You Last Touched a Weight or Cardio Machine

Start doing something, literally anything, as soon as possible. Today. Now, preferably.

If there’s an activity you enjoy doing — strength training, cardio, or a hobby that involves moving your body — then start there. The best thing you can do is get started, then you can decide what path to take going forward once some momentum has been built.

To get back into strength training after an indiscernible layoff, a good approach is to revert to beginner status: use a few basic exercises, use weights you can dominate to reestablish confidence with the exercises, and resist doing too much too soon out of impatience.

Trying to jump back in at full speed after a long layoff isn’t smart. Getting brutally sore doesn’t make the results come any quicker; in fact, it can slow down progress because your body will be too busy repairing the damage just to get back to baseline, and therefore you won’t improve performance or build muscle.

Don’t be in a rush to get back to your previous performance, or bodyweight or shape. Give yourself room to progress in the workouts by not doing too much too soon. Give your body time to rebuild strength and work capacity.

Why Did You Stop Working Out in the First Place?

Most people don’t ask this question after a long layoff from the gym. But they should, and, likely, you should too.

Perhaps you had to deal with a crucial real-life matter that took priority. Maybe you used your usual workout time to perfect a work project. If your break from working out was a result of more important life demands, get back into the habit of working out with your preferred routine.

However, if your absence from working out was because your previous regimen was unsustainable (i.e., it didn’t fit into your lifestyle; your life revolved around the program, so you quit), you often dreaded the workouts rather than look forward to them, the workouts took too much time to complete so you ended up skipping them, you were constantly sore or spent more time managing aches and pains rather than working out, then it’s time to adopt a new approach to get back into working out.

Recommended article: The Secret to Fitness Success (That’s Not Useless Crap)

If any of those scenarios describe you, don’t just restart. Restart with a better plan that fits your preferences, goals, and lifestyle. Set yourself up for success this time.

Choose a physical activity or workout that you would enjoy doing. Use whatever equipment you prefer or feel comfortable using. Perhaps focus on getting strong instead of burning calories if the latter is all exercise has ever been about for you. If time isn’t a luxury you may simply need workouts you can perform within 30 minutes so you can complete an effective workout and then get on with your life. (If this is you, check out the article How to Make Short Workouts More Effective.)

Fitness should be a lifelong pursuit; do what you can, now, to make sure that happens.

The One Rule That Rules Them All

Regardless of where you find yourself right now — having missed a week of workouts or you haven’t done any structured exercise in a year or more — the next step is the same: start immediately. Get back to feeding the workout habit.

Given my tremendous bias to lifting weights, that would mean performing some type of strength training workout, whether it’s with barbell exercises or dumbbell exercises. Ease into it if you must: use light weights you can dominate and focus on using efficient technique and get reacquainted with what it feels like to push and pull weights around again.

Not sure if you’re performing some of the basic exercises correctly? Use these tutorials to get you going:

How to Squat

How to Deadlift

How to Bench Press and Perform the Standing Press

How to Perform the Barbell Row and Chin-ups

Or maybe you prefer cardio; that’s great too. Go for a walk around your neighborhood to get started, if that’s the easiest option.

To get back into working out after a layoff, especially a lengthy one, it really does not matter what you do, only that you do something. Then keep doing it.

While you’re here, sign up for the newsletter. You’ll receive insider-only information and other great stuff not shared anywhere else.

The post How to Get Back to Working Out after a Break appeared first on Nia Shanks.

from Tips By Crystal https://www.niashanks.com/how-to-get-back-to-working-out-after-a-break/

[moorefitness]

How to Break Training Plateaus

This is possibly one of the most important articles I have ever published. It addresses how to break through a training plateau, which is probably one of the most commonly asked questions on the internet.

I say I, but actually, this is a section from our Muscle and Strength Training Pyramid book, so I should say Eric, Andrea, and I. Though I have made additions so that this works as a stand-alone article.

The training plateau trap people get into is usually thus:

Start training seriously. > Progress linearly and consistently by adding weight each session. > Stall.

Train a little harder (more effort). > Progress then stall.

Keep adding weight anyway, form degrades over time… *snap* > injury. Frustration, loss of motivation, 1–3 months break from gym entirely (instead of working around it and training what you can.)

Re-start training with more attention paid to good form. > Progress up to and past the previous plateau. > Stall.

Train a little harder. > Progress then stall.

Change from adding weight each session to something marginally more complex (like linear periodization or double progression, covered in our progression article). > Progress then stall.

Frustration. Google to the “rescue”! > Drop sets, giant sets, supersets, ‘new and shiny’ training program, bro splits, more, more, MOAAAR! > Stall.

Sound familiar? This article is here to fix that. It will show you how to systematically assess and address training plateaus.

However, a warning: the steps in the checklist we’re about to present are easy to understand, but they won’t necessarily be easy to identify as being true for you. — The ego has a nasty habit of getting in the way. But things are not progressing as planned because you are doing something wrong, right? Bear this in mind as you read and let’s solve this once and for all then.

First though, a little theory…

Avoid Black and White Thinking

Don’t look at the volume, intensity and frequency guidelines with your absolutist glasses on. Just because the number of sets we are recommending is in the 10–20 range, performing 9 sets doesn’t mean you won’t grow at all and performing 21 sets doesn’t mean you will overtrain and regress.

Also, when looking to compare other programs, remember, you can make a good high intensity, high volume, or high-frequency program if you adjust the other variables. This means you may find an “optimal” approach that falls outside of these general guidelines—“optimal” for you, if you adapt to it.

Progress is not an on or off switch. It’s not that we make gains or we don’t, it’s maybe we make better progress by adjusting some of the variables.

Remember the meta-analyses we have available are primarily on studies comprised of novice trainees with few studies on “trained” lifters that I would typically classify as intermediate. If you are a novice, start on the low end of the volume recs (~10–13 sets week). If you are more intermediate or advanced (and you don’t know where to start), try the mid to high end of the range (~14–20 sets a week), and then adjust from there.

Increase Volume As Your Fitness Improves

So, too much volume is counterproductive as it accumulates too much fatigue. But it is also true that for the most part, strength and hypertrophy gains increase with more volume.

When you have been training for a while and have made good strength and mass gains, but have plateaued with your current training, in order to make more progress you may need to increase volume. You will not necessarily want to add volume each training day, week, or even month, but increasing volume gradually over your training career as necessary, may be needed for progression [20].

A good way to think about volume over your career is to do enough volume to progress and only to increase it when progress has plateaued (assuming you are recovering normally). This is a much smarter choice than constantly putting yourself in the hole with fatigue by adding volume prematurely and having to drop volume back and taper all the time. Also remember, that if you are lifting heavier loads, even if reps and sets are the same, that is an indication that progressive overload has occurred and you are adapting.

Do enough to progress, not as much as possible. Increase when plateaued if you are recovering well.

So, how do you know whether adding volume is the answer to your training plateau or whether you need to change something else?

You can use this handy flowchart:

A Checklist When Training Progress Has Stalled

Experience tells me (this is Andy speaking) that a whole bunch of people reading this are going to ignore some important points, read only what they want to read, and quickly conclude that they need to increase their volume. Stop. Let me spell it out a little more for you a little clearer first.

This is the order of your checklist in that first yellow box on the right:

1) You’re not sleeping enough: If you aren’t sleeping 8+ hours, as hard as it may be to do so, that might be your issue. Yes, you may be waving your hands in the air right now, “Impossible, I have kids!” Ok, I get it, but that doesn’t change this fact. Try to sleep more. If you’re sleeping just 6 hours then aim for 7 and see how you do.

2) You’re not eating enough: You can’t expect your body to make something from nothing. The leaner you are and the more training experience you have, the harder it becomes to make progress while your weight is stable or decreasing (aka. when you are at caloric maintenance or below).

On average, for a guy that is say, dieting (aka. ‘cutting’) from 20% body fat to a stage shredded 5% (add 8% to these figures for women), they’ll make progress during the first 1/3 of the cut, work to maintain their progress during the middle third, and then probably regress a little in the last 1/3 as they get below 9% body fat.

Most people reading this won’t be competing, but many of you will be looking to get down to that 9-12% body-fat range at some point, which for guys is when your abs are nicely through. What this means is that your progress will likely stall at some point while you are cutting regardless of what you do. Fighting this can get you injured.

3) You’re not eating enough protein: If you aren’t consuming enough protein, consume it. In the most up to date and comprehensive meta-analysis on the effect of protein on muscle and strength gains in individuals not in an energy deficit, the beneficial effects of protein plateaued between 0.7 and 1.0 grams per pound (1.6–2.2 g/kg) of body weight 1. (What probably makes the most sense for protein intake while you’re dieting is somewhere between 1.0 to 1.2 grams per pound (2.2–2.6 g/kg) of body weight. However, this doesn’t mean eating sufficient protein negates the importance of the previous point (2).

4) Your training too hard or not hard enough: Undershooting RPE means you’re either not training hard enough, which is exceptionally common. Overshooting RPE means you are training too close to failure, too often, which is causing a higher level of fatigue that is desirable, hampering your progress. This is less common. (If you don’t have our book, you can learn about RPE in my article here.)

5) You’re not training each bodypart / lift frequently enough: Are you hitting each muscle group (if you’re a bodybuilder) or lift (if you’re a powerlifter) at least twice a week? If not, consider adjusting your routine to do that. (If you don’t have our book, we have four sample programs to show you what we mean by that, or get you started here.)

6) Your lifting technique is poor: Are you training with good form, or using such poor form you’re cheating yourself out of progress? I’m not really talking about people who swing their bicep curls, kip their pull-ups, or perform rows with the momentum of their whole body — such mistakes should be obvious and are present in every gym I’ve ever set foot in. I’m talking about people who are trying to be conscious of their form but aren’t quite getting it right.

If you have a trainer you can trust or friend that knows their stuff, have them take a look. Otherwise, consider checking out The Lifting Library, which is an exceptionally underpriced video product by my co-author Eric and his coaching team.

These Are Principles and Guidelines, Not Rules

There isn’t a right or wrong way to train. We’re just trying to get you in a ballpark of the right place to start so that you can adjust.

The recommendations are actually very wide-ranging when you think about it. There is a twofold difference between doing 10 sets and 20 sets for a muscle group or movement. Despite its broad nature, you will typically see a similar outcome in the majority of people training in this range. Plus, these guidelines should just be seen as the average range that will occur over the course of a cycle of training. There can and should be periods that are above and below these ranges depending on the phase of training.

Also remember, studies report averages, but each person is an individual and there are always outliers who will do best on substantially more or less volume or a lower or higher frequency than what we recommend. So, start here, give yourself time, see if you progress, then think about adjustments.

10–20 sets per muscle group/movement, a place to start and adjust from, not a law to live your life by.

Remember, don’t get impatient. Volume will increase over the course of a training career as you progress; however, it won’t necessarily increase from session to session, week to week, or month to month, because you’ll have elements of periodization in your programming. The concept of needing more volume to grow is a concept to apply over a career of lifting, as needed when progress stalls. Don’t use this book to justify doing full body 6 days a week with 20 sets per muscle group per session by next year because “volume has to keep increasing bro!”

Just do enough volume to progress and only increase when you need, not want, to do more.

If you have found this helpful, you might be pleased to know it is just a small section taken from our Muscle and Strength Training Pyramid book. The second edition, along with the Nutrition companion book, was released this January 3rd, 2019.

Join 16,000+ other readers, get your copies here.

Thank you for reading. Questions welcomed in the comments.

– Andy, Eric, and Andrea

The post How to Break Training Plateaus appeared first on RippedBody.com.

[iloveyoupittsburghpirates-blog]

That Was A Painful Week, Pittsburgh Pirates

My Dearest Pittsburgh Pirates,

Woof. It’s hard to remember a more brutal week in recent memory than the one you just had. It actually would’ve been punctuated perfectly if you would have got no-hit my Michael Wacha yesterday. Fortunately, Colin Moran singled in the 9th inning to keep that from happening. In a vital week, you went 2-5 against two of your division rivals. You were shutout twice, your bullpen lost four games, and you are currently 6 ½ games out of first place and 3 ½ games out of a wildcard spot. You are only one game over .500. My how things have changed. This week felt ominous after going 2-5 against teams like the Padres and Reds. Your last ten games have been against the Cardinals and Cubs. In those games, you went 3-7. You are finding ways to lose games. That’s usually a characteristic of a bad team. I’m not saying you are one, but you’ve certainly played like one over the last couple weeks. There’s not some grand idea that will fix your problems. Make the routine plays, have smarter at bats, don’t blow late game leads. These aren’t exactly far-fetched concepts. I don’t know how you will do it but you need to start improving immediately before this entire season slips away.

These past seven days could have gone in such a different direction. I’ve been heaping praise on the bullpen for the past few weeks and even though they had already started regressing, nothing could have prepared you or me for what occurred. Since last Sunday, you’ve lost six games and four of those were because of the bullpen. In three of those four loses, you had a lead that the bullpen blew. There is almost no one who isn’t due blame except maybe for Kyle Crick and Tyler Glasnow. The greatest offender has been your closer and recipient of a contract extension this past off-season, Felipe Vasquez. He currently leads the league in blown saves, his most egregious coming on Thursday with a three-run lead. You trailed 4-0 after the first inning and fought back to take an 8-5 lead thanks to an 8th inning, three-run homer by Cervelli. In the 9th, Vasquez gave up a double, a horrible error by SRod at third, a walk, a two-run single, and a three-run homer. Game over without recording a single out. His ERA is 4.84 and, even worse, his WHIP is 1.57. While Vasquez is certainly to blame for his poor performance, some fingers need to be pointed at the coaching staff. As we discussed in last week’s letter, Vasquez left the game last Sunday not being able to lift his arm due to elbow pain. Always a major red flag. On Monday, you deemed it not a problem, cleared him to pitch after a bullpen session, and gave him the day off. Fine. Then, inexplicably, you allowed him to pitch in each of the next three games. Hurdle used to have a rule against throwing a reliever three games in a row. This time he does it after a potential arm problem and after only giving him one day off. That means he pitched four out of five games after serious elbow pain. That’s completely unacceptable. Hurdle and his staff put him and the team in a position to lose. No one else in the bullpen has been reliable so I understand wanting to rely on Vasquez but that shouldn’t be when he’s struggled mightily and it shouldn’t be when he’s had arm issues. Use your head!

I do have to give you some credit. It’s seems like you are stating to adjust to baseball’s new pitching trend. The starting rotation provided the most, and only, amount of optimism this week. Jameson Taillon and Chad Kuhl are starting to come to fruition because you’re beginning to follow the Astros’ philosophy that seeming made their pitchers unstoppable (along with pine tar) which is throwing more off-speed pitches. Kuhl is throwing his slider 1/3 of the time now and he’s become more consistent ever since the change. Over the last month, he has a 2.80 ERA and a 1.16 WHIP. Taillon developed a slider for the first time three games ago and already has a major league ready version. That’s wildly impressive. He used it regularly in his masterpiece on Friday night. Opponents numbers against his slider are terrible so far and he’s struck out batters almost 1/3 of the time when he throws it. If these two are beginning to figure it out and you believe in Musgrove’s terrific start, then decision needs to be made. Even though Trevor Williams has regressed from his hot start, he’s still looking like he could be a reliable 4th or 5th starter. That leaves one more pitcher in the rotation and it should be Nick Kingham. Ivan Nova will be back soon and he should be your long reliever. Screw starting him because he has a big contract. If it’s not Kingham, Tyler Glasnow has pitched well enough out of the bullpen recently to either be worthy of making the starting five or being used in high leverage situations. Nova can come into games and throw strikes. That’s actually a valuable trait for a long reliever. The upside for everyone else in this staff is much higher than Nova. If you can’t make a deal for him, use him in the bullpen. I truly believe he can thrive there.

It’s been a bad week for Serpico. As far as hitting is concerned, it’s been a terrible year but SRod’s one strength has been compromised. When you traded to bring him back last season, most fans loved it especially when he hit a walkoff homer his first game back. His guaranteed contract of 5.75 million this year should probably have been more of a concern but when you cut so much salary this offseason with the Cutch and Cole trades, it became easy to overlook. The hope was that he could continue to play every position at a high level and could get back to his form two seasons ago with you when he hit 18 homers. That hasn’t come to fruition. SRod has splits of .167/.279/.323 for a .602 OPS and has struck out 35 times in 96 at bats which means he strikes out 36% of the time. That’s egregious. His error on Thursday helped open the flood gates in the 9th inning which led to a devastating loss. Yesterday, with runners on first and second in the first inning, a ball was hit to SRod at shortstop that should have been a double play. He botched it so instead of two outs and a man on third, there was no outs and bases loaded. The next batter, Marcell Ozuna, hit a grand slam. It’s nearly impossible to bounce back from a 4-0 lead in the first inning. I loved SRod as a utility player, but his one strength was his versatility on defense. When you continuously make huge errors and you’re not hitting, you lose all of your value. Then you end up like George Kontos.

There’s no use crying over spilled milk. What’s done is done. You can obsess over past transgressions and allow this stretch of games to define the rest of your season. It’s easy to keep sinking when things aren’t going well and right now they definitely are not. Your schedule doesn’t get any easier either. After the day off today, you come home to play three against the surging Dodgers. They were floundering due to injuries but now they are getting healthy and they have won seven of their last ten games. Clayton Kershaw going back to the DL will help your cause (not my fantasy team’s though) but this won’t be an easy series. You follow that with a trip to Chicago to play the Cubs who have won eight of their last ten and now have the third best record in the NL. You need a way to pull yourself out of the gutter. The bullpen obviously needs to pitch better but this stretch of losing isn’t totally their fault. You’re still not getting enough production from Gregory Polanco and Josh Bell. Bell has an OPS under .700 right now and he’s batted cleanup almost every game this season. That hurts in a big way. Things need to change and they need to change right now. If they don’t, you will be sellers at the trade deadline again. Find ways to improve and we will see what this week holds. Enjoy the day off and get to work tomorrow. Hopefully I talk to you under better circumstances next week. Still love you!

                                                                    Trying Not To Totally Lose My Mind,

                                                                                             Brad

P.S. stands for the Prodigal Son returns. Jung-ho Kang has started playing games in Single-A since his return to the states. He’s only played two games but he’s already walked three times and hit a grand slam. He’s played shortstop in a game so there is reason to believe he could play there next year if Mercer is gone or can provide depth at third and shortstop this season. Kang is still a long way from a promotion to the majors but it’s reasonable to believe that it will happen this year. Actually, when he is ready that could spell the end of SRod. You have four legitimate outfielders now and Kang can play SS at 3B. You might be light at second base but JHay and Frazier (kind of) can handle that. I wouldn’t be opposed to trying Kang there too. The only thing that’s certain is the Kang saga will be one of the most interesting stories as the season progresses.

[365footballorg-blog]

Armchair Analyst: Your complete guide to the Week 12 MLS slate

May 18, 201812:16PM EDT

Nobody reads ledes anymore, right?

Into the weekend we go:

Friday Night

Toronto FC vs. Orlando City SC

8 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

In last Sunday’s column I caused quite a stir by putting TFC in their own tier because, despite their record, I think they’re fine. You, my beloved and gentle and maaaaaybe not entirely rational readers, think otherwise. Some numbers provided by Opta back up my point.

Team GD xGD GD-xGD Toronto -6 1.57 -7.57 Philadelphia -6 0.5 -6.5 Vancouver -8 -2.92 -5.08 Columbus 7 11.68 -4.68 D.C. United -6 -1.98 -4.02 LA Galaxy -5 -1.1 -3.9 Chicago -4 -2.85 -1.15 Atlanta 12 12.75 -0.75 Montreal -12 -11.69 -0.31 Seattle -4 -4.1 0.1 Minnesota -8 -8.11 0.11 LAFC 6 4.92 1.08 Orlando 4 2.57 1.43 San Jose -2 -4.04 2.04 RSL -8 -10.14 2.14 NY Red Bulls 12 9.7 2.3 Colorado -2 -4.45 2.45 Portland 0 -2.71 2.71 NYCFC 5 2.17 2.83 Houston 5 2.1 2.9 Sporting KC 11 7.32 3.68 FC Dallas 5 1.18 3.82 New England 4 -2.37 6.37

The point stands for most players and teams who are either vastly underperforming or vastly overperforming their expected goals: Eventually they regress/progress back to the mean. Eventually those looks – like Marky Delgado’s against Chivas, or Tosaint Ricketts’ against Seattle, or Jay Chapman’s against New England – start falling. And as the defense gets healthy (expect to see Chris Mavinga and Gregory van der Wiel in central defense this weekend) and they get the disastrous Ager Aketxe out of central midfield, there will stop being the types of defensive breakdowns that buried them in the first half against the Revs.

So my official stance is that TFC are fine, and they will have the bonus of going against an Orlando City team that’s without Yoshi Yotun (yellow card accumulation) and Dom Dwyer (lower body injury) Friday night. That’s not fine for the Purple Lions.

If TFC lose or even draw this one then come back here and feel free to dunk on me and them. That said:

I also think TFC will be fine, but right now almost half of all opposition shots are on target. That’s… not great. pic.twitter.com/1USqQefvCB

— Rob Lowe (@LoweDownStats) May 18, 2018

Make sure you give Rob some credit when you do so.

Saturday Slate

NYCFC vs. Colorado Rapids

1 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

As Ben Baer wrote earlier this week, NYCFC have played – by far – the toughest schedule in the league. Seven of their 11 have been on the road, and many of those have been against the league’s best teams (the likes of Atlanta, Sporting and RBNY). They have performed beyond admirably, taking nine points from those seven games.

At home they’re an absolute wagon at 4-0-0 with 11 goals scored and just 2 conceded. The House that Lampard Built™ has treated them well.

As for the Rapids…

This chart also shows that, with a -5.8 xGD, #Rapids96 haven’t been very good at creating good chances while preventing the opponent from getting good chances. 19th in the league. And the 3.8 GD-xGD means we’ve been lucky. So big warning: regression ahead for Colorado. https://t.co/yO0m5FhKpp

— Rapids Rabbi (@rapidsrabbi) May 18, 2018

They have just one of a possible 12 points on the road thus far, and while their back five is, in theory, suited toward walling off the final third on a small pitch, the reality is that teams have pretty easily been able to shoot the gaps between Colorado’s wingbacks and wide central defenders. Look for David Villa to drift out left and get on the ball in that channel with runners ahead of him – in particular Ben Sweat underlapping to post up on the edge of the box. 

Portland Timbers vs. LAFC

3 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

LAFC have lost a good deal of their explosiveness in the last few games following the injury to Marco Ureña. The Costa Rican center forward never scores, but his hold-up play and movement drag opposing defenses around and allow guys like Carlos Vela, Diego Rossi and Latif Blessing to hit gaps that otherwise don’t really exist.

Even without him, though, LAFC have been damn good. They’re in the midst of rewriting what’s possible for an expansion team:

.@LAFC’s 10-game start and where it ranks among @MLS expansion teams:

– 20 points (1st) – 22 goals (1st) – +6 GD (2nd behind 1998 Fire)

— Paul Carr (@PaulCarrTM) May 14, 2018

Saturday’s trip to Portland will be a different kind of test for them, as the Timbers have found themselves over the past month by dragging numbers behind the ball and trying to bottle the game up. They’re toggling between a 4-3-2-1 and a 4-2-3-1 but the point of how they play each is the same: Put and keep numbers in Zone 14 to protect the backline, and defend deep so that guys like Diego Valeri and Sebastian Blanco get the ball on the run.

It’s obviously working, as the Timbers are on a run of three straight shutout wins for the first time in their MLS existence.

FC Dallas vs. Vancouver Whitecaps FC

4 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

I will always feel that the Red Bulls won the Tim Parker for Felipe + cash trade because 1) If you have a pair of mid-20s domestic center backs (who are good) to build around, it makes constructing a balanced roster so, so much easier; and 2) TAM grows on trees.

That said, Felipe’s been excellent. The diving/after-the-fact fouls/outright dirty play of league’s most despised player (he’d win it with like 90% of the vote, folks) often overshadows the fact that he remains a very good soccer player, and his ability to conduct the game has boosted the once moribund ‘Caps attack over the past month.

They really have figured some stuff out in central midfield, and while he’s not a true No. 10, he hasn’t really needed to be. To my eye he’s the catalyst behind better overall attacking play in recent weeks:

Date Expected Goals 28/04/18 2.93 12/05/18 2.84 17/05/18 2.32 05/05/18 1.99 10/03/18 1.49 04/03/18 1.24 08/04/18 1.18 17/03/18 0.86 25/03/18 0.86 21/04/18 0.64 31/03/18 0.45 14/04/18 0.29

Yordy Reyna isn’t a true No. 10 either, but he looked like it the other night in a disappointing 2-2 home draw against San Jose. If those two guys can in a groove and stay on the field, then Vancouver will have finally found their attacking Plan B and won’t be so reliant upon long-balls and crosses. It’s an “if” since the sample size is not large right now, but it’s been promising. 

The problem with the ‘Caps – and yeah, this goes back to the Parker thing – is that their defense has been outright bad. They got beat over the top on San Jose’s first goal. They got beat up the gut on San Jose’s second goal after Efrain Juarez decided “maybe nah, running’s hard.” They gave up one against Houston when they simply didn’t track Tomas Martinez, and another when they were slow to a deflected ball at the top of the box. 

Can’t play like that at home against struggling teams and expect to win. Play like that on the road against an FC Dallas team that’s finding something close to their 2016 form? Yeah… not gonna end good for the ‘Caps unless they clean it up.

New England Revolution vs. Columbus Crew SC

7:30 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

We’ve sung Gregg Berhalter’s praises up and down for his ability to get tap-ins for his center forwards over the years. He deserves it – a parade of guys have had their best years when playing for him in his system.

But it’s not all the system. This really is a precise, deceptive and patient run from Gyasi Zardes:

He gets into Johan Kappelhof’s head so early with the threat of the back-post run, then angles near post and forces Kappelhof to commit. At which point he jams on the brakes and lets him fly right by, then plants himself in the perfect spot for the one-touch finish. And let’s dap Niko Hansen the hell up for his 60-yard run and assist.

I really love that goal.

The Revs have been successful this year in large part because they’re not giving up goals like that. They’ve done an exceptional job of 1) high pressing other teams into useful turnovers, and 2) only rarely getting turned around and running back at their own goal. If you’re going to beat them, it’s going to be by packing them into their own end and forcing individual mistakes (which can and does happen, though Matt Turner bails them out all the time).

Anyway, New England’s gonna come out and try to press Zack Steffen into a mistake. If Columbus are able to play through that press and get on the run a little bit, there will be many goals in this game.

Philadelphia Union vs. Real Salt Lake

7:30 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

RSL are starting to do some nice things in attack:

They are also dislocated all over the place through central midfield and central defense, which is/has been problematic. They keep getting drilled during the final 30 minutes of just about every game they play, including against 10-man D.C. United last week (RSL were fortunate to hang onto a 3-2 home win).

What is left to say about Philly? They look like they know what they’re doing most weeks, and while they have some weaknesses at the back that are typical of young teams, their attack should be better than it is. It’s just that pretty much nobody’s finishing.

San Jose Earthquakes vs. D.C. United

10:30 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

The Quakes went to a 5-4-1 at Vancouver on Wednesday and got themselves a very nice result. It doesn’t change the fact that their backline has been leaky and left back has been something close to an open wound all season long. Teams are able to go at whoever’s out there and find both time and space to cause problems.

Keep an eye on center forward Danny Hoesen in this one, by the way. He now has goals in three of his last four games.

As for D.C. United… who knows? Winger Paul Arriola is maybe going to play as a No. 8, there are injury concerns in a few spots, Lucho Acosta threw a fit when subbed last week, and the defense is a weekly disaster.

Sunday Slate

Minnesota United vs. Sporting KC

2 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

Young Harrison Hamm wrote a very nice debut article for the nerds over at AmericanSoccerAnalysis. Go read it.

I’m gonna pull out one of the clips he used and highlight it:

And also, here’s Minnesota struggling to press: pic.twitter.com/82PJNn4AP3

— Harrison Hamm (@harrisonhamm21) May 15, 2018

Minnesota’s problem, from Day 1, is that they allow teams to build into spots between the lines, and allow teams to use that to create running lanes off the ball. Obviously they have other problems as well, but the biggest one is just that they’re easy to play against. They allow you to get into a rhythm and pull them apart.

SKC have become a “rhythm” team over the past year in large part because of how they use their fullbacks. Though both Graham Zusi and Jimmy Medranda will overlap if you give them space, both are more likely to stay a little bit deeper, basically on the same latitude as d-mid Ilie, and spray possession-oriented passes. Sporting thus have three deep-lying fulcrums to conduct the game, while other teams usually use only one.

Both those guys will actually pinch into central midfield as well, which leaves SKC vulnerable to wide counters – a big reason why they’ve struggled defensively at times this year. But they’re doing something different and, frankly, better than in years past. And it’s working.

Chicago Fire vs. Houston Dynamo

4 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

Which Fire team will show up this week? The one that plays a 3-5-2 with Bastian Schweinsteiger as a sweeper? The 4-3-3, possession-focused bunch we’ve seen from time to time? A sort of 4-5-1 team that man marks all over the field? Other?

Chicago’s got some pieces and have mostly held their season together by treating every game as if it’s the knockout round of a tournament and they’re the underdogs – i.e., they try to focus on taking away the opponent’s biggest strength. But sooner or later they’re going to have to start building a foundation of “here’s who we are and what we do well” and so far they haven’t. My guess is you will start to see frustration start to boil over for some of the veterans in coming weeks.

If Houston get a result here – and they’re entirely capable of that – the time for frustration would be now. 

Atlanta United vs. New York Red Bulls

7 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

Here’s Bobby’s take on how to beat Atlanta United, who are leading the Supporters’ Shield race. Read it.

Also read this:

Non-penalty goals + assists per 90 minutes leaders (min. 300 minutes). Some interesting names on here. pic.twitter.com/eDaIAxDK5X

— Ben Baer (@BenBaer89) May 15, 2018

It’s hard to overstate just how good RBNY’s attack has been. They’ve mostly been going against bottom-half-of-the-table foes, but the two good teams they’ve faced – Club Tijuana in the CCL and NYCFC two weeks back – they absolutely murderized.

Expect to see Miguel Almiron float out left a ton. The way to beat the Red Bulls is to hit the space vacated by their overlapping fullbacks and punish them for playing such front-foot soccer.

Monday’s Matinee

Montreal Impact vs. LA Galaxy

3 pm ET | Match Preview | TV & Streaming Info

Montreal have taken three of the last 21 points on offer and are on track to post the worst single-season defensive record in MLS history.

Judging by how much firepower each of these teams have, and how much each defense has struggled, this one could – maybe even should – end up being a 4-3 game.

One more thing to ponder…

Happy weekending, everybody.

Series: 

Topics: 

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MLSsoccer.com News

Armchair Analyst: Your complete guide to the Week 12 MLS slate was originally published on 365 Football

[thrashermaxey]

Ramblings: Barzal, Panarin Each Hit 80 Points

Barzal, Panarin Each Hit 80 Points

Mathew Barzal scored two goals and added an assist, giving him 60 assists and 82 points on the season. Let’s step back and admire what a rookie season it has been for Barzal, who is the first rookie since Evgeni Malkin in 2006-07 to reach 80 points. The Calder Trophy is pretty much his at this point, as he is nearly 20 points clear of the next highest-scoring rookie (Clayton Keller). One burning question I have: Will he be the Islanders’ first line center next season? That question applies whether or not John Tavares is back on Long Island.

Barzal’s linemate Anthony Beauvillier scored a goal and added two assists on seven shots on goal, giving him 20 goals on the season. Beauvillier is riding a four-game goal streak, so he should be rolling in your fantasy lineup as the Islanders play out the string.

Nolan Patrick scored two goals and added an assist in the same game, which places him one point shy of 30 in his rookie season. These splits seem to foreshadow progression next season. Don’t forget to add the 2017 second overall pick to your sleeper list.

Oct-Jan: 41 GP, 11 PTS (0.27 PTS/GP)

Feb-Apr: 30 GP, 18 PTS (0.6 PTS/GP)

Over a full season, Patrick’s production over the past two months would amount to a 50-point pace.

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Did anyone have Taylor Hall booked for 90 points playing on the Devils? With two goals and two assists on Tuesday, Hall has now reached 93 points and is just one goal shy of 40. Hall is also third with 37 power-play points and ninth with 274 shots. Hall was barely drafted in the top 100 (ADP: 92.5 in Yahoo leagues), yet he won’t come nearly as cheap next season.

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Those hoping that Erik Karlsson would cash in because of the Sens’ four-game week will be disappointed that he will miss the final three games of the season. Understandable, though, given what he has been through. Have we seen the last of him in a Senators’ uniform? The offseason should certainly be interesting.

If you’re a Karlsson owner playing for a championship, Thomas Chabot is worth an add. He scored two goals and an assist on Monday and also has three games over the last four days of the fantasy season. Expect big minutes and power-play opportunity with Karlsson out. Chabot’s fantasy value will be helped big time if Karlsson is shipped out without an adequate return on defense.

Speaking of the Sens, Mark Stone is expected to be a game-time decision on Wednesday. Get ready to activate him in case he plays.

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With a goal and two assists on Tuesday, Artemi Panarin has four consecutive multipoint games with 11 points over that span. Projected by many to regress in Columbus, Panarin has actually improved with his first 80-point season. Panarin has been ripping it up during the fantasy playoffs with 28 points in just 17 games since the beginning of March. We can officially abandon the narrative that Panarin’s point totals were high because of Patrick Kane. He’s an exceptional player on his own.

With his goal on Tuesday, Pierre-Luc Dubois now has five goals over his last three games and seven points over his last four games. On Panarin’s line, Dubois has been a point-per-game player over that same hot stretch since early March.

The other player on that line is Cam Atkinson, who with two goals on Tuesday now has 10 goals and 15 points over his last 10 games. He was also a point-per-game player since early March after a disappointing first half. Between this red-hot top line and the solid goaltending of Sergei Bobrovsky, does anyone like the Blue Jackets as a potential Cinderella team out of the East? Something I’m starting to think about.

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You might think that Kyle Connor has at least partially been a product of his linemates. So it’s worth mentioning that he scored his 30th  goal of the season to go with two assists. His linemates for Tuesday? Try Jack Roslovic and Andrew Copp. The Jets rested Mark Scheifele and Blake Wheeler, among others, for this game. Somebody tell these coaches that we have fantasy titles to win and we need our big guns in the lineup!

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In stopping all 33 shots he faced against Atlantic rival Boston, Andrei Vasilevskiy won for the first time in four games and earned his first shutout in over two months. Surprisingly, he still leads the league in both categories. Vasilevskiy posted a goals-against average north of 4.00 in March (ouch!) so maybe it’s gotten to the point where you have benched him. It’s been that kind of rollercoaster ride for too many goalies this season.

Vasilevskiy and the Bolts earned the win in spite of being without Steven Stamkos, who is day-to-day with a lower-body injury.

Charlie McAvoy returned to the Bruins’ lineup after missing 15 games. He was held without a point and was a minus-2.

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Hat trick for Jamie Benn, who has now cracked the 30-goal mark. His goal and point totals over the past couple seasons suggest that he is a very good fantasy option, but not an elite one as it stands now.

Kari Lehtonen left Tuesday’s game against San Jose with an upper-body injury. With Ben Bishop also sidelined, Mike McKenna came on in relief and stopped all 17 shots he faced to earn a come-from-behind win for the Stars.

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With his 42-save win against Calgary, Antti Raanta has now won six consecutive starts and nine of his last ten. Since January 1 Raanta has a 1.83 GAA and .942 SV%. I understand the Coyotes’ and Raanta’s rough starts, but how could he still only be owned in slightly less than half of Yahoo leagues? This guy could be winning you a championship as your third goalie!

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Here’s the Predators’ buzzer beater that was disallowed due to “goaltender interference.” Don’t ask me for my opinion because I don’t know what goaltender interference is anymore. It seems that Viktor Arvidsson pushing his stick on Roberto Luongo was enough for the refs to make the call.

{youtube}UHgBGAPFy88{/youtube}

Even Carrie Underwood is weighing in now…  

I am seriously livid. @NHL , fix this.

— Carrie Underwood (@carrieunderwood) April 4, 2018

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Some Anaheim injury news: Cam Fowler is expected to be sidelined for the next 2-6 weeks (I know, doesn’t really narrow it down) with a shoulder injury, while John Gibson is day-to-day with an upper-body injury.

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Remember Brandon Pirri? That Vegas magic dust rubbed off on him in his first game for the Vegas Golden Knights, as he scored two goals in a late game against the Canucks. Pirri was in the lineup because Erik Haula and Jonathan Marchessault were given the night off, a concept that seems to be growing in popularity in the NHL.

William Karlsson scored goal number 43 and added two more assists, giving him six 3-point games on the season. Much is made of the goal total, which no one predicted. But did you know that Wild Bill leads the NHL with a plus-46? I still say the goal total regresses next season with a likely shooting percentage decline (23 percent), but chemistry is chemistry and confidence is confidence. He’s found both in Vegas.

When Jussi Jokinen was sent to Vancouver in the Thomas Vanek trade, I assumed that he was just a throw-in that would mostly be healthy scratched over the remainder of the season. But injuries hit the forward ranks, and Jokinen has not only played, but thrived. With an assist on Tuesday, Jokinen now has seven points over his last five games. The way Jim Benning loves his veteran mentors, I now wouldn’t be surprised if Jokinen is brought back by the Canucks next season after playing for four teams this season. Especially with the Sedins retiring. Maybe Jokinens is even a late-season add if you’re in a deeper format.

Nikolay Goldobin posted the first two-goal game of his career on Tuesday, which gives him goals in back-to-back games and four points over his last three games. He shows flashes of brilliance, such as a goal I was in attendance for where he absolutely undressed Drew Doughty. Yet he disappears for long stretches, which should make him hard to trust in keeper leagues.

I’m sure you’ve heard or will hear about plenty of Sedin stories as they now play their final week. Here are two that stand out to me, both originating from their draft day in 1999:

The three trades that Brian Burke made to acquire both first-round picks needed (the Canucks already owned one pick). You may believe that Burke is an overrated GM/executive, but this was outstanding work and perhaps his finest moment as a GM. These trades ensured that the Sedins could spend their entire careers together. It’s fair to assume that they wouldn’t have had the individual success they had without each other.  

The 1999 draft class itself. Aside from the Sedins, this might be the weakest draft class ever. Ryan Miller and Henrik Zetterberg were superb later-round picks, but many of the names in the first round are unrecognizable today. This might serve as a cautionary tale of overvaluing draft picks relative to actual NHL players, although I am led to believe that scouting tools have improved in the information age.

Daniel recorded an assist, while Henrik was held without a point in their first game since they announced they would retire at the end of the season. I’ve got the Sunday Ramblings, so be prepared for at least a little bit of Sedin coverage as they play their final game on Saturday.

Classy move by the Golden Knights in sticking around to shake hands with the Sedins after the game.  

Congratulations on an incredible career! @canucks #ThankYouSedins pic.twitter.com/s4nu14fppP

— y – Vegas Golden Knights (@GoldenKnights) April 4, 2018

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For more fantasy hockey information, you can follow me on Twitter @Ian_Gooding.

  from All About Sports https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-barzal-panarin-each-hit-80-points/

[zeroviraluniverse-blog]

Eric Hosmer striking it rich in San Diego is so crazy it could work

Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/eric-hosmer-striking-it-rich-in-san-diego-is-so-crazy-it-could-work/

Eric Hosmer striking it rich in San Diego is so crazy it could work

While most of America was either tucked away in bed or deep into Saturday night revelries, the tortoise pace of baseball’s lingering offseason quickened. The most divisive member of this year’s class of free agents finally found a home: Eric Hosmer is a member of the San Diego Padres.

According to reports, Hosmer’s deal runs for eight years with a total value of $144 million. Meanwhile, MLB.com reported that there is an opt-out clause after the fifth year, and Bleacher Report reported that the deal is front-loaded: The first five years are at $20 million per season (with a $5 million signing bonus); the last three are at $13 million annually.

Unsigned veterans such as Logan Morrison might be tempted to wait to sign after Opening Day, but it’s a gambit without guarantees — or recent success.

As spring training begins, we identify baseball’s elite — the teams with a chance to compete — and the teams that aren’t even trying to win this year. Where does your squad land?

From a former superstar at a crossroads to an ace on the mend, you won’t have to wait until Opening Day to see if these guys are ready to shine.

2 Related

The back end of that contract — the three years and $39 million — is a fascinating way to structure a deal that overall, frankly, isn’t going to register as “smart” by most analytically charged readings. But we’ll get to that.

The practice of front-loading deals is one that might become a trend, given the typical shape of free-agent deals — albeit without the opt-out. The opt-out protects the player in case of serious injury or a rapid decline in performance. It doesn’t do as much for the team. This structure does limit the back-end downside for the Padres, in theory, because of the lower salaries. The hope is that the surplus value created by the first five years of the deal will cover the club for the last three, less-costly campaigns. But it all comes down to properly valuing those first few seasons.

It’s a risk: If the next phase of Hosmer’s career is better than his first, then he’ll surely opt out when he can in five years. By then, the Padres will have already have paid out $105 million of the $144 million in potential value. If Hosmer ages in that way, which is unusual, the surplus value the Padres would have gotten at the end of the contract would be moot. But that’s not the way things tend to work out with these big free-agent deals, which is what makes this contract structure so interesting.

At first blush, this deal is tough to justify by metrics — but not impossible. According to FanGraphs.com, Hosmer has accumulated 9.9 WAR during his seven big league seasons, 4.1 of which came last season. In easily his best overall campaign, Hosmer overcame a slow start to hit .318/.385/.498 with a career-high 25 homers, 94 RBIs and 98 runs.

It’s important to understand the rough math to see why this contract is likely to be hotly debated in analytical circles, just as Hosmer’s free agency has been a hot-button issue for the past year. Hosmer is projected for around 2.8 WAR this season in most systems, with his forecast being the product of a reasonable degree of regression coming off a career season. If Hosmer plays out this contract to its completion, that would take him through his age-35 season.

Eric Hosmer’s deal with the Padres promises huge rewards, but will it trigger more signings? Jay Biggerstaff/USA Today Sports

Let’s give Hosmer three years at 2.8 WAR apiece, taking him through his age-30 season and his likely peak seasons. Then let’s take off a half-win for the remaining years of the deal, which is a standard rule of thumb when it comes to the aging curve — though Hosmer isn’t necessarily a standard anything, and players age in different ways. Anyway, that gives him these WAR totals for Years 4 through 8: 2.3, 1.8, 1.3, 0.8, 0.3. The total WAR he’d compile during the deal in this case would be 14.9. For the Padres to break even on this investment, the average cost of a win during the course of the contract would need to be around $9.7 million.

With that figure in mind, perhaps the best way to justify the terms of the deal is reflected in the work of Matt Swartz, writing for FanGraphs. The key point is that with revenues and payrolls rising across baseball, the cost of a win in the free-agent market has been on the rise. That trend may or may not be blunted or even reversed by this year’s slow market, but that remains to be seen.

If Swartz’s estimates prove to be close, then we can estimate that the above WAR forecast for Hosmer could yield up to something like $180 million of value, not only justifying the outlay but actually giving San Diego a nice buffer if market values stagnate. That said, Hosmer’s performance was below replacement in 2016, and there is literally no value created by that kind of performance. Plus, he’s joining a new team in a new park that is the toughest power-hitting venue for a lefty hitter in the National League.

We don’t always know how a player will translate to a new context, and if Hosmer turns out to be more 2016 than 2017 early in the contract, the deal will be an albatross. It could also be a problem if the costs of a win stagnate or decline. In any event, despite what many are likely to conclude about this contract, it is far from certain how this deal will look in hindsight. It really depends on how San Diego projected Hosmer internally, if that projection is close to right, and how close their estimated costs of a win are to reality. In other words, there is plenty of room for interpretation on a deal of this length, for those dollars and for that player.

Players and teams get in gear for Opening Day in Florida and Arizona. • Complete spring training coverage »

Something else to keep in mind about Hosmer is this: His WAR totals have possibly been deflated by a consistently average-to-worse defensive showing in the metrics. However, last season’s Gold Glove was his fourth. This is as Jeter-esque a divide between measured defensive value and perceived performance as you’ll find. Indeed, if you watch Hosmer play first base for any length of time, then go to the numbers, it’s hard to make sense of it. Teams don’t use the measurements we’re quoting here. They have their own systems, and if Hosmer’s glove carries more value than systems such as defensive runs saved seem to think, that changes his outlook considerably.

Also working in his favor is his athleticism — few first basemen in recent memory have been better on the basepaths than Hosmer. Generally speaking, the more athletic a player is, the better he ages. Finally, there is real reason to believe that Hosmer has untapped potential at the plate. His bloated ground ball rates have been the subject of a lot of hand-wringing, but the fact of the matter is that few players hit the ball as hard consistently as Hosmer. Given the right adjustments, it’s entirely possible that last year’s breakout was evidence of a powder keg about to go off.

Hosmer was one of the youngest free agents on the market, and the fact that he’s entering his age-28 season explains the length of the deal his agent, Scott Boras, was able to extract even from this locked-up market. And for all of this technical picking apart of the contract’s terms, those terms are tough to judge based on cold metrics analysis.

There could also be a considerable opportunity cost from the team’s perspective. This is money that the Padres might have been able to spend on a player with a more stable performance record — but the “might” qualifier in that statement is important. Hosmer was willing to come. There is no guarantee another marquee player would have. You could also state that the uncertainty expressed here is the very reason the Padres shouldn’t have taken the plunge. It would be a reasonable response.

Nevertheless, why San Diego?

For one, the Padres are a team on the move. Or at least it will be — just not in 2018. After plugging Hosmer into San Diego’s depth chart and moving incumbent first baseman Wil Myers to left field, the Padres’ 2018 win forecast jumps by a whopping 1.5 wins — all the way to 71.2. (This is a baseline number, before being run through a schedule simulator.) This signing isn’t so much about what Hosmer brings to the Padres this season, but the foundation he’ll provide for the seasons to come.

Who’s still on the market as teams hunt for help this winter? Insider: Law’s top free agents | Trade market

From the day he arrived in the big leagues, Hosmer was the heart of the Royals’ clubhouse, and that remained the case through Kansas City’s gradual rise to a World Series title in 2015. He set the tone in terms of playing smartly and aggressively, always willing to adjust his approach to the situation, a trait that marked those Royals teams. And he was there all through the rise of a team from bottom-feeder to champion. Still young, he can now be that person for another franchise, one still seeking its first World Series crown.

Are intangibles worth at least $105 million, or possibly $144 million? Of course not. But there are plenty of reasons to believe — call it hope — that this deal will work out for the Padres, as the likes of Luis Urias and Fernando Tatis Jr. and Cal Quantrill and MacKenzie Gore make their way to Petco Park over the next few years. They will join a clubhouse in which Hosmer sets the tone, and as a former champion, he’ll command the respect that such veterans always do in big league clubhouses. Maybe you don’t value that; the Royals clearly did, and the Padres clearly do.

As for the metrics, just remember this: The Padres, led by general manager A.J. Preller, believe in analytics. They aren’t ignorant of the various valuations floating about. In fact, just last month, San Diego hired FanGraphs writer Dave Cameron to work in its front office. If Cameron couldn’t talk Preller out of signing Hosmer, couldn’t it just be that teams work with better information than the rest of us have?

That last question might not be the right one. Sure, teams have better data. But teams also make mistakes in the free-agent market, and the Padres haven’t played in free agency at this level, well, ever. This is the largest contract in Padres history.

For several weeks now, Hosmer’s market has appeared to be just two teams: The Royals, who gained another high draft pick for their rebuild with Hosmer’s departure, and the Padres. Maybe this shouldn’t be that surprising. The market for first basemen just wasn’t robust this winter. Besides, the very things that make Hosmer so well thought of in the industry are perhaps more valuable to teams like the Royals and Padres than they would be to a more established, star-laden team.

In other words, the Padres and Hosmer are a better match than they appear to be at first glance. In a few years, we might well look at this late Saturday night splash as the moment San Diego began to turn the corner. Or, if the metrics hounds prove prescient, it might be the night the San Diego rebuild hit the skids before it really ever got started. The outcome may depend on soft factors we analysts tend to despise.

Either way, this is the most interest the national baseball media has taken in the Padres in years. Doesn’t that, in itself, speak volumes?

[yahoo-shutdown-corner-blog]

NFL Winners and Losers: With everything on the line, Cowboys' stars come up short

Even after all the rough patches this season, the Dallas Cowboys were in pretty good shape to make the playoffs.

They survived until Ezekiel Elliott’s suspension was done. The Detroit Lions, who could have put the Cowboys all but out of the playoffs by beating two bad teams to finish the season, inexplicably lost to the Cincinnati Bengals in an early game Sunday. The Atlanta Falcons’ loss on Sunday helped too. The Philadelphia Eagles were expected to win on Monday, clinch a No. 1 seed and bench some starters against the Cowboys in Week 17. All the Cowboys had to do was beat a Seattle Seahawks team that lost 42-7 a week before, beat an Eagles team with nothing to play for next week and hope the final few pieces fell in their favor.

And when it mattered most, the Cowboys’ three superstars let them down.

Quarterback Dak Prescott wasn’t good. He threw for 182 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions. One was a terrible decision that was returned for a touchdown. The other bounced off Dez Bryant’s hands. Bryant came up small the entire game. He had three catches for 44 yards. Bryant was seen on the sideline in the first half doing what he often does, yelling at teammates and coaches over whatever (it’s hard to say he was complaining, because we’ve assumed that before and it hasn’t been the case), and then he lost a fumble that turned around the game. Elliott was fine in his return. He had 97 yards rushing and 21 more receiving. He played pretty well. But perhaps the Cowboys wouldn’t have been in such a dire spot had Elliott not gotten suspended in the first place. The Cowboys were 3-3 without him. They would have had a much better chance of winning one of those three losses with Elliott in the lineup.

That was the problem with this year’s Cowboys: It was always something. There were suspensions early in the season, the Elliott suspension and courthouse drama, Jerry Jones’ sudden concern about who was standing for the anthem … always something other than football.

Elliott was a big part of that. Prescott and Bryant just weren’t good enough on the field to overcome everything else. Prescott was just OK all season, and nobody should be surprised that he regressed after an unbelievable rookie season. But he had some no-shows that really hurt the Cowboys. In those three losses without Elliott, Prescott had no touchdowns, five interceptions and a 57 rating. He didn’t play well Sunday, and this wasn’t the Legion of Boom he was facing. The Seahawks are without Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman in the secondary, Cliff Avril has been out most of the season and linebacker Bobby Wagner is playing through a hamstring injury. Prescott averaged just 5.4 yards per attempt against a injury-plagued Seahawks defense that was torn apart by the Rams last week. Prescott’s interception that was returned for a score was a wild throw off his back foot that a good quarterback just shouldn’t make. It’s worth noting Prescott is still a very young quarterback.

The Seahawks had 136 yards (don’t dare blame the Cowboys defense for this loss) and 142 penalty yards. They became the first team since the 1966 Eagles to win a game with fewer yards gained than penalty yards, according to Fox’s broadcast. You can only do that if you get turnovers, and Prescott helped in that. So did Bryant. Bryant is only 29 but he has looked much older this season. Bryant hasn’t had a 100-yard game all season. He has only had one game with more than 73 yards. And on Sunday he made no impact while losing one fumble and having one pass go off his hands that was picked off.

Dallas had to win to stay alive on Sunday. It was basically a playoff game. You won’t win often when some of your best players don’t rise to the occasion.

And if you want to lay this all on head coach Jason Garrett’s feet and see him fired, Jones indicated that won’t be happening.

Jerry Jones, asked about his faith in his team’s leadership, said he understands fan frustration after a game like that, but added he has confidence in Jason Garrett. pic.twitter.com/0fFGld9apW

— David Helman (@HelmanDC) December 25, 2017

The Cowboys should be back in the hunt next season, but this was a wasted year. The Cowboys have the blue-chip talent to be championship contenders, and they’re 8-7 and playing for nothing next week. Prescott is a good quarterback and he’ll improve, even if it’s possible he never reaches the heights of his incredible rookie season again. Elliott is talented but the Cowboys need him to stay out of trouble. His suspension aside, Elliott’s maturity has been a constant story in Dallas. And it’s fine for Bryant to be demonstrative on the sideline when he’s producing, but not many receivers with 771 yards and six touchdowns put on that show. Bryant needs to quickly prove this was a one-off season and not the start of a downward slide. And it wouldn’t be the worst thing next season if Jones didn’t create unnecessary story lines, though that might be asking a bit much.

Dallas came into this season with Super Bowl hopes. They’ll come into next season with Super Bowl aspirations too. The overall talent isn’t a question. But they’ll need more out of their superstars if they’re going to make it happen.

Dallas Cowboys’ Dak Prescott threw a pair of interceptions in a loss to the Seahawks. (AP)

Here are the rest of the winners and losers from Sunday’s Week 16 action:

WINNERS

The Chargers’ playoff chances: The Los Angeles Chargers are, inexplicably, still alive.

The Chargers won 14-7 against the New York Jets. Unlike last week, their defense showed up in a big way. It wasn’t the prettiest win, but it did the job. And the Chargers got some help. The Buffalo Bills lost to the New England Patriots, and the Tennessee Titans’ slide continued with a loss to the Los Angeles Rams. That opened up an avenue for the Chargers to get in the playoffs despite an 0-4 start.

If the Chargers beat the Raiders, the Titans lose to the Jaguars and the Ravens beat the Bengals, the Chargers are in. The biggest concern might be the Jaguars, who have a division title clinched and can not get a first-round bye if the Steelers win Monday. Jacksonville might rest their starters in Week 17. The Titans could get into the playoffs with a backdoor win over a Jaguars team with little to play for.

The Chargers seem to be on a constant roller coaster, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they are staying alive by the skin of their teeth heading into Week 17. The rest of the AFC is probably hopeful the above scenario doesn’t happen. Anyone in the AFC playoffs would much rather see the Titans find their way in than a talented Chargers team.

Clutch Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers: Newton is one of the biggest names and greatest talents in the NFL, and he’s pretty good in the clutch too.

The Panthers were in a bind Sunday. Somehow, they trailed the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers 19-15 at home with three minutes to go. But a missed field goal by the Buccaneers (seriously, are they just jinxed at kicker?) opened the door for Newton to stage a comeback, and he did.

Newton hit a huge pass on third-and-10, moving around in the pocket to keep the play alive and hitting Kaelin Clay for 11 yards. The Panthers picked up a fourth-and-1 later in the drive when Jonathan Stewart bulled ahead for a yard. Then on the next play Newton gave Panthers fans a momentary heart attack when he fumbled the snap, but he picked it up on the move and got into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown run.

The Panthers said they’d cut back on Newton’s running, but it seems that will never happen until Newton isn’t effective anymore. Newton led the Panthers with 14 carries and 52 rushing yards on Sunday. His talent as a runner is one reason he’s one of the NFL’s best. The Panthers just keep winning, and the biggest reason is Newton. It will be a tough NFC playoff field, but Newton gives the Panthers a chance to make some noise.

Jimmy Garoppolo’s accountant: OK, now we know why Kyle Shanahan didn’t want to start Garoppolo. Shanahan probably knew if Garoppolo played, he’d play well. And that’s not the best news for the 49ers at the negotiating table.

We all know the quarterback market is crazy. Brock Osweiler got $18 million a year. Mike Glennon got $15 million a year. Case Keenum is probably getting at least $16 million per year and maybe as much as $18 million a year next offseason. So what does Garoppolo’s agent do? Put on a tape of Sunday’s performance against the Jacksonville Jaguars and ask for a blank check?

The Jaguars not only have the best pass defense in the NFL, they have one of the best defenses in many years. Garoppolo was unimpressed. He came out firing from the opening kickoff and led a 44-33 beatdown of the Jaguars. Garoppolo had 242 yards and two touchdowns, and aside from one ill-advised interception he was in control the whole game. The 49ers defense helped in a turnover-fest against Blake Bortles (yeah, he’s getting a mention in this space, a little later on), but Garoppolo undeniably played well. He has been a revelation for the 49ers, who have won four in a row with him starting. The thought of the 49ers scoring that many points against the Jaguars’ defense a month ago, when Shanahan was stubbornly holding onto C.J. Beathard as his starter, was laughable.

Garoppolo, who was a steal in a trade with the New England Patriots, will be a free agent next offseason. At very least the 49ers are going to give him the franchise tag – though, as we’ve seen with Kirk Cousins, that is not always a cure-all. More realistically, after Garoppolo’s big finish, the 49ers are simply going to have to pay him whatever he wants.

Dion Lewis: Do the Patriots have a factory in which they create running backs?

It doesn’t seem to matter who lines up behind Tom Brady, because they all produce. Lewis’ turn was Sunday, with Danny Woodhead and James White out. All he did was rush for 129 yards an a touchdown in a win over the Bills. He also had a receiving touchdown.

Lewis has had some fine moments before, and he is a shining example of how the Patriots can save careers. Lewis looked done when he missed the 2013 season with an injury and was unsigned for all of 2014. The Patriots signed him to a futures contract at the end of the 2014 season, the kind of move that works for the Patriots at a much higher rate than anyone else. Lewis has become a nice role player and when he has been asked to do more, he delivers.

The Patriots keep cruising along. They will clinch the AFC’s No. 1 seed with a win over the New York Jets next week. And once the Patriots get to the playoffs, just assume whoever is at running back will make some plays.

Los Angeles Rams: The Rams winning a division title since 2003 is a great milestone. It was also impressive how they handled a tough spot.

The Rams were coming off their biggest win since probably 2003, playing a Titans team that isn’t easy to get up for. It was an early game for Los Angeles, and that’s not always the best spot for West Coast teams. And while it wasn’t the most dominant win, the Rams got out of Nashville with a 27-23 win. That the Rams could keep cruising along is a testament to coach Sean McVay having the team focused, even if Jeff Fisher thinks he was really the reason for the victory.

LOSERS

Detroit Lions: The Lions had a clearer path to the playoffs than anyone mentioned in the past week or so. If the Lions won out they would have been in good shape, although the tiebreakers would have been tricky. The Lions’ final two opponents were a Cincinnati Bengals team that looked utterly horrible the previous two weeks, and the Green Bay Packers with Brett Hundley at quarterback.

Maybe nobody was talking about the Lions because everyone knew they’d screw it up.

The Lions were flat and bad in a horrible loss to the Bengals. Jim Caldwell gave Lions ownership a lot to think about, in terms of his future, when he failed to challenge a Golden Tate catch in what should have been an obvious spot to challenge. The Lions went from being in a good spot to make the playoffs to being eliminated.

Caldwell hasn’t been a bad coach, but it will be interesting to see what the Lions do this offseason. They’re a franchise perennially stuck on a road to nowhere. It couldn’t have surprised anyone on Sunday when they lost to a bad Bengals team Sunday with their season on the line. That’s who the Lions are. The Lions might not be able to get a better coach than Caldwell, but a shake-up might be in order anyway. At some point, maybe the Lions will get it right.

Devonta Freeman: Freeman is a great player, but he had a rough day on Sunday.

Freeman had a crucial fumble on the goal line that the Saints recovered. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Freeman was stopped on fourth-and-goal at the 1-yard line. Those plays were huge in a 23-13 loss.

The Falcons finished the early games still looking OK in the playoff race because they held tiebreakers over the Cowboys and Seahawks. The Seahawks won, and the Falcons will be in the playoffs with a win next week. But they’ll need to beat the Panthers next week, and the Panthers are still in the NFC South race. To beat the Panthers they’ll need Freeman to have a big game, as he had many times in his career. He’ll be looking to rebound from a tough afternoon.

Eli Manning: Eli Manning got his job back. And … well, we’ve mostly seen why he was benched in the first place.

Manning was bad again on Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals. The Giants lost 23-0, the first time they have been shut out since 2014, and the Cardinals’ first time shutting out an opponent since 1992 when they were still the Phoenix Cardinals. Manning threw for 263 yards, no touchdowns and two interceptions. While Manning deserved better when he was benched by lame duck since-fired coach Ben McAdoo, he hasn’t had a good season. While it’s true he hasn’t had much help from a frighteningly thin offense, Manning’s play has brought up many questions about his future. The last three weeks, after he was reinstated following the infamous benching, have been inconsistent. The Giants are going to get either the second or third pick of the draft and be in position to draft a quarterback, which they should do. Manning will be 37 next season. Not that Josh Rosen’s reported preference to play with the Giants means everything, considering the Browns have clinched the top pick, but that would be a nice consolation prize for the Giants after a terrible season (it is pretty funny to think Rosen could end up with the Giants because he refuses to play for another team … remember that Manning ended up on the Giants because he forced the hand of the Chargers, who had the first pick when he was drafted).

And that brings us back to Manning. Would the Giants keep him around as a bridge to Rosen or whoever they draft? If not, would Manning waive his no-trade clause to help out the Giants or simply force the team to cut him and then explore his options? Whatever will happen this offseason, Manning’s Giants career might be ending with a pretty meek whimper.

TheJacksonville Jaguars and Blake Bortles’ bandwagons: If you refused to buy into the Jaguars being legitimate contenders, mostly because they’re the Jaguars and the wheels would fall off for Bortles at some point, take a bow.

What happened in San Francisco on Sunday was alarming. Bortles looked terrible after a good three-game stretch. He missed some easy passes and some of his best completions were right into the hands of 49ers defenders. Bortles rallied the Jaguars late, but his three interceptions put the team in a huge hole. There was also the mess of linebacker Myles Jack getting a personal foul for taunting Carlos Hyde and then defensive end Yannick Ngakoue getting a bad unnecessary roughness penalty later in the drive. And at the end, needing a stop to get the ball back after a late rally, defensive end Malik Jackson couldn’t stop himself from head-butting a 49ers player and picking up a 15-yard penalty. The Jaguars melted down in every way.

That does help the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers clinch a first-round bye if they beat the Houston Texans on Monday night. The Jaguars have looked good for most of this season. But there has been skepticism, mostly because they’re the Jaguars. That was justified on Sunday. So on a day in which the Jaguars clinched their first division title since 1999, when they won the AFC Central, it didn’t seem like a time to celebrate.

The NFL, in hopes that Week 17 would bring some excitement: There’s not much the NFL can do about how Week 17 falls. Some weeks there is great excitement with many races in the air. Other years are like this one.

There is not one game next week between two teams fighting for a playoff spot or a division title. Seven of the eight division titles have been clinched. The eighth is between the Panthers and Saints for the NFC South, but they don’t play each other. Both first-round byes in the AFC will be clinched if the Steelers win Monday, and the Eagles can clinch a No. 1 seed on Monday night. The only way the Vikings won’t get the second NFC bye is if they lose at home to the Bears, the Panthers win at Atlanta and New Orleans loses or ties at Tampa Bay (h/t to Chris Tomasson of the St. Paul Pioneer Press).

In short, we won’t have a Week 17 filled with important games. There is still intrigue with wild-card spots in both conferences, and those will be interesting to watch unfold. But as the NFL got together to figure out which game to flex to Sunday night next week, they had to quickly realize there was no good option. The NFL has been catching a run of bad breaks all season, and the bad luck continues through the Week 17 schedule.

– – – – – – –

Frank Schwab is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab

More NFL coverage from Yahoo Sports: • Watch: Winston loses mind after game-ending fumble • Broncos’ Osweiler gives the saddest sideline speech ever • Insult added to injury: Seattle CB mocks Zeke after TD • Once again, the NFL’s worst rule reared its ugly head

[petitrangement]

In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared.

Just shy of his 3rd birthday, an engaged, chatty child, full of typical speech — “I love you,” “Where are my Ninja Turtles?” “Let’s get ice cream!” — fell silent. He cried, inconsolably. Didn’t sleep. Wouldn’t make eye contact. His only word was “juice.”

I had just started a job as The Wall Street Journal’s national affairs reporter. My wife, Cornelia, a former journalist, was home with him  — a new story every day, a new horror. He could barely use a sippy cup, though he’d long ago graduated to a big-boy cup. He wove about like someone walking with his eyes shut. “It doesn’t make sense,” I’d say at night. “You don’t grow backward.” Had he been injured somehow when he was out of our sight, banged his head, swallowed something poisonous? It was like searching for clues to a kidnapping.

After visits to several doctors, we first heard the word “autism.” Later, it would be fine-tuned to “regressive autism,” now affecting roughly a third of children with the disorder. Unlike the kids born with it, this group seems typical until somewhere between 18 and 36 months — then they vanish. Some never get their speech back. Families stop watching those early videos, their child waving to the camera. Too painful. That child’s gone.

In the year since his diagnosis, Owen’s only activity with his brother, Walt, is something they did before the autism struck: watching Disney movies. “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” — it was a boom time for Disney — and also the old classics: “Dumbo,” “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio,” “Bambi.” They watch on a television bracketed to the wall in a high corner of our smallish bedroom in Georgetown. It is hard to know all the things going through the mind of our 6-year-old, Walt, about how his little brother, now nearly 4, is changing. They pile up pillows on our bed and sit close, Walt often with his arm around Owen’s shoulders, trying to hold him — and the shifting world — in place.

Then Walt slips out to play with friends, and Owen keeps watching. Movie after movie. Certain parts he rewinds and rewatches. Lots of rewinding. But he seems content, focused.              

We ask our growing team of developmental specialists, doctors and therapists about it. We were never big fans of plopping our kids in front of Disney videos, but now the question seemed more urgent: Is this good for him? They shrug. Is he relaxed? Yes. Does it seem joyful? Definitely. Keep it limited, they say. But if it does all that for him, there’s no reason to stop it.

So we join him upstairs, all of us, on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon in November 1994. Owen is already on the bed, oblivious to our arrival, murmuring gibberish. . . . “Juicervose, juicervose.” It is something we’ve been hearing for the past few weeks. Cornelia thinks maybe he wants more juice; but no, he refuses the sippy cup. “The Little Mermaid” is playing as we settle in, propping up pillows. We’ve all seen it at least a dozen times, but it’s at one of the best parts: where Ursula the sea witch, an acerbic diva, sings her song of villainy, “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” to the selfish mermaid, Ariel, setting up the part in which Ursula will turn Ariel into a human, allowing her to seek out the handsome prince, in exchange for her voice.

When the song is over, Owen lifts the remote. Hits rewind.

“Come on, Owen, just let it play!” Walt moans. But Owen goes back just 20 seconds or so, to the song’s next-to-last stanza, with Ursula shouting:

Go ahead — make your choice!

I’m a very busy woman, and I haven’t got all day.

It won’t cost much, just your voice!

He does it again. Stop. Rewind. Play. And one more time. On the fourth pass, Cornelia whispers, “It’s not ‘juice.’ ” I barely hear her. “What?” “It’s not ‘juice.’ It’s ‘just’ . . . ‘just your voice’!”

I grab Owen by the shoulders. “Just your voice! Is that what you’re saying?!”

He looks right at me, our first real eye contact in a year. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!”

Walt starts to shout, “Owen’s talking again!” A mermaid lost her voice in a moment of transformation. So did this silent boy. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!” Owen keeps saying it, watching us shout and cheer. And then we’re up, all of us, bouncing on the bed. Owen, too, singing it over and over — “Juicervose!” — as Cornelia, tears beginning to fall, whispers softly, “Thank God, he’s in there.”

Roger Ross Williams, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, spent time with Ron Suskind and his son, Owen, who has autism, to show how they learned to communicate using dialogue from Disney movies.

We told his various therapists about what happened. Cornelia and I could think of little else. Owen reached out, if only for a moment, from his shut-in world. We spoke to our child.

The speech therapist tamped down our enthusiasm. Dr. Alan Rosenblatt, our trusted developmental pediatrician, did, too. He explained that echolalia is a common feature in kids like Owen. It’s something babies sometimes do between 6 and 9 months, repeating consonants and vowels as they learn to turn babble into words. It’s also something seen in people with developmental disabilities who can’t speak. Just like what the term suggests, they echo, usually the last word or two of a sentence. “You’re a very smart and pretty girl,” a mother might say to her daughter. “Pretty girl,” the child will respond, an echo. Do those kids know what the words mean, we pressed Rosenblatt. “Usually not,” he said. “They may want to make a connection, which is hopeful,” he added.

“They just repeat the last sound,” I croaked. He nodded. Why, I persisted, in a last stab, would he be rewinding that one part for weeks, maybe longer, and choose that phrase from so many in an 83-minute movie? Rosenblatt shrugged. No way of knowing.

Three weeks after the “juicervose” dance, we are at Walt Disney World. Walt grabs Owen’s hand, and off they go down Main Street, U.S.A. There are attractions in Fantasyland — the Mad Tea Party, Snow White’s Scary Adventures, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — that echo movies they both love. The boys sit in the flying galleon on Peter Pan’s Flight as it swirls and dips over landscapes and figures from Never Land, the Lost Boys frolicking in their lair, Wendy walking the plank, Peter Pan crossing swords with Captain Hook. They look like any other pair of brothers, and in the trick of this light, they are.

Each time Cornelia and I feel that, we catch ourselves. After the “juicervose” euphoria and then the cold water poured on us by doctors, we try to make sure we aren’t just seeing what we want to see.

But by midafternoon, it’s clear that Owen isn’t self-talking in the streams of gibberish or flapping his hands as he usually does. Some, but not much. He seems calm and focused — following the group, making eye contact — and oddly settled, with a slight smile, eyes alight, just as he is while watching the movies on our bed. Owen seems at home here, as though his identity, or however much of it has formed, is somehow tied to this place.

On the way out of Magic Kingdom, when Walt spots the Sword in the Stone near the carousel, we can’t help indulging in fantasy. A Disney actor dressed as Merlin is there, reciting dialogue — “Let the boy try.” As we approach the anvil, someone flips a hidden switch that loosens the sword. Walt pulls it out as Merlin cries, “You, my boy, are our king!”

Then both of them turn to Owen. “You can do it, Owie,” Walt whispers. “I know you can.” Owen looks evenly at his brother and Merlin, and then steps to the anvil and lifts the sword true. Did he understand what Walt was saying? Did he just imitate what he saw his brother do? What the hell difference did it make? Today, in the sunlight, he’s the hero of his imagination.

It’s Walt’s 9th birthday, September 1997, in our new house near Chevy Chase Circle. Owen is 6½. After roughhousing with buddies in the backyard at the end of his party, Walt gets a little weepy. He’s already a tough, independent kid, often the case with siblings of disabled kids. But he can get a little sad on his birthdays. As Cornelia and I return to the kitchen, Owen walks in right behind us.

He looks intently at us, one, then the other. “Walter doesn’t want to grow up,” he says evenly, “like Mowgli or Peter Pan.”

We nod, dumbly, looking down at him. He nods back and then vanishes into some private reverie.

It’s as if a thunderbolt just passed through the kitchen. A full sentence, and not just an “I want this” or “Give me that.” No, a complex sentence, the likes of which he’d not uttered in four years. Actually, ever.

We don’t say anything at first and then don’t stop talking for the next four hours, peeling apart, layer by layer, what just happened. Beyond the language, it’s interpretive thinking that he’s not supposed to be able to do: that someone crying on his birthday may not want to grow up. Not only would such an insight be improbable for a typical 6-year-old; it was an elegant connection that Cornelia and I overlooked.

It’s as if Owen had let us in, just for an instant, to glimpse a mysterious grid growing inside him, a matrix on which he affixed items he saw each day that we might not even notice. And then he carefully aligned it to another one, standing parallel: The world of Disney.

After dinner is over and the boys retreat upstairs to their attic lair, Cornelia starts to think about what to do now. It’s like he peeked out from some vast underground and then vanished. He’s done this before, but never quite like this. “How on earth,” she says almost to herself, “do you get back in there?”

I feel she’s asking me. She has been the one lifting the burden each day, driving him to therapists and schools, rocking him to sleep as he thrashes at 3 a.m. I’m the one who tells stories, does voices, wears a propeller hat. Her look says, “Find a way.”

Soon I’m tiptoeing up the carpeted stairs. Owen’s sitting on his bed, flipping through a Disney book; he can’t read, of course, but he likes to look at the pictures. The mission is to reach around the banister into his closet and grab his puppet of Iago, the parrot from “Aladdin” and one of his favorite characters. He has been doing lots of Iago echolalia, easy to identify because the character is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, who talks like a busted Cuisinart. Once Iago’s in hand, I gently pull the bedspread from the foot of Owen’s bed onto the floor. He doesn’t look up. It takes four minutes for Iago and me to make it safely under the bedspread.

Now crawl, snail-slow, along the side of the bed to its midpoint. Fine.

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure out my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning.

Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend. “I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.” I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was 2. I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years. Or Iago is. Stay in character. “So, Owen, when did yoooou and I become such good friends?”

“When I started watching ‘Aladdin’ all the time. You made me laugh so much. You’re so funny.”

My mind is racing — find a snatch of dialogue, anything. One scene I’ve seen him watch and rewind is when Iago tells the villainous vizier Jafar how he should become sultan.

Back as Iago: “Funny? O.K., Owen, like when I say . . . um. . . . So, so, you marry the princess and you become the chump husband.” Owen makes a gravelly sound, like someone trying to clear his throat or find a lower tone: “I loooove the way your fowl little mind works.” It’s a Jafar line, in Jafar’s voice — a bit higher-pitched, of course, but all there, the faintly British accent, the sinister tone.

I’m an evil parrot talking to a Disney villain, and he’s talking back. Then, I hear a laugh, a joyful little laugh that I have not heard in many years.

A week after the Iago breakthrough, we decide to try an experiment. Owen usually picks the animated movie whenever we gather in front of the 26-inch Magnavox in the basement. On this night, we pick it for him: “The Jungle Book.” It’s a movie that the boys have long loved and one that Cornelia and I remember from our childhood: Disney’s 1967 rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s tales of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the jungles of India, schooled by Baloo, the obstreperous bear, and Bagheera, the protective black panther.

We watch the movie until, a few minutes along, we get to its signature song, “The Bare Necessities.” We turn down the sound, and in my best attempt at the voice and inflection of Phil Harris, who voices the bear, I say: " ‘Look, now, it’s like this, little britches. All you’ve got to do is. . . . ' ”

Then we all sing, trying to get the words right:

Look for the bare necessities,

The simple bare necessities. . . .

When you look under the rocks and plants

And take a glance at the fancy ants, and maybe

try a few.

Just as Baloo looks at Mowgli, I look at Owen; he looks squarely back at me, and then it happens. Right on cue, he says, " ‘You eat ants?’ ” That’s Mowgli’s line; he speaks it as Mowgli, almost like a tape recording.

I’m poised with Baloo’s next line: " ‘Ha-ha, you better believe it! And you’re gonna love the way they tickle.’ ”

A few minutes later, when King Louie, the crazy orangutan, voiced by the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Prima, sings to Mowgli about becoming a man, Walt’s ready. " ‘Teach me the secret of man’s red fire,’ ” he says, pulling on his ear, waiting for the whispered secret from the boy. Owen recoils, just as Mowgli does in the movie, and says, " ‘I don’t know how to make fire.’ ” Cornelia catches my eye; I shake my head. The inflection and ease of speech are things he can’t otherwise muster. It’s almost as though there’s no autism. Mimicry is one thing. This isn’t that. The movements, the tone, the emotions seem utterly authentic, like method acting.

When Owen was 3, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test. But now it seems that as he watched each Disney movie again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multitrack. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years, words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese — or, rather, spoken English — by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds we can now help him contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression, as we just managed with “The Jungle Book.”

So begin the basement sessions. During daylight, we go about our lives. Walt rides his bike to school each morning, back home each afternoon. Cornelia manages the house, the bills, the overloaded schedules of the kids. I am editing and writing for The Journal, putting on my suit and subwaying to the bureau.

No one knows we’re all living double lives. At night, we become animated characters.

By the fall of 1999, the start of Owen’s third year at the Lab School of Washington, a private school for kids with learning disabilities, we see his skills improving, his rudimentary reading, his new ability to do simple math. But the progress is uneven and unsteady, as is the building of social connections with potential friends. It’s a struggle for him to keep up, the school warns us darkly, because his mind so often races through the parallel universe of movies.

We tell them what we’ve found: The key is to harness it. We discovered that he learned to read using the slowly scrolling credits at the end of movies. He’d hit pause and decode — animators, art directors, best boys, long-dead voice actors — desperate to know who was behind the flickering screen of light. The school rose to the challenge, up to a point, letting him cast and star in a play of “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby” — with Owen reciting every line from our bootleg copy of “Song of the South.”

But by his fifth year at Lab, we sense trouble has arrived. Owen is making progress, but the other kids, with lighter burdens, are moving faster. Sally Smith, the school’s director, says it just isn’t working out for Owen at Lab. What we both know is that the school has changed. Each year, I help Smith with a gala for Learning-Disabled Achievers, a glittering night in Washington honoring people like Tom Cruise and David Boies, most of them with more manageable issues like dyslexia. The students now bend more toward younger versions of those glittering awardees rather than the disabled son whom Smith founded her school in 1967 to help.

I make my case: Owen is making progress in his own fashion, improving by the day. “He’s turning these movies into tools that, more and more, he’s using to make sense of the wider world,” I tell her.

She looks at me sympathetically but doesn’t budge. “Many of these kids are just too hard to teach,” she says, then pauses. “Look, not picking up social cues is just too great a burden. They can’t engage with teachers or peers with enough ease, enough capacity, to push themselves forward.”

I rise from my chair. “You started this school so your son, who’d been discarded, would have a place to go,” I say, putting on my coat. Her son, Gary, now well into adulthood, has significant challenges, much like Owen. “Do you think he’d be accepted here today?”

Those are fighting words. I can’t help it. I am thinking how difficult this is going to be for Owen. To her credit, Smith doesn’t rise to battle.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “Times change. We’re serving a need and serving it well. Just not anymore for someone like Owen.”

We call the school he was at six years before, Ivymount, which is for needier and more disabled kids, and tell the administrators that Owen will not be moving up with his class to the middle school at Lab. They’re sympathetic and say they will gladly take him back. We’re worried that he’ll lose some of the gains he has made being in class with kids who have milder challenges, but we don’t have much of a choice.

We tell Owen in early May 2002, a month before he will leave his school. We go out to dinner and say he’ll be going back to Ivymount. He has made a few friends at Lab. They do things together, are starting to form little rituals. Quite a lot about friendship, after all, is ritual. “It’ll be great, Owie,” Walt says, putting his arm around Owen’s shoulder. “I’m sure some of your old friends at Ivymount will still be there.”

Owen gets this look where he raises his eyebrows and presses his face into the widest of smiles. He calls it “happy face.” He does it when he’s worried he might cry.

Back at Ivymount in the fall, Owen, now 11, is not being challenged academically or socially. Cornelia’s response is to crank up his programming. She starts him in piano lessons with an Ivymount instructor who specializes in teaching special-needs kids. There are still the rounds of therapist visits and any after-school activity we can find. Not many playdates, though.

Owen doesn’t seem to mind. All he wants are sketch pads and pencils. Markers, too. He goes through a pad in a few days and wants another. O.K., back to the CVS. A few more days, he needs another one. I look around for what are now two missing pads. They’re nowhere. Could he have hidden them?

We’ve been observing him closely since the ouster from Lab. We know he was bruised, but he doesn’t have enough expressive speech to explain his feelings. So we watch, collecting clues, like spies in our own home. He’s distracted. He’s watching lots of videos. The school reports that he’s doing lots of “silly,” the word we use for self-stimulatory behavior like flapping hands.

One Saturday afternoon, while Cornelia and Walt are running errands, I see Owen padding across the kitchen’s Mexican tile floor on his way to the basement with pad, pencils and one of his large animation books in hand. I wait a minute before I tiptoe behind him, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. He’s on the rug, kneeling but hunched forward, flipping furiously through the book; as I edge closer, I see it contains artwork from “Learn to Draw Disney’s The Little Mermaid.”

Standing silently over him, I can see he’s stopping at pictures of Sebastian, the wise crab who watches over the heroine, Ariel. There are lots of Sebastians: pencil sketches from when the animators were developing the character, full-color renderings of key scenes from the movie. That is where he stops, at a slide of Sebastian with a fearful look, mouth open and eyes wide.

The sketchbook flies open, the black pencil in hand. He looks from the picture to his pad, picture, pad, picture, pad. And then the tightly gripped pencil begins to move, a lead-lined crawl. Most kids, most anyone, would begin with the face — where we all tend to look first — but he starts on the edge, with the crab leg, then the claw, which take shape in a single line. I think of those old-style drafting machines with two pencils poised above two pads, the pencils connected to a mechanical apparatus, a crosshatch, so that moving one would create the same motion, the same precise line, with the other. At the end, you’d have two identical drawings, side by side.

But here’s the crazy part: Every part of him starts moving except that rock-steady hand. His whole body begins twisting and flinching, moving as much as you can move while kneeling, with his free arm bending in the angle of Sebastian’s left claw. Five minutes later, when he gets to the face, I look up and see a reflection of Owen’s face, me behind him, in the darkened screen of the TV in front of us. The look on the crab’s face in the book is replicated in my son’s reflection on the TV, where, of course, we’ve watched this scene — of Sebastian watching Ariel lose her voice — so many times.

And then it’s over, like a passing storm. He drops the pencil, rears back, turns his head, leaps up and bounds off.

It freaks me out.

He can’t write his name legibly. But here is a rendering of a Disney character that might have easily appeared in any one of 20 animation books in his room.

I squat down and begin flipping. It’s one character after another — the Mad Hatter next to Rafiki, and then Lumiere, the candelabra from “Beauty and the Beast,” and then Jiminy Cricket. The expressions are all so vivid, mostly fearful. Dozens of them, page after page.

I settle in cross-legged on the carpet to examine the pages. What do the drawings mean? Are the faces of these characters a reflection of hidden, repressed feelings? Does he race through the books looking for an expression that matches the way he feels and then literally draw that emotion to the surface?

Could be a half-hour I’m sitting, maybe longer. I’m inside him, or so I imagine, running my fingers along the slight indentations of carbon — a smiling mouth of Baloo, a weeping dwarf, a soaring crow from “Dumbo” — to try to touch him, his tears and smiles and moments of sudden flight. This is the crushing pain of autism. Of not being able to know your own child, to share love and laughter with him, to comfort him, to answer his questions. Cornelia spends time in here, in his head — this child she carried — whispering to him. Now I’m in here, too.

Time passes, pages turn. And then I see writing. On the next to last page of the sketchbook, there’s something. It’s his usual scrawl, the letters barely legible: “I Am the Protekter of Sidekicks.”

I flip to the last page. In the chicken scratch of a kindergartner is a single sentence: “No Sidekick Gets Left Behind.”

We need the right moment to respond. Every second we’re with Owen in the coming days, Cornelia and I look for our opening — a moment when he’s alone, or settled, or upbeat or a bit more talkative than usual.

Then the stars align. He’s watching “Beauty and the Beast” and wants us all to join him. Soon we’re together in the basement, watching the familiar opening, when the handsome prince spurns an old, ugly woman on a forbidding night, only to have her transform into a beautiful enchantress, who turns him into a hideous beast; a spell that can be broken only if he can “learn to love another and earn her love in return.”

As the credits roll, we do a few voices — I say, “Sacre bleu, invaders!” as Lumiere (Jerry Orbach, doing a stagy French accent). Cornelia throws in Mrs. Potts (Angela Lansbury, upper-crust British): “He’s finally learned to love.” Owen rises to each with a burst of follow-up lines. We respond in character. Nothing special. Just your average American family speaking in Disney dialogue.

Both characters are vividly drawn in his sketchbook. “They’re a great pair of . . . sidekicks,” Cornelia says. We’ve never used the word with him in conversation. Owen snaps to. “I love Mrs. Potts and Lumiere,” he says.

“What is a sidekick?” Cornelia asks him.

“A sidekick helps the hero fulfill his destiny,” he chirps. Rolls right off his tongue. A classical, elegant definition.

“Do you feel like a sidekick, Owie?” Cornelia asks him softly. Their eyes are aligned, just the two of them now, looking into each other, until he suddenly breaks into “happy face.”

“I am one!” he says. His voice is high and cheery, no sign of a quaver. “I am a sidekick.” The words come out flat, without affectation. But he compensates, giving them expression by nodding after every two syllables.

“And no . . . sidekick . . . gets left . . . behind.”

There’s no doubt, now, that he sees what we see: that kids of all kinds, including his classmates at Lab School, are moving on, while he’s left behind. The sidekicks have emerged, sketch by sketch, in the difficult months since his ejection from Lab. His response has been to embrace it, the pain of it, and be a protector of the discarded. He starts giving sidekick identities to his classmates at Ivymount, so many of whom are heavily burdened — some with physical infirmities, and plenty of autistic kids with little speech. But they have qualities that he’s identifying — this one was loyal, that one gentle, another one silly in some lighthearted way that makes him laugh.

It’s often the supporting players in Disney fables who are more varied and vivid. Even in the earliest Disney movies, the first sidekicks — Goofy, Pluto and then Donald Duck — often carried confusions, frailties, foolishness, pride, vanity and hard-won, often reluctantly learned, insights. The spectrum of complex human emotions is housed with the sidekicks.

Owen and I walk gingerly down the icy steps of a side entrance to Dan Griffin’s basement office in Takoma Park, Md. It’s a particularly cold and stormy afternoon in December 2005, the week before Christmas. Griffin welcomes us with hugs, as always, and we settle into our usual chairs.

Owen started seeing the psychologist last year, when he was 13. More than any other therapist, Griffin took to the “Disney therapy,” or more broadly, what might be called “affinity therapy,” that Cornelia and I, with Walt’s assistance, have been conducting for years in our home, and even more so recently. After Owen spent two years at Ivymount, Cornelia started home-schooling him last year, using Disney scripts as a bridge to teach him the basics of reading and math that he’ll need to get into a high school for special-needs kids in Maryland. She regularly guides Griffin, who each week tries to use the scripts to teach Owen social and life skills as well.

Like many other therapists we’d seen, Griffin was initially a little concerned about Owen’s intense affinity for Disney movies — but unlike the others, he became intrigued. In fact, he had come up with an ingenious plan for Owen to protect and advise a sidekick. We had settled on Zazu, the proud but naïve hornbill charged with protecting a young Simba in “The Lion King.” Owen said, “Zazu has a lot to learn.”

Hence:

Educating Zazu

I, Owen Harry Suskind, agree to undertake the challenging but critical task of providing stimulating educational experiences for my good friend Zazu. This project will take a good deal of work and preparation, but should be a lot of fun and also immensely beneficial to Zazu. I agree to do this for the academic year of 2005–6.

Areas of Zazu’s learning program shall include but will not be limited to:

1. Life in the world

2. How to concentrate

3. Following directions

4. Health

5. Asking questions

6. Making friends

7. Fun

8. Loving people

9. Science

10. Helping others

Signed,

Owen Suskind

We start today’s therapy session in December with talk of Zazu and his progress. The focus is on contract item No. 6: Making friends.

Owen doesn’t have friends, other than kids he encounters through carefully structured activities. He sees the boy next door, Nathan, the “typical” child of our close friends, one evening a week at our house for an art class. Their meetings are facilitated by a 20-something media-arts guy from the Lab School, a large, happy Wisconsinite who helps the boys make a short animated flip book. In a social-skills group run by his psychiatrist, C. T. Gordon, Owen also sees Brian and Robert, two autism-spectrum boys who are also really into movies.

But when advising Zazu, Owen suddenly seems full of advice about how to make friends.

“To make a friend, you have to be a friend,” he says, picking up a line that is used at Walt’s summer camp; it’s something Cornelia has said to him a few times but has never heard him repeat.

“And you need to be interested in what they’re interested in,” Owen adds. “And then they can be interested in what you’re interested in.”

Owen seems to infuse the advice with feeling. Instead of just repeating these chestnuts about social skills, he seems to be really owning them. Griffin — whom Owen has dubbed Rafiki, after the wise baboon in “The Lion King” — keeps up the momentum by mentioning the “second-question rule” for keeping a conversation going, asking narrower questions: “When did you do that? Who else was with you? How did that feel?” We practice a few of those, all three of us.

Owen mentions how Zazu has trouble with contract item No. 8 — loving people — because he’s “ashamed about how he failed Simba,” who slipped away from the hornbill’s watchful gaze and got into trouble — trouble that eventually led to his father’s death.

Griffin takes the risk of asking Owen to elaborate about the fairly complex dynamic between Zazu and Simba; when you fail to meet your own expectations and disappoint someone you care about, what does that feel like? As Owen is thinking, I mouth “P-h-i-l” to Griffin. He knows immediately which scene I’m thinking of and asks Owen if this is what happens to Phil in “Hercules.”

Owen starts to laugh. “Can I do it?”

Before we can nod, Owen’s off and running, doing a scene in which Phil is trying to tell a crowd of doubters about Hercules’s potential. We watch as Owen seems to access the emotions of Phil, Hercules and the three other characters in that scene. He ends with a plea from Hercules: “How am I supposed to prove myself a hero if nobody will give me a chance?”

As the session ends, Griffin pulls me aside. “Autistic kids like Owen are not supposed to do that,” he says. “This is getting weird in a very good way.”

Since Owen turned 3, the daunting, never-enough demands of autism have remained inelastic, bottomless. Not knowing what really works, or helps, makes identifying the inessentials all but impossible. You try everything. And we have: from changing his diet to gluten-free to auditory processing, when he spends hours doing high-speed computer tests while different noises ring in his ears. Lots of families run themselves into bankruptcy. We’ve spent about $90,000 a year on Owen. Actually, that’s not so much higher than the norm — autism organizations estimate that it costs about $60,000 a year to provide adequate educational, medical and therapeutic services to an autistic child. About half of that can go to school tuitions, often with some of the money coming from public funding.

And we are just one family. There are an estimated two million people with autism-spectrum disorders in the United States, more than 500,000 of whom are children. Beneath the oft-cited incidence rate of one in 88 children is a more startling one. Because of the five-to-one prevalence of the disorder in boys over girls, one in every 54 boys is affected, a number with few epidemiological precedents. Down syndrome, by comparison, occurs in one of every 691 children.

What we’re hoping to get our arms around one night in 2010, just before Owen is to graduate from high school, is some sense of what the future — the long future — might look like.

There’s a knock on our door, and Team Owen begins to arrive. Griffin, the psychologist, is excited to see Dr. Lance Clawson, the psychiatrist; they’ve never met, though they’ve exchanged reports on Owen and other patients they share. Suzie Blattner, an education specialist, has been tutoring Owen since he was 3, right around the time Bill Stixrud, his neuropsychological testing specialist, first tested him. That’s 15 years. These people have helped Cornelia and me parent our son. It’s a humbling thought, and one that prompts a blurring of lines between hired professional and friend.

The immediate issue is what comes next, how the autistic world and the “neurotypical” world might be fitted together for Owen. The discussion moves swiftly, between possible plans to set up a group house to college programs. There’s a school Cornelia has heard about called Riverview on Cape Cod that has a program for high-school- and college-age kids on the autism spectrum. Everyone knows the school — it has a national reputation and costs about $65,000 a year — but, Clawson warns, sometimes kids return home from these kinds of programs and still end up “living in the basement.”

I can see Cornelia’s face fall any time basements are mentioned. The image of Owen watching videos in the basement at 50 is a waking nightmare. I’m with her on that.

But over the hour and into the next, Griffin talks more and more about Owen’s progress with the Disney therapy, as we’ve come to call it. Of course everyone knows of his affinity for these movies, as it has been a factor in the work of every one of them. For the first time, though, we can hear them discuss, professional to professional, what’s been going on in Griffin’s office.

It’s almost as though Cornelia and I are not there. The questions fly fast; some responses are in professional jargon. You can practically hear the whir of collected consciousness — a group of diverse experts, with 100 years of experience with autism-spectrum-disorder patients among them.

“It’s not so much how he’s used the movies to help with academics,” Blattner says. “It’s how he’s used them to guide emotional growth, which, of course, is the bigger and more complex challenge.”

Everyone nods to that.

Griffin cites some surprising recent breakthroughs. Owen has been whispering under his breath to sidekicks for years, having them guide him as he faces challenges. He is developing a version of “inner speech,” something that typical people develop as children to “think through” behavior and plan actions, the core cognitive processes of executive function, which are thought to be deficient in autistic people. Lately, Owen has let us in on it. At our prompting, he tells us how various sidekicks would solve his problems, quell his fears. He does it in the characters’ voices, seeming to channel insights that are otherwise inaccessible to him. Griffin tells the group how he has recently channeled Rafiki’s voice on why change is so hard and how we manage it, and Jiminy Cricket’s on the meaning of conscience and how to converse with that “voice in your head.”

Last week, Griffin recalls, he asked Merlin how he would advise a boy like Owen who was concerned with high school’s ending and what would come next. “So, as Merlin, he says: ‘Listen, boy, whistle the graduation song a little bit every day. By the time the big day comes, you’ll be fine.’ ”

Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, just as the Grimm Brothers did, from a vast repository of folklore. Countless cultures have told versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” which dates back 2,000 years to the Latin “Cupid and Psyche” and certainly beyond that. These are stories human beings have always told themselves to make their way in the world.

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

The latest research that Cornelia and I came across seems to show that a feature of autism is a lack of traditional habituation, or the way we become used to things. Typically, people sort various inputs, keep or discard them and then store those they keep. Our brains thus become accustomed to the familiar. After the third viewing of a good movie, or a 10th viewing of a real favorite, you’ve had your fill. Many autistic people, though, can watch that favorite a hundred times and seemingly feel the same sensations as the first time. While they are soothed by the repetition, they may also be looking for new details and patterns in each viewing, so-called hypersystemizing, a theory that asserts that the repetitive urge underlies special abilities for some of those on the spectrum.

Disney provided raw material, publicly available and ubiquitous, that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others, it’s maps. While our household may not be typical, with a pair of writerly parents and a fixation on stories — all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations — we have no doubt that he shares a basic neurological architecture with people on the autism spectrum everywhere.

The challenge is how to make our example useful to other families and other kids, whatever their burning interest. That’s what Team Owen seems to be talking about. How does this work? Is there a methodology? Can it be translated from anecdote to analysis and be helpful to others in need?

Owen, now 20, is opening the microwave in the galley kitchen when we arrive at Riverview on Cape Cod one day in April 2012. “Should I put in the Orville’s?” he calls to the dorm counselor out in the suite, gets the O.K. and then emerges to help us lay out cups, juice and M&Ms on a table in the TV lounge. The students trickle in.

It’s the Sunday-night meeting of Disney Club. Owen decided to start the group not long after he arrived at Riverview eight months ago. It has been a fine first year so far in their college program: He’s getting a mix of academic and social challenges, has made one good friend and is building independence.

Starting Disney Club has been a highlight; he has never been a member of a club, never mind the president of one. About a dozen students come to Owen’s dorm each week, settle in to eat popcorn, chat a bit and watch their favorites. A few times he described club meetings to us, and we tried to suggest activities over the phone. Then a few weeks ago, he asked if we could come out as Disney Club’s parent advisers.

We always knew there were other autism-spectrum kids who focused intently on Disney — we’d met several, after all, over the years. But by starting this club, Owen has drawn together a roomful of them.

Tonight’s selection is “Dumbo,” a fertile tale of self-recognition and emergence. After we watch a bit of the movie, we pause it and talk about how the thing that makes the little elephant a pariah, his huge ears, ultimately allows him to soar. I ask each of them about their “hidden ears,” the thing “that makes them different — maybe even an outcast — that they’ve discovered is a great strength.”

The room gets quiet. It’s clear that many of these students have rarely, if ever, had their passion for Disney treated as something serious and meaningful.

One young woman talks about how her gentle nature, something that leaves her vulnerable, is a great strength in how she handles rescue dogs. Another mentions “my brain, because it can take me on adventures of imagination.”

A young man, speaking in a very routinized way with speech patterns that closely match the “Rain Man” characterization of autism, asks me the date of my birth. I tell him, and his eyes flicker. “That was a Friday.”

When I ask the group which Disney character they most identify with, the same student, now enlivened, says Pinocchio and eventually explains, “I feel like a wooden boy, and I’ve always dreamed of feeling what real boys feel.” The dorm counselor, who told me ahead of time that this student has disciplinary issues and an unreachable emotional core, then compliments him — “That was beautiful,” she says — and looks at me with astonishment. I shrug. He’d already bonded in a soul-searching way with his character. I just asked him which one.

It goes on this way for an hour. Like a broken dam. The students, many of whom have very modest expressive speech, summon subtle and deeply moving truths.

There’s a reason — a good-enough reason — that each autistic person has embraced a particular interest. Find that reason, and you will find them, hiding in there, and maybe get a glimpse of their underlying capacities. In our experience, we found that showing authentic interest will help them feel dignity and impel them to show you more, complete with maps and navigational tools that may help to guide their development, their growth. Revealed capability, in turn, may lead to a better understanding of what’s possible in the lives of many people who are challenged.

As the Disney Club members now say, it’s about “finding the hidden ears.”

Owen and I are driving to Griffin’s office in the summer of 2012 for a rare visit. Owen hasn’t seen Griffin since Christmas break. As we drive, Owen says, let’s do “that love business.” Lately we’ve been doing this at least once a day.

“O.K., you do Merlin,” I say, which means I can do the young Arthur from Disney’s 1962 “The Sword and the Stone.” Arthur, thankfully, has only one line.

“You know, lad, this love business is a powerful thing,” he says in Merlin’s reedy, old man’s voice.

“Greater than gravity?” I respond as Arthur.

���Well, yes, boy, in its way.” Owen pauses, considering it all, just as the wizard does in this, one of his favorite passages. “Yes, I’d say it’s the greatest force on earth.”

Romantic love. It’s running through him, first and fresh, which is what he tells Griffin as they sit in the office. “I’ve fallen in love with a wonderful, kind, beautiful, soft and gentle girl, who likes the same things I like — animated movies, mostly hand-drawn, and mostly from Disney.”

Griffin is giddy. He wants to know everything about Emily, Owen’s girlfriend. He lays it all out: the tale of how they met at Riverview, how she’s in Disney Club, their first kiss.

For most of us, social interactions don’t feel so much like work. We engage instinctively, with sensations and often satisfactions freely harvested in the search itself. For Owen, much of that remains hard work. Despite his often saying to Griffin that his aim is to be popular — a catchall for the joys of connecting with other people — that goal, largely theoretical, has been like watery fuel in his sputtering engine.

Now, it’s high-octane. That’s what a first kiss can do. The specific therapeutic yield of this awakening is an intense focus, at long last, on social engagement — but at its very highest peak: the mysteries of how two people can be like one.

Owen tells Griffin that Aladdin and Jasmine have been helpful. “I need to give her space,” he says of Emily. “That’s what Aladdin learns. Jasmine needs to make the choices for herself. She has to choose, and he needs to know what she wants.”

Griffin presses forward on his chair, his face close to Owen’s. “But how can you know what she wants?”

Owen nods immediately. He’s on it. “I have a song.” He explains it is from a movie called “Quest for Camelot,” an Arthurian romance a few Disney expats worked on for Warner Brothers in 1998. “The song is called ‘Looking Through Your Eyes.’ ” He explains that he listens to the song every morning “to make sure I don’t forget to see the world through her eyes.”

For nearly a decade, Owen has been coming to see Griffin in this basement office, trying to decipher the subtle patterns of how people grow close to one another. That desire to connect has always been there as, the latest research indicates, it may be in all autistic people; their neurological barriers don’t kill the desire, even if it’s deeply submerged. And this is the way he still is — autism isn’t a spell that has been broken; it’s a way of being. That means the world will continue to be inhospitable to him, walking about, as he does, uncertain, missing cues, his heart exposed. But he has desperately wanted to connect, to feel his life, fully, and — using his movies and the improvised tool kit we helped him build — he’s finding his footing. For so many years, it was about us finding him, a search joined by Griffin and others. Now it was about him finding himself.

“Owen, my good friend,” Griffin says, his eyes glistening, “it’s fair to say, you’re on your way.”

Owen stands up, that little curly-haired boy now a man, almost Griffin’s height, and smiles, a knowing smile of self-awareness.

“Thank you, Rafiki,” Owen says to Griffin. “For everything.”

“Is friendship forever?” Owen asks me.

“Yes, Owen, it often is.”

“But not always.”

“No, not always.”

It’s later that night, and we’re driving down Connecticut Avenue after seeing the latest from Disney (and Pixar), “Brave.” I think I understand now, from a deeper place, how Owen, and some of his Disney Club friends, use the movies and why it feels so improbable. Most of us grow from a different direction, starting as utterly experiential, sorting through the blooming and buzzing confusion to learn this feels good, that not so much, this works, that doesn’t, as we gradually form a set of rules that we live by, with moral judgments at the peak.

Owen, with his reliance from an early age on myth and fable, each carrying the clarity of black and white, good and evil, inverts this pyramid. He starts with the moral — beauty lies within, be true to yourself, love conquers all — and tests them in a world colored by shades of gray. It’s the sidekicks who help him navigate that eternal debate, as they often do for the heroes in their movies.

“I know love lasts forever!” Owen says after a few minutes.

We’re approaching Chevy Chase Circle, five minutes from where we live. I know I need to touch, gently, upon the notion that making friends or finding love entails risk. There’s no guarantee of forever. There may be heartbreak. But we do it anyway. I drop this bitter morsel into the mix, folding around it an affirmation that he took a risk when he went to an unfamiliar place on Cape Cod, far from his friends and home, and found love. The lesson, I begin, is “to never be afraid to reach out.”

He cuts me off. “I know, I know,” he says, and then summons a voice for support. It’s Laverne, the gargoyle from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“Quasi,” he says. “Take it from an old spectator. Life’s not a spectator sport. If watchin’s all you’re gonna do, then you’re gonna watch your life go by without you.”

He giggles under his breath, then does a little shoulder roll, something he does when a jolt of emotion runs through him. “You know, they’re not like the other sidekicks.”

He has jumped ahead of me again. I scramble. “No? How?”

“All the other sidekicks live within their movies as characters, walk around, do things. The gargoyles only live when Quasimodo is alone with them.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because he breathes life into them. They only live in his imagination.”

Everything goes still. “What’s that mean, buddy?”

He purses his lips and smiles, chin out, as if he got caught in a game of chess. But maybe he wanted to. “It means the answers are inside of him,” he says.

“Then why did he need the gargoyles?”

“He needed to breathe life into them so he could talk to himself. It’s the only way he could find out who he was.”

“You know anyone else like that?”

“Me.” He laughs a sweet, little laugh, soft and deep. And then there’s a long pause.

“But it can get so lonely, talking to yourself,” my son Owen finally says. “You have to live in the world.”