#national gold star mother's day

[murderousink23]

09/29/2024 is European Heritage Day 🇦🇹, World Heart Day ❤️🌎, National Attend Your Grandchild's Birthday 🇺🇸, National Coffee Day ☕️🇺🇸, VFW Day 🇺🇸, National Gold Star Mother's Day 🇺🇸, National Police Memorial Day (ACAB) 🇬🇧, International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction 🇺🇳

[waitmyturtles]

Last Twilight, episode 1: reflections

TW: suicide

ALLLLLLLLRIGHT! Aof Noppharnach began our year with Moonlight Chicken; interjected it with Our Skyy 2 x Bad Buddy x A Tale of Thousand Stars, and bookends it with Last Twilight. I've got my cha yen ready (not too sweet), here we go, Last Twilight, episode 1.

Some quick notes on random stuff first, then themes I'm picking up on:

1) Yes, we had to have Doc Jimmy start a new series with a new fight, huh (and always in these bowling shirt/jackets, too)

2) Ajahn Pichai with the gold chain, sheeeet! (Listen. It's my OGMMTVC Bad Buddy Meta Month. Just about everyone working on this show on the screenwriting and directing team are BBS alums. The comparisons will be unavoidable!)

3) Why do I know Sea Tawinan? It’s not because I watched Vice Versa (I stayed away), but because he was great in a small role in 55:15 Never Too Late, AND, more importantly, homeboy wore an off-shoulder Fendi sweater WITH a blazer (CLAP EMOJIS) to some GMMTV event, which warmed my couture cockles. Much respect for the taste! (Poor @lurkingshan has had to literally hear about my fashion obsession with this get-up MULTIPLE TIMES, sorry Shan, palms together!)

4) Of the few episodes of Midnight Museum and UMG that I watched earlier this year, I was not impressed with Namtan Tipnaree, but I appreciate that she's starting off quite strong and moodily here. (Also, UMG's script did literally no human being any justice.)

@twig-tea has gathered the ragged and burnt out (oh, is that just me, lmao) Ephemerality Squad from the Only Friends meta circle to join them in a Last Twilight Liminality.... what should we call ourselves, the Liminality League? The Liminality Legion? Someone choose! Anyway, I am super down, and ready to start chewing on some themes. Twig captured the big theme of liminality, of time purgatory, and I totally agree with what you've gotten down in your post, Twig.

In the preview episode for this series, Before Last Twilight, we learn that Day has 180 days -- six months -- of vision left. At the same time, Mhok has 180 days -- six months -- to earn enough money to buy back his late sister's car.

In addition to liminality/time purgatory (this is only my coinage, btw, a way in which I can understand the moment in life this show is capturing), we clearly have a theme of cars and movement. Mhok is a mechanic. He wants to keep his late sister's car. The Bimmer that Night is driving is Day's car. Mhok has to get Day home on the back of a motorcycle as Night had to drive away while Day was wandering in the middle of the road. A car can move backwards only very temporarily, and will HAVE to move forwards at any point in time in order to get to another location (..... unless you're a driver from New Jersey, ayooo!). The car belonging to the late Rung is very much in purgatory at the moment.

We have a theme of sibling rivalry between Day and Night. Day was the success of the family, knows it, and hangs it over Night's head. And we have a theme of opposites. Day, Night, blind, seeing. I can play badminton, I cannot play badminton.

(BY THE WAY! We know we'll be reading more into badminton, AND in the rivalry of Day and Night, AND in the rivalry of Sea and Mark in this series, yes? Mark Pakin and Sea Tawinan are both national-level Thai badminton players who chose acting as their careers. They're facing off in some GMMTV BL sports tournament at the end of the year. I hope it's slightly aggressive! In Before Last Twilight, Sea actually made reference to his rivalry with Mark. Ooooh, TESTY!)

While I'm watching closely the tension between Day and Night, I'm also watching for the stress and pressure that caring for Day will put on Mhok, as well as Night and his and Day's mother. As many of us are watching Last Twilight very closely for accuracy and authenticity in reflecting the experience of a disabled person in an unaccommodating environment; I'm also looking to this show to hopefully capture stories of caregiver stress, which is an incredibly real and important phenomenon (relevant articles here and here).

As I always, always harken to in my posts: behavioral change is very real, and very difficult -- especially when behavioral change is forced upon an individual AND/OR a group, all of which contain very different emotional constructions. Day and Night's forced behavioral change, based on Day's vision condition, has very naturally and automatically caused stress in the group dynamic of Day's family system, as we saw in the outburst in Day's car. I wonder how Mhok will deal with that stress, and how he'll manage his own stress vis à vis caring for Day.

Last theme for now, and then some concluding thoughts. Mhok's emotional distance from his sister's suicide. He can't bring himself to connect with it directly.

I'm eating this up. It's certainly Mhok's way of grieving at the moment. He's also talking with his ex-girlfriend in both of these scenes. There's emotional space between him and Rung, between him and Porjai. And certainly there's simmering and unresolved anger as well -- honestly, the whole emotional circle. But Mhok, at this point, is not toeing the line of getting close to those emotions, and is engaging with the memory of his sister with distance, which is bound to be addressed vis à vis his connection with Day.

There's a lot of anger, a lot of regret, a lot of avoidance, a lot of dancing around the honest truth. Mhok and Day are likely conduits of emotional openness and steadiness to each other; we will see how it plays out.

What do I think of JimmySea? I'm not you're average Wai hater -- I really liked Jimmy as Wai in Bad Buddy. Because I didn't watch Vice Versa, I honestly don't know what I think about him in a lead role. So I am going in REAL fresh, knowing nothing about JimmySea's chemistry, and I like what I'm seeing so far, particularly with Jimmy's emotional control. I appreciate having seen a bit of the work they did together in Before Last Twilight to get to this series premiere.

Aof has done this before: he's recognized potential in pairings (specifically in Dark Blue Kiss with TayNew and Still 2gether with BrightWin) to come up with fabulous shows. So I have trust that he knows what he's doing with JimmySea. Let's see. I really like this so far, but Only Friends did indeed burn me out to a crisp, so I'm allowing myself the slightest touch of hesitancy as I get into a new and big GMMTV show.

[roseamongroses]

nothing in the world belongs to me, but

Shuri/Riri Williams

[Major Character Death] [Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses] [Apocalypse] [Period Typical Attitudes] [Goddess!Shuri] [Astronomer!Riri] [Hero's Quest] [Rebirth]

Summary: Her. It was all for Her.

- SHURIRIWEEK2024 - day six - "song fic/ song inspo" - loosely inspired by My Love Mine All Mine

@shuririweek

ao3

----

Oh-- The Earth. It waned.

Dark clouds bore down on the countrymen below. Winds picked up, sharp against their skin--warning them of the storm to come.

Days prior, The Oracle warned The King of the devastation. A disaster brought forth not by man nor nature.

Under the Sea God’s might, entire nations would sink.

Was it for revenge? Indulgence? No one knew for certain why such a curse had befallen the lands. At least, that’s what The Crown had claimed. Tucked behind stone walls draped in ivory and gold. Lofty, safe from the encroaching beast below.

Troops were rallied. Songs of conquest and valor sang. Banners swung, legs marched on.

All clamoring forth into battle--all drowned.

A wrath like no other rising to swallow them whole.

Ships were sent and sank. Cargo barreled into the docks. Sailors dumped onto the rocks. Churches filled-- tithings offered with muddied, waif hands. Prayers went unanswered as the sea levels continued to rise.

No other God was willing to intervene.

Bodies piled up--The King was desperate. A draft was enforced despite the uproar from the people. Nobility scattered, abandoning the towering lights of the sea-side cities for the darkest crevices of the country-side. All who were left--the desperate, the needy, the ill-begotten souls of this cursed land would bear the folly of the crown and his noblemen.

Riri did not cry for her country's plight. She’s cried enough. For her mother she left behind, for her father, friends who left her. If she must grieve this wretched earth, it will be for the hands who toiled it. Never The Crown.

And yet, here she was dying for that Bastard King.

Blood seeped into her mouth. The taste of iron and salt squeezing her lungs. She swam on, limbs heavy even as she discarded her overskirts and bodice. Now she faced the cold with only left in a thin chemise and cap. Another wave swelled, pushing her against the wall of the cave. Riri’s body shuddered, a throbbing pain overtaking the fatigue and numbness.

Eyes weary, she cast her gaze up as darkness threatened to take hold. Even a mind as sharp as hers would falter in these conditions. No one would understand why she’d taken on this quest. She was no Knight. She had no armor. No land, no power to her name.

Only her mind kept her from the pits of irrelevance in a society this cruel. No one could interpret the stars like she could. She spent many nights in the Royal Observatory, hunched over an assortment of lenses. She poured over notes, calculations, renderings--deciphering the distance between earth and those endless depths above.

A fever for knowledge--a sign of madness to others. Smarts did a woman no good afterall. Rumors would speculate that her position only existed to keep her close to the King’s bedchamber without alerting the church.

Riri didn’t care. At the end of the day, her ceaseless research was an act of prayer. Not meant to be understood by others. To dare cast her sights above, to dare know the unknowable. Between the moon’s craters, the stars fading lights, and that space that never ended.

She’d see traces of Her everywhere.

Reverently, she’d write through the night catching glimpses of the Goddess’s presence. A breeze over her shoulder in a windowless room. Shadows that stretched like slender fingers, tracing the curved, ink numbers.

Oh--her Goddess of Moon, of Stars. She who kept the secrets of creation just out of sight--teasing her lowly worshiper.

It was a frantic night of discovery--like many others--that her Goddess finally answered.

It led her here. The bloody depths--her inevitable tomb.

And yet, drifting between consciousness, Riri smiles.

Above, through the cracks of the cave ceiling, the moon shined. Its light cool against her face--a caress like no other.

Around Riri, the water retreated. An arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her upright

Cool lips brushed against her ear-- Riri trembled.

“My curious astronomer…” Shuri whispered, watching a trail of water trickle down the human’s throat, “So bright, so fragile--Will you give up?”

Riri exhaled, squeezing her eyes tight, “Never,” she promised, “If I die…”

Kingdoms would fall--man would crumble--but most importantly--

“How else will I prove you wrong?”

Shuri laughed, surprised by her arrogance, “Oh? About what?”

“That I can never know you,” Riri said, head falling back, “That I can never reach you,”

“But I’m right here, aren’t I?” Shuri teased, a featherlight touch tracing Riri’s temple, “There’s nothing else to find. You’ve see it all,”

“I’ve never seen you,” Riri sighed, relishing the brief relief Her touch brought. She knows if she opens her eyes, if she dares to look back, there will be nothing but moonlight to greet her, “My everything, my eternity… I will not rest until I see you again.”

“Again?” Shuri echoed, lost.

Riri has never seen her in this lifetime. Ever.

Riri didn’t seem to take notice of the strangeness of her words. The prayer, it's promise, so natural on her lips.

Shuri let it pass, “If you insist,” she said, “But you must endure far greater pain,” she kissed Riri’s temple, then cheek--just shy of her lips, “No human can return from where you must go,” she murmured, words reverberating against Riri’s soul.

Shuri’s embrace slipped away.

Clouds covered the moon, marring its face.

Riri was alone again.

And the water rose, eager to swallow--to reduce her body to a corpse desperate for shore. Riri braced herself, taking a moment before she she let her fingers slip. She let herself get dragged down, down deeper.

Fear gripped her--it always did. Riri let it rush over, body jerking as brine spilled into her lips--lungs convulsing.

Riri kept swimming deeper, even as her body bloated to the surface.

Burning clarity pulled her from despair. Every atom buzzed into her awareness as she cast herself down deeper until the water scorched.

Riri gripped the sword buried in the core.

Oh-- The Earth.

It trembled as she became a little greater.

[steelfyre]

࣪𓏲ּ  ֶָ  𝑤𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑠𝒕𝒗  ⁝         melisa asli pamuk,  33,  cis woman,  she / her.    announcing  the  arrival  of  alara  of  house  dayne,  the  heiress of starfall.  whispers  among  the  court  name  them  to  be  both  fierce  and  vindictive  in  disposition,  and  those  closest  to  them  speak  to  their  interests  in  archery.  if  we  bards  could  compose  a  song  for  them,  it  might  tell  stories  of  the  light  of  the  full  moon  illuminating  an  oasis  where  huntress  waits  with  a  silver  bow  held  in  steady  hands  ,  its  arrow  ready  to  strike  ;  a  change  in  the  winds  carrying  the  promise  of  divine  reckoning.  she  does  not  tremble  but  smiles  ;  galloping  across  the  desert  on  a  white  stallion  ,  you  were  never  made  for  ivory  towers  and  needed  no  knight  to  save  you  ;  a  beauty  more  wild  than  serene  ,  more  sharp  than  gentle  -  something  mythical  lingered  within  mortal  flesh  ,  waiting  ,  raging.  the  seven  whisper  to  their  most  devout  queen  as  she  sleeps,  making  her  question  where  their  loyalties  truly  lie.  are  they  right  to  whisper?  for  their  loyalties  truly  lie  with  dorne.

basic information.

official name: alara dayne. nickname: none. noble title: heiress of starfall , lady of starfall. date of birth: march 24. age: thirty-three. birthplace: starfall , dorne. home: starfall. nationality: westerosi. gender: cis woman. pronouns: she / her. orientation: bisexual , biromantic. monikers: starmaiden , lady starfire / starfyre , the star of dorne. languages: the common tongue , fluent. familiar with some essosi dialect. accent: a traditionally dornish accent spoken in a steady , gentle tone infused with warmth.

physical information.

faceclaim: melisa asli pamuk. ethnicity: rhoynar. hair: brown with soft gold highlights. eyes: golden brown. height: five feet , ten inches. build: taller than most women of westeros with a hunter's build, lean, not bulky, muscles visible, particularly in her arms, but not detracting from the lady's elegance. dominant hand: ambidextrous. allergies: none. scars: none. distinguishing features: her height and the birthmark above her lips. clothing style: traditional dornish style regardless of where she currently resides. favors loose and light dresses in warm shades on normal days but oft chooses more revealing outfits when attending events. can also be spotted in pants and shirts when training, horseback riding, or hunting. the jewelry she wears is not excessive, normally limited to a necklace and bracelets. she also has a pair of favorite hairpins that double at daggers in case danger unexpectedly arises.

personality.

positive: fierce ,  resilient ,  dauntless , charming ,  protective , forthright. negative: vindictive ,  prideful ,  headstrong , mistrustful , obstinate , temperamental. label: the huntress , the tempest. mbti: entj - the commander. enneagram: 8w7 , the maverick. element: fire. star sign: aries. temperament: choleric. moral alignment: chaotic good. deadly sin: pride , wrath. heavenly virtue : diligence. godly parent: artemis.

drives.

hobbies: archery , horseback riding , hunting , stargazing. religion: very loosely follows the faith of the seven. alliance: house dayne , dorne. personal goals: to protect her son, particularly from the targaryens and anyone who might try using him as a pawn, and free dorne from the targaryen reign. would they choose family or power?: family.

family ties.

father: ruling lord alvar dayne. relationship: tba. mother: ruling lady thalina dayne. relationship: tba. sibling: lord/lady/liege utp dayne. relationship: tba. sister: lady laina dayne. relationship: tba. son: davios sand. relationship: tba. third cousins: house dayne of high hermtiage. relationship: tba.

history.

the darling heiress was never the image of the perfect lady, headstrong and adventurous from a young age, but those of starfall never minded. her parents encouraged her to pursue her interests, teaching her how to ride horses the same time she learned to walk and gifting her a bow and arrow when alara gravitated toward that skill. the responsibilities of heir wasn't nonexistent - she was still expected to attend more traditional lessons, but a balance between freedom and expectations was found. a relief for the lady alara's temper was also observed from a young age after a particularly loud squabble with the septa, who was then quickly replaced, trying to instruct her.

lady thalina, after not having children with her first husband despite trying, adored her daughter, and alara admired her mother in turn. in her youth, wherever the ruling lady went, the heiress often followed. her mother's shadow. her mother's apprentice. though alara wasn't a silent shadow; there were many times that she would voice her opinion during meetings or if she felt her mother was being disrespected, wouldn't hesitate to say so. as alara grew older and was able to travel more, her presence at her mother's side decreased but all it would take was a raven to call the heiress back home, which her mother occasionally did when she wished for her daughter's assistance or perspective and letters wouldn't do.

while she loved starfall, alara felt the pull to see the world beyond. first it was dorne that she explored from the red mountains in the west until she reached sunspear on the eastern coast. but the world stretched beyond her beloved desert so alara continued on, venturing north into westeros and then eventually across the narrow sea. her travels were splintered across the years. she could never be away from home for too long and did not wish to be either.

places where the dragons frequented were often avoided whenever possible. living under targaryen rule had forever been distasteful, and she hoped that within her lifetime, dorne would be free of their beastly overlords. however, a chance encounter with the crown prince and a night shared left alara pregnant. alara did not expect marriage ( could think of no worse fate ) but she hadn't expected that the prince would refuse to acknowledge his son's existence. rage, empowered by motherhood, burned hotter. she remained in dorne since learning she was pregnant, which caused some whispers as she'd become a commonly seen figure in society, and after giving birth to her son, a boy with lilac eyes but, thankfully, medium brown hair. her appearance at the royal wedding was the first time she attended court since she fell pregnant. and whispers now spread like wildfire.

important: while muses can, and likely do, suspect that davios is the prince of dragonstone's son, the only muses who know of his parentage for certain are the dayne family ( and possibly some royal targaryens / council members if they're in the know ) as alara has kept it a secret from everyone else.

headcanons

an excellent horsewoman. alara has pretty much taken over the stables at starfall where she raises her horses. she often goes riding at least once and can grow very restless when her duties or court prevent her from venturing outside a keep's walls. her prized horse is a white mare named dune.

while she does know how to fight with a sword, she does greatly prefer a bow and arrow. she's an extremely skilled archer, both in a fight and when hunting, and can maintain her accuracy when shooting from horseback.

always carries at least one dagger with her, normally strapped to her thigh and hidden from sight.

so, so prideful. she will not forget a slight and is very hesitant to forgive. forgive and forget? no, resent and remember.

is capable of adapting to court and being extremely charming when she wants to be. but her patience for courtly etiquette is limited, though it has grown as she has gotten older. holding her tongue is difficult but she knows she must do it for her family's and dorne's sake. however, she has had a few incidents over the years where a noble has pushed her past her limits and she has snapped at them.

well known for her beauty, which has resulted in her having a handful of flings over the years.

she's still very close to her mother and will go to her when she needs advice. they often discuss matters together, ruling starfall as a team in preparation for the day that alara will be ruling lady.

alara has no desire to put her son on the throne. in fact, she doesn't want the targaryens anywhere near her son. had they actually acknowledged davios when he was born, she might feel differently but now she is steadfast in keeping them away from davios. he is only a dayne in her eyes and once dorne gains there independence, she would want to legitimize him as a dayne.

that being said, alara does believe her son has every right to a dragon egg and does want to see him have a dragon of his own - one that would protect dorne.

wanted connections. | established connections.

[coochiequeens]

Anthropologist Zelia Nuttall transformed the way we think of ancient Mesoamerica

An illustration of the Aztec calendar stone surrounds a young portrait of anthropologist Zelia Nuttall. “Mrs. Nuttall’s investigations of the Mexican calendar appear to furnish for the first time a satisfactory key,” wrote one leading scholar.Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

By Merilee Grindle

Author, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations

On a bright day early in 1885, Zelia Nuttall was strolling around the ancient ruins of Teotihuacán, the enormous ceremonial site north of Mexico City. Not yet 30, Zelia had a deep interest in the history of Mexico, and now, with her marriage in ruins and her future uncertain, she was on a trip with her mother, Magdalena; her brother George; and her 3-year-old daughter, Nadine, to distract her from her worries.

The site, which covered eight square miles, had once been home to the predecessors of the Aztecs. It included about 2,000 dwellings along with temples, plazas and pyramids where they charted the stars and made offerings to the sun and moon. As Zelia admired the impressive buildings, some shrouded in dirt and vegetation, she reached down and collected a few pieces of pottery from the dusty soil. They were plentiful and easy to find with a few brushes of her hand.

The moment she picked up those artifacts would prove to be pivotal in the life and long career of this trailblazing anthropologist. Over the next 50 years, Zelia’s careful study of artifacts would challenge the way people thought of Mesoamerican history. She was the first to decode the Aztec calendar and identify the purposes of ancient adornments and weapons. She untangled the organization of commercial networks and transcribed ancient songs. She found clues about the ancient Americas all over the world: Once, deep in the stacks of the British Museum, she found an Indigenous pictorial history that predated the Spanish conquest; skilled at interpreting Aztec drawings and symbols, and having taught herself Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and their predecessors, she was the first to transcribe and translate this and other ancient manuscripts.

A 19th-century engraving of the pyramids of Teotihuacan. The Pyramid of the Sun was restored in 1910, on the centennial of the Mexican War of Independence. Bridgeman Images

She also served as a bridge between the United States and Mexico, living in both countries and working with leading national institutions in each. At a time when many scholars spun elaborate and unfounded theories based on 19th-century views of race, Zelia looked at the evidence and made concrete connections based on scientific observations. By the time she died, in 1933, she had published three books and more than 75 articles.

Yet during her lifetime, she was sometimes called an antiquarian, a folklorist or a “lady scientist.” When she died, scholarly journals and some newspapers ran notices and obituaries. After that, she largely passed from the public’s eye.

Today, anthropologists often have specialized expertise. But in the 19th century, anthropology was not yet a discipline with its own paradigms, methods and boundaries. Most of its practitioners were self-taught or served as apprentices to a handful of recognized experts. Many such “amateurs” made important contributions to the field. And many of them were women.

She was born in 1857 to a wealthy family in San Francisco, then a fast-growing city of about 50,000 people. Near the shore, ships mired in mud—many abandoned by crews eager to make their fortunes in the gold fields—served as hostels to a restless, sometimes violent and mostly male population. Other adventurers found uncertain homes in hastily built hotels and rooming houses. But the city was also an exciting international settlement. Ships arrived daily from across the Pacific, Panama and the east via Cape Horn.

Her well-appointed household stood apart from the city’s wilder quarters, but the people who lived there reflected San Francisco’s international character. Her mother, Magdalena Parrott Nuttall, herself the daughter of an American businessman and a Mexican woman, spoke Spanish, and her grandfather, who lived nearby, employed a French lady’s maid; a nursemaid from New York; a chambermaid, laundress, housekeeper, coachman and groom from Ireland; a steward from Switzerland; a cook and additional servants from France; and nine day laborers from China.

When Zelia was 8, her family left San Francisco for Europe. Along with her older brother, Juanito, and her younger siblings Carmelita and George, Zelia and her parents set off for Ireland, her father’s native land. Over the course of 11 years, the Nuttalls made their way to London, Paris, the South of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Throughout that time, Zelia was educated largely by governesses and tutors, with some formal schooling in Dresden and London. But her time overseas shaped her interest in ancient history and expanded her language skills, as she added French, German and Italian to her fluent Spanish. All of this expansion thrilled her mind, but it also made her feel increasingly out of step with the expectations for young women of her age. “My ideas and opinions form themselves I don’t know how, and I sometimes am astonished at the determined ideas I have!” she wrote in a November 1875 letter.

She took refuge in singing and tried to be pleased with the few social events she attended. Photos from the time show Zelia as an attractive young woman with large, dark eyes, arched eyebrows and stylishly arranged hair. Nevertheless, she was unhappy. “I was infinitely disgusted with some of the idiotic specimens of mankind I danced with,” she wrote in an 1876 letter after a party.

The Nuttalls returned to San Francisco in 1876, when she was nearly 20. Two years later, she met a young French anthropologist, Alphonse Pinart, already celebrated in his mid-20s as an explorer and linguist. He had been to Alaska, Arizona, Canada, Maine, Russia and the South Sea Islands. Pinart may have led the family to understand that he was wealthy. In fact, he was almost penniless, having already spent his significant inheritance.

They were married at the Nuttall home on May 10, 1880. During the next year and a half, the couple traveled to Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. Pinart introduced Zelia to a burgeoning academic literature in ethnology and archaeology, and she began to understand the theories of linguistics. She found 16th-century Spanish hardly a challenge as she consulted annotated codices—pictorial documents that traced pre-Columbian genealogies and conquests in Mesoamerica. While Pinart dashed from project to project and roamed widely among countries, tribes and languages, Zelia began to demonstrate an intellectual style that was more focused and precise.

Despite the excitement of discovery, something began to go wrong in the marriage. Hints of Zelia’s distress can be found in her effusive letters home. There was, for example, the shipboard admission that her husband was less attentive than she had anticipated. She noted that he was “so quiet and undemonstrative” that it was hard to imagine they were newly married. Some fellow passengers thought they were brother and sister—an odd assumption to make, even in Victorian times, about newlyweds.

By contrast, Zelia is nowhere to be found in Pinart’s surviving correspondence. On April 6, 1881, she gave birth to a daughter, Roberta, who lived only 11 days. To add to this melancholy time, her beloved father died in May, leaving her doubly devastated. A letter Pinart wrote to a friend just a few months later from Cuba appeared on stationery with a black border, signifying mourning, but he made no reference to his wife, her father or their child.

Zelia found solace in learning about her heritage when she and Pinart traveled to Mexico in 1881. She was eager to see her mother’s homeland and to hone her understanding of its pre-Columbian cultures. While Pinart carried out his own research, she began to learn Nahuatl, and she toured villages where dialects of the language were still spoken and ruins where the marks of the past could still be found.

The couple returned to San Francisco on December 6, 1881. By then, Zelia was pregnant again. In late January, Pinart set out to spend several months in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama, while Zelia awaited the birth of her second child, Nadine, at her mother’s house.

What finally drove Zelia to sue for divorce, on the grounds of cruelty and neglect, remains elusive. She may have felt that Pinart had married her for access to her family’s fortune. Many years later, she angrily informed Nadine that Pinart had spent the $9,000 she had inherited from her father as well as her marriage settlement. When the money was gone, and when her family was firm that he shouldn’t expect any more, he abandoned his wife and child. Once Zelia demanded a separation, he did not contest it, though obtaining the divorce was a long process that started soon after the couple’s return from their travels and didn’t conclude until 1888.

In later life, Nadine Nuttall Pinart would reflect on how much it had cost her to grow up without a father. “From the time before I can remember, he was taboo to me,” she wrote in a 1961 letter to Ross Parmenter, a New York Times editor who wrote numerous books about Mexico and developed a fascination with Zelia Nuttall. “I was frightened by the violent scoldings I got for mentioning his name. Later, I compromised with myself and when asked about him quietly said, ‘I never knew him!’ I realized that people thought he was dead and were sorry for me and said no more. In those days it was a disgrace to have a divorced mother.”

If the period between 1881 and 1888, when Zelia finalized her divorce, was fraught with tension and heartache, this was also when she set about redefining herself as a woman with a vocation. She spent five months in Mexico with her mother, her daughter and her brother between December 1884 and April 1885, visiting Cuernavaca, Mexico City and Toluca, and exploring archaeological ruins. It was during this time that Zelia made her fateful winter visit to Teotihuacan and acquired her first artifacts.

The pieces of pottery she picked up that day were small terra-cotta heads. They were abundant in the area among the pyramids. At the time, the site was still being used as farmland, and the artifacts came to the surface during ploughing. The heads themselves were an inch or two long, with flat backs and a neck attached. Scholars before Zelia—Americans, Europeans and Mexicans—had mused creatively about such relics, describing differences in their facial features and the variety of headdresses they had sported. Drawing on 19th-century fascination with the topic of race, the French archaeologist Désiré Charnay became convinced that he could see in them African, Chinese and Greek facial features. Charnay mused: Had their creators migrated from Africa, Asia or Europe? And if racial identity was a marker of human development, as many believed at the time, what might this curious mixture of features reveal about civilizations in the Americas?

This kind of thinking was typical. Mistaken ideas about Darwinism led many Western scholars to believe that civilizations evolved along a linear, hierarchical path, from primitive villages to ancient kingdoms to modern industrial and urban societies. Not surprisingly, they used this to legitimize beliefs about the superiority of the white race.

Zelia Nuttall divided her collection of terra-cotta heads into three classes. The first included rudimentary efforts to represent a human face (as seen above, far left). The second class (including the bald second head from the left above) had holes for attaching earrings and other ornaments. The third category included the rest of the heads pictured here, sporting what Zelia called “a confusing variety of peculiar and not ungraceful headdresses.” Public Domain

Zelia generally accepted her era’s assumptions about race and class, and she was comfortable with her elite status and its privileges. Yet in her research, she did not categorize civilizations as primitive, savage or barbaric, as other scholars did, nor did she indulge in racial theories of cultural development. Instead, she sought to sweep aside this kind of speculation and replace it with observation and reason.

The more Zelia examined her terra-cotta heads, the more she realized she needed guidance from someone who had more experience in the study of antiquity than she had. At the time, there were no departments of anthropology in colleges or universities, no degrees to be earned, no clear routes to building a career. To pursue her burgeoning interest in the ancient civilizations of Mexico, and to decipher the meaning of an assortment of terra-cotta heads, she contacted Frederic Ward Putnam, the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and a leading expert on Mesoamerica. He agreed to meet her in the fall of 1885. The meeting was all she hoped for: Putnam warmed to her work and encouraged her to follow her intuitive grasp of how to observe and interpret evidence.

Putnam’s regard for women’s intellectual capacities was clear. He was one of a small number of Harvard researchers who gave lectures at ��the Annex,” an institution established for women who had passed the college’s admissions test but were not allowed to attend classes or earn a degree. (The Harvard Annex eventually became Radcliffe College.) He hired a resourceful administrative staff of women and encouraged them to play a role in managing the museum. He also had a “correspondence school,” which he conducted through a widespread exchange of letters. As he once wrote, “Several of my best students are women, who have become widely known by their thorough and important works and publications; and this I consider as high an honor as could be accorded to me.”

Within months of their first encounter, in late 1885, Putnam asked Zelia to become a special assistant in Mexican archaeology for the Peabody. Less than a year later, in the annual report of the Peabody Museum, he wrote about her appointment in glowing terms: “Familiar with the Nahuatl language … and with an exceptional talent for linguistics and archaeology, as well as being thoroughly informed in all the early native and Spanish writings relating to Mexico and its people, Mrs. Nuttall enters the study with a preparation as remarkable as it is exceptional.”

With guidance from Putnam, Zelia wrote an investigation of the terra-cotta heads, her first published scientific report, which appeared in the spring 1886 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. “At the first glance,” she wrote, “the multitude and variety of these heads are confusing; but after prolonged observation, they seem to naturally distribute themselves into three large and well-defined Classes.”

Each class, she theorized, had been created at a different time and represented a different stage in the culture. The first class contained “primary and crude attempts at the representation of a human face.” The second class included the first efforts at artistry. Her inspection revealed “holes, notches and lines,” suggesting ways in which tiny headdresses, feathers or beads could have been attached to the heads, and noted traces of several colors of paint and different kinds of clay.

The third class was the most important, Zelia argued, because of the quality of the molding and carving. This class had “modifications of feature sufficient to give every specimen an individuality of its own,” she wrote. “The faces are invariably in repose, in some the eyes are closed … faces young and smooth, others very elongated, some with sunken cheeks, others with wrinkles.”

By comparing these terra-cotta heads with ancient pictographs and writings, she showed that some of the heads represented children while others depicted young men, warriors or elders. Others showed the distinct hairstyles described in the writings of Bernardino de Sahagún, a 16th-century Franciscan friar who spent 50 years studying the Aztec culture, language and history. “The noblewomen used to wear their hair hanging to the waist, or to the shoulders only. Others wore it long over the temples and ears only,” Sahagún had written. “Others entwined their hair with black cotton-thread and wore these twists about the head, forming two little horns above the forehead. Others have longer hair and cut its ends equally, as an embellishment, so that, when it is twisted and tied up, it looked as though it were all of the same length; and other women have their whole heads shorn or clipped.”

These concrete observations allowed Zelia to challenge popular ideas about the supposed African, Asian, European or Egyptian origins of the “races” in the Americas. For example, by studying the ornamentation the heads displayed, she was able to identify the person or god each artifact represented and interpret its ritual or symbolic purpose. One clearly corresponded with Tlaloc, the pan-Mesoamerican god of rain, who had been shown in the pictographs with a curved band above the mouth and circles around the eyes. Another head, molded with a turban-like cap, corresponded with the goddess Centeotl; Zelia speculated that the clay turbans once had real feathers attached. She also noted the significance of various poses. “In the picture-writings, closed eyes invariably convey the idea of death,” she wrote.

The article revealed how Zelia intended to be seen as a scholar. First, she made it clear that she had read what others had written. Then she revealed that she would go beyond existing speculation to answer questions that had puzzled others; hers was to be original and important work.

In 1892, Zelia presented a paper in Spain about the Aztec calendar stone. Buried during the destruction of the Aztec Empire, the calendar stone had been unearthed in December 1790, when repairs were being made to the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. The sculpted stone, some 12 feet in diameter and weighing 25 tons, became a popular attraction exhibited in the Mexico City Cathedral, steps from where it had been found. Antonio de León y Gama, a Mexican astronomer, mathematician and archaeologist, had written about its discovery and praised the intelligence of the Aztecs who had created it. Alexander von Humboldt, who saw the stone when he visited Mexico in 1803-1804, included a drawing in his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, published in 1810, and encouraged Mexican intellectuals to study the meaning of its concentric circles and numerous glyphs. Many others took on its puzzles in the years that followed.

At the time of Zelia’s presentation, the Mexican upper classes were carefully crafting a new national image—a story that would allow Mexico to take its place among the modern nations of the world. The Aztecs, Maya, Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs and other cultures had left their imprints throughout the country in magnificent temples, enigmatic statues, gold jewelry, jade figurines and painted murals. This history was reclaimed as a national heritage every bit as glorious as those of Greece and Rome. A statue of Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec king who resisted Cortés, took its place on Mexico City’s elegant Paseo de la Reforma in 1887. The calendar stone had been installed in a place of honor in the National Museum in 1885. But little was known about the actual customs and beliefs of those ancient people.

The Aztec calendar stone, a central focus of Zelia’s research, has been on display at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology since 1885. Alamy

With her extraordinary knowledge of surviving codices, Zelia offered a novel “reading” of the giant calendar stone that had stumped others and provided new insights into the annual and seasonal cycles of daily life in ancient Mexico, illuminating the cosmology, agriculture and trade patterns of the Aztecs. She presented another version of the paper at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Zelia returned to Mexico City in February 1902, and after a personal audience with Mexican President José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz, arranged by the U.S. ambassador, she embarked on a spree of travel to archaeological sites she had long wanted to visit. In May, she and 20-year-old Nadine joined friends at the Oaxacan ruins at Mitla, a religious center, where the “place of the dead” harbored both Mixtec and Zapotec art and architecture. On this dry, high plain ringed by mountains, Zelia strolled across vast stone patios, inspected the elaborate geometric friezes that lined and decorated them, explored temples and imagined a sophisticated society of kings, priests, nobles, artisans and farmers.

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico in the 16th century, the Aztec Empire dominated the area. This map of its largest city, Tenochtitlan (now the historic center of Mexico City), was printed in 1524 in Nuremberg, Germany, likely based on a drawing by one of Hernán Cortés’ men. It shows the city’s elaborate network of roads, bridges and canals, complete with aqueducts and bathhouses. The Spaniards executed the last Aztec ruler, Moctezuma II Xocoyotzin, and forced his people to convert to Catholicism. Alamy

Zelia was welcomed into the international community of anthropologists in Mexico. She and Nadine traveled in the Yucatán with the young American anthropologist Alfred Tozzer, where they were beset by frequent rain and terrible roads. Arriving tired and wet in a small town, Tozzer, who would one day chair Harvard’s department of anthropology, was impressed by the women’s resilience. “Imagine the picture,” he wrote to his family on April 8, 1902. “Mrs. Nuttall, never accustomed to roughing it, a woman entertained by the crowned heads of Europe, sitting at a bench with the top part of my pajamas on drinking chocolate and her daughter with a flannel shirt of mine on doing the same.”

After a few months, Zelia and her daughter returned to Mexico City and purchased a mansion they called Casa Alvarado, in the upscale suburb of Coyoacán. The grand house never failed to impress. Frederick Starr, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, was one of many who found the palace beautiful and restful: “We rode out to Coyoacán where we found Mrs. Nuttall and her daughter really charmingly situated. The color decoration is simple and strong. Nasturtiums are handsomely used in the patio and balcony effects. … While Mrs. Nuttall dressed, Miss Nuttall showed us through the garden, where a real transformation has been effected.”

Living in Mexico energized Zelia. In addition to her affiliation with Harvard, she had funding to travel and collect artifacts for the Department of Anthropology at the University of California. “With me here, in touch with the government and people, I think that American institutions can but profit and that I can do some good in advancing Science in this country,” she confided to Putnam.

Impressed by her knowledge of the country’s past, public officials and foreign visitors came to see her and listened carefully as she led them around her home and garden, explaining the collection she was busy assembling. Her garden, patio and verandas were home to an increasingly large number of stone artifacts, a beautiful carving of the serpent god Quetzalcóatl, revered for his wisdom, among them. She took up “digging” near Casa Alvarado, an activity one guest later recalled fondly. “Every morning after breakfast Mrs. Nuttall would give me a trowel and a bucket. She herself was equipped with a sort of short-handled spade, and we would go out into the surrounding country and ‘dig.’ We mostly found broken pieces of pottery, but she seemed to think some of them were significant, if not valuable. … She was a very handsome woman and very charming. She lived in great style, with many Mexican servants.”

The Codex Borgia, an accordion-folded document of Aztec life, was brought to Europe during the Spanish colonial period. Made of animal skins and stretching 36 feet when unfolded, the codex catalogs different units of time and the deities associated with them. It also includes astrological predictions once used for arranging marriages. Zelia drew on the codex to help her decode the Aztec calendar. Courtesy Ziereis Facsimiles

A section from the Codex Borgia

Zelia continued to travel throughout the country. She found a 14-page codex painted on deerskin, with commentary in Nahuatl, that she believed so valuable that she bought it with her own money, selling some of her possessions to afford it. “Owing to my residence here I must keep it a profound secret that I possess and sent out of the country this Codex,” she wrote to Putnam.

While she was not above smuggling treasures out of Mexico, Zelia also worked in the National Museum, contributing to its displays and archives, and she became an honorary professor of the institution.

Zelia had never owned a home until she bought Casa Alvarado in 1902. In a letter, she described the property as “a beautiful old place with extensive gardens.” Smithsonian Archives

Her Sunday teas at Casa Alvarado were a study in salon orchestration. “She would have 30 or 40 people and she would change the groups she invited,” one visitor recalled. “Sometimes they were all people who knew each other. Or else she would bring people together she wanted to introduce to each other. They weren’t like old-style Mexican parties, with all the women on one side and men on the other. The men and women were mixed together.”

According to an oft-repeated legend, at one of her soirées, she advanced to welcome an eminent guest just as her voluminous Victorian drawers came loose and dropped to her ankles. She calmly stepped out of them and proceeded as if nothing had happened. Zelia was, above all, self-confident.

Zelia Nuttall left Mexico during the early months of 1910 and did not return to her beloved Casa Alvarado for seven years. Throughout that time, Mexico was in the midst of a violent revolution. As many as two million people lost their lives in the ten-year conflict, and the country’s infrastructure was reduced to tatters. Even after the end of the most extensive violence, turmoil erupted sporadically until the late 1920s.

By then, visitors to Casa Alvarado agreed that Zelia was rooted in a bygone era. She was a middle-aged woman with thick glasses who favored shawls, laces and jet beads. Her palace was still filled with stuff only a Victorian could accumulate, but Mexico was telling new stories about itself.

The writer D.H. Lawrence used Zelia as a model for a fictional character—“an elderly woman, rather like a Conquistador herself in her black silk dress and her little black shoulder-shawl.” Antropo Wiki

The elites of the previous generation had asserted that descendants of the Aztec, Maya and other civilizations deteriorated into poverty and abandon. Young artists and intellectuals now rejected this belief. In Diego Rivera’s vast public murals, he showed the people of Mexico being ground into poverty and submission by Spanish conquistadors, a rapacious church, foreign capitalism, the army and cruel politicians. Quetzalcóatl replaced Santa Claus at the National Stadium; Chapultepec Park hosted Mexico Night.

Zelia did not like the revolution and she did not approve of what came after it. She did not celebrate the masses; she believed in hierarchy and a natural order of classes and races. Yet she was determined to be relevant to a new era in Mexico. Casa Alvarado became a meeting place for politicians, journalists, writers and social scientists from Mexico and abroad, many of whom came to witness the possibilities of change in the aftermath of a people’s revolution.

Nevertheless, the stubborn elegance of Casa Alvarado in the 1920s was clear testimony that Zelia was not willing to give up her lifestyle. When the French American painter Jean Charlot was a guest at one of Zelia’s teas, he was aghast at the Mexican servants in white gloves.

When Zelia Nuttall died in 1933, the U.S. consul in Mexico City wrote to Nadine—by then a 51-year-old widow living in Cambridge, England—assuring her that they’d given her mother a tasteful funeral. “Your Mother was very highly thought of here, as evidenced by the floral offerings and the number of her friends who came to the funeral service at the cemetery, it being estimated that about one hundred persons were present.”

By that time, the field of anthropology was dramatically changing, becoming more systematic and organized. Those who entered the field in the 1920s and 1930s built expertise in the classroom and under supervision in the field, passing a variety of tests and milestones determined by academic experts and acquiring a credential as proof of the right to pursue these inquiries. With these rigorous new standards, they asserted their superiority as scholars over those of Zelia’s generation.

Researchers thought this item at Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology was a “Moorish hat” before Zelia identified it as a Mesoamerican headdress. Alamy

Yet Alfred Tozzer, in his memorial in the journal American Anthropologist, reflected that Zelia “was a remarkable example of 19th-century versatility.” She was wrong in some of her overarching theories. For instance, she fallaciously argued that ancient Phoenician travelers had carried their culture to Mesoamerica. But she was right about many other things. Through her letters, articles and books, we can trace what she got right and what she got wrong as a scholar, and we can follow her as she moved from one research obsession to the next.

Her private life is harder to grasp. Among all the artifacts, there is little about the quips and gossip she exchanged with friends, the piano music she liked to play and sing. We cannot know what was in the boxes of papers in the cellar of Casa Alvarado that were burned in the housecleaning undertaken by its new tenants. We cannot retrieve personal and public documents lost in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.

What we do know is that she had to make sacrifices, often very personal ones. We can feel her vulnerability, uncertainty, anger and embarrassment in the letters she wrote, as well as her self-assuredness. It required unusual self-discipline to learn so many languages and to gain a mastery of ancient pictographs. Her almost constant travels imperiled her health even while they advanced her vast network of friends, colleagues and patrons. But she continued to work, and that work helped establish the foundation on which many others now build.

A single mother pursuing a career while looking after a family in a man’s world: In some ways, Zelia Nuttall was a very modern woman.

Adapted from In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2023 by Merilee Grindle. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter Two. The Culture of Despair

They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith. —Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair:A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology [47]

Stories of rage are first stories of despair.

Jeniece Learned stands amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in the lapels of their jackets or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She has an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder-length hair. She is carrying a booklet called Ringing in a Culture of Life. The booklet has the schedule of the two-day event she is attending organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event, says the booklet, is “dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss.”

Learned, who drove five hours from a town outside of Youngstown, Ohio, was raised Jewish. She wears a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inset in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women, when the speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., asked if there were any “postabortive” women present. Learned runs a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she tries to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions. She speaks in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence rather than birth control as the only acceptable form of contraception. And in the fight against abortion and in her conversion, she has found a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her.

Her life, before she was saved, was chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She says she was sexually abused by a family member. Her father left her mother when Learned was12. She says her mother periodically woke her and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent. The children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a strange apartment in another town. Her mother worked nights and weekends as a bartender. Learned, the oldest, often had to run the home.

“There was a lot of fighting,” she says. “I remember my dad hitting my mom one time and him going to jail. I don’t have a lot of memories, mind you, before eighth grade because of the sexual abuse. When my dad divorced my mom, he divorced us, too.”

Learned said she learned to repress and contain her emotions. She remembers sitting bewildered at a meal with the family member who had molested her the night before and wondering why he treated her with ice-cold disdain. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something Learned also considered. Suicide seemed, as she grew into adulthood, a release, the only road out of the hell of her existence.

“My grandfather committed suicide, close family members tried suicide,” she says. “In my family, there was no hope. The only way to solve problems when they got bad was to end your life.

“My family put the ‘dys’ in ‘function,’” she adds. “I had relatives switching husbands and wives with other couples. I am so thankful that God moved me 3,000 miles away. I am so thankful He pulled me out of that. Because I am so glad my children…you know, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I said, ‘God, just break the chains…just break the chains.’ And He has. My children have no idea about the dysfunction I lived through. I really truly believe that Satan got a hold of my family early on. I feel like Satan had this huge grip.”

The instability and abuse, the constant moving, saw her retreat into herself. By the time she graduated she had attended three high schools. She was an angry young woman. At 15 she became pregnant. She had an abortion, using the name of her school bus driver to get into the clinic.

“Between being sexually abused, my parents being divorced, my mom being gone all the time, my brothers giving my mom such a hard time, my mother was always in a bad mood,” she says. “I was criticized and put down a lot. I was never good enough. Things were never good enough. The only time I got love was when my mom was taking me to these photo shoots and beauty pageants, and really pushing modeling. And the only time I got love from my mom is when I would win beauty pageants.”

Learned moved out of the house before she was 18, drifted and ended up in Beverly Hills, working nights in a strip club wearing a leotard and French corset. At one point she was homeless and called a family member for a place to stay. On the ride over, driving her 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, she thought of veering it over the edge of the raised highway. On the second night at the house, the family member came into her room and tried to molest her. She fled to a friend’s apartment. It was not long after that she married her husband Rod and found Jesus, but the trauma of her past continued to plague her.

“I started having some major sexual dysfunctions,” she says. “A lot of flashbacks were coming back. A lot of memories that I did not remember were coming back. I was really struggling. And here I am newly married. I didn’t want any part of it. There would be times when Rod and I would try to be intimate and I would just fall apart. And he didn’t know what to do.”

She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College when she and Rod were living in Orange County. During a chapel service an antiabortion group, Living Alternative, showed a film called The Silent Scream.

“You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get away from this suction tube,” she says. “And its mouth is open, and it is like this baby is screaming. I flipped out. It was at that moment that God just took this veil that I had over my eyes for the last eight years. I couldn’t breathe. I was hyperventilating. I ran outside. One of the girls followed me from Living Alternative. And she said, ‘Did you commit your life to Christ?’ And I said, ‘I did.’ And she said, ‘Did you ask for your forgiveness of sins?’ And I said, ‘I did.’ And she goes, ‘Does that mean all your sins, or does that mean some of them?’ And I said, ‘I guess it means all of them.’ So she said, ‘Basically, you are thinking God hasn’t forgiven you for your abortion because that is a worse sin than any of your other sins that you have done.’”

The film brought her into the fight to make abortion illegal. Her activism became atonement for her own abortion. She struggled with depression after she gave birth to Rachel. When she came home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She thought she saw an eight-year-old boy standing next to her bed. It was, she is sure, the image of the son she had murdered.

“I started crying and asking God over and over again to forgive me,” she says. “I had murdered His child. I asked Him to forgive me over and over again. It was just incredible. I was possessed. On the fourth day I remember hearing God’s voice: ‘I have your baby, now get up!’ It was the most incredibly freeing and peaceful moment. I got up and I showered and I ate. I just knew it was God’s voice.”

The combination of abuse, shame and guilt, as well as the depression and despair, marked a period of her life that she wants to forget. The certitude of her new life is a comfort. It is a life of moral absolutes. It is a battle against a culture she despises. Its rigidity—its sanctification of hatred for those who would “murder” the unborn or contaminate America with the godless creed of secular humanism—brings with it feelings of righteousness and virtue. Her faith gives her an emotional grounding and a vent for her anger. Embracing the Christian community means destroying competing communities. The power of her yearning for inclusion, for those who surrender to Jesus, is matched by the power of her destructive fury. She is fighting for something good and against something evil, and it is an evil she knows intimately.

The stories many in this movement tell are stories of failure—personal, communal and sometimes economic. They are stories of public and private institutions that are increasingly distant and irrelevant, stories of loneliness and abuse. Isolation, the plague of the modern industrial society, has torn apart networks of extended families and communities. It has empowered this new movement of dreamers, who bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world and fill the resulting emptiness with a new world where time stops and all problems are solved. The movement promises to followers what many never had: a stable home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and personal success and an abolition of uncertainty and doubt. It offers a religious vision that will make fragmented, lost individuals whole. It provides moral clarity. It also promises to exterminate, in one final, apocalyptic battle, the forces many of these people blame for their despair. Learned, through her faith, put her life back together. And she waits, like many believers, for a day when the forces that nearly destroyed her life are vanquished and rendered impotent.

Learned lives in the nation’s rust belt. The flight of manufacturing jobs has turned most of the old steel mill towns around her into wastelands of poverty and urban decay. The days when steelworkers could make middle-class salaries are a distant and cherished memory. She lives amid America’s vast and growing class of dispossessed, tens of millions of working poor, 30 million of whom make less than $8.70 an hour, the official poverty level for a family of four. Most economists contend that it takes at least twice this rate of pay to provide basic necessities to a family. These low-wage jobs, which come without benefits or job security, have meant billions in profits for the corporations that no longer feel the pressure or the need to take care of their workers. Learned and her neighbors have watched helplessly as jobs are automated or outsourced. After 1970, when manufacturers closed huge plants and moved them abroad, the real earning power of wages for men, who once could bring in enough income for their households, stopped rising. Economics professors Peter Gottschalk of Boston College and Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan found that about half of those whose family income ranked in the bottom 20 percent in 1968 were in the same group in 1991. Of those who moved up, nearly three-quarters remained below the median income.[48]

The loss of manufacturing jobs has dealt a body blow to the American middle class. Manufacturing jobs accounted for 53 percent of the economy in 1965; by 1988, they accounted for 39 percent. By 2004 they accounted for 9 percent. This is the first time since the industrial revolution that less than 10 percent of the American workforce is employed in manufacturing.[49] There has been a loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs nationwide since mid-2000.[50] The forced retreat by workers into the service sector, into jobs that pay little more than the minimum wage, has left many households desperate. Laborers in the steel mills and manufacturing plants once made an average of $51,000 annually. Those who have moved into the service sector now make $16,000 in the leisure and hospitality sector, $33,000 in health care, or $39,000 in construction. In 2004, average employee compensation in the United States fell for the first time in 14 years.[51] Between 2000 and 2004, Ohio lost a quarter of a million jobs. Cleveland became the nation’s poorest big city, and young people are fleeing the state in massive numbers to find work.

The bleakness of life in Ohio exposes the myth peddled by the Christian Right about the American heartland: that here alone are family values and piety cherished, nurtured and protected. The so-called red states, which vote Republican and have large evangelical populations, have higher rates of murder, illegitimacy and teenage births than the so-called blue states, which vote Democrat and have kept the evangelicals at bay. The lowest divorce rates tend to be found in blue states as well as in the Northeast and upper Midwest. The state with the lowest divorce rate is Massachusetts, a state singled out by televangelists because of its liberal politicians and legalization of same-sex marriage. In 2003, Massachusetts had a divorce rate of 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in Arkansas.[52]

Couples in former manufacturing states such as Ohio have to find two jobs to survive. The economic catastrophe has been accompanied by the erosion in federal and state assistance programs, the cutting of funds to elementary and secondary education, the reduction in assistance to women through the Women, Infants and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program, along with reductions in programs such as Head Start and federal programs to assist low-income families, elderly people, and people with disabilities who once turned to the government for rental assistance.[53] Federal abandonment of the destitute came at a time when these communities most needed support. As the years passed and the future began to look as bleak as the present, this despair morphed into rage. Learned has watched families unravel under the pressure. Domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse run like plagues through the depressed pockets around her community. And Ohio, seething, has more white nationalist groups than any state in the Midwest (73), according to the Center for New Community in Chicago.[54]

It is hard to argue that Learned, or any other convert, is typical. The movement cuts across class and economic lines. Not all who fall into despair turn to the Christian Right. Learned focuses her life on the fight against abortion rather than on campaigns to elect Christian candidates. She is not particularly political. But she knows intimately the despair that is the fuel of the movement. While this despair manifests itself in many ways and produces many varied reactions and belief systems, it shares a common feeling of loss, of abandonment, of deep pessimism about the future. When despair is this profound, the desperate begin to seek miracles. It is easier, indeed understandable, to look for hope and comfort in the mystical hand of God. It is easier to believe that destiny has been preordained and that the faithful will be blessed, even if they have to go through hard times. Christian conservatism has allowed Learned to redirect her anger, an anger many around her share, at those who have failed to heed the word of God. She believes, like 36 percent of all respondents according to a Gallup poll, that the world is soon coming to an end.[55] She has read and accepts as prophetic the 12-volume Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins that has sold more than 60 million copies. The manufacturing and industrial world around her has already seen its apocalypse. The rusting hulks of old plants loom like giant, rusted dinosaurs along the roadsides. The labor and pain and sacrifice of a lifetime of toil have left workers bereft, impoverished and living in urban squalor and neglect. The world has crashed and burned for them. Another apocalypse, one that will lift Christians out of this morass, seems a welcome relief.

The ecstatic expectation of the Rapture, in which the elect are raised up into heaven while the damned suffer unspeakable torments below, creates, for the despairing, a dramatic and miraculous reversal of roles. This belief comforts those thrust aside in America, and in an age of greater and greater inequality, allows people to privatize their morality. They are told that people who suffer are responsible for their suffering; they must not be right with God. These believers can ignore their own social responsibility for inadequate inner-city schools, for the 18 percent of American children who don’t get enough to eat each day, for the homeless, for the mentally ill. They accept the curtailing of federal assistance programs and turn inward, assisting only those within their exclusive Christian community and damning the world outside.[56] This social concern is replaced by tiny, more manageable acts of personal charity, such as giving food packages to a family in the church or teaching young girls about abstinence. Learned, like many in the movement, has little time for those who depend on the state. Goodness has become, in the new creed of the Christian Right, a question of judgment and carries with it condemnation. The movement allows marginalized people the pleasure of denouncing others, of condemning those they fear becoming. The condemnations give them the illusion of distance, as if by denouncing the indigent they are protected from becoming indigent. But this road also leads to a disastrous disengagement with the larger, more complicated systems and imbalances that fuels poverty and injustice.

“I think welfare has played a huge role,” Learned says when asked about what contributed to the sickness of American society. “I know that I am speaking just for my own area, but these men are not taking responsibility for their children. They live with their welfare moms until the welfare moms get sick of them. They spit them out to some other welfare mom. And these guys don’t work! They don’t work. They live off the welfare money of these girls. They create babies all over the place. It is sickening! It is absolutely sickening that we are not making these men take responsibility for their babies. And what sickens me is these guys are driving around in these incredible cars, and you know they are dealing drugs!”

But while the movement depends on the dislocation and rage of millions of working-class Americans, it is not defined solely by economic boundaries. The common denominator is despair, a despair creeping into a threatened middle class, where jobs are also being outsourced and company layoffs are throwing older workers out of jobs. There may be more despair in places like Youngstown, but it exists in communities across the nation, including those of the middle and upper classes, where people feel isolated and adrift. In interview after interview, those in the movement spoke of desires for suicide before finding Jesus. Even if the feelings were fleeting and never acted upon, they indicate how terrible life had become before conversion. Despair is the most powerful force driving people into the movement.

June Hunt is the daughter of Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, one of his 15 children by three different mothers. Her father, a staunch conservative who hated President John F. Kennedy, was a bigamist and con artist. He abused her mother and was remote, often terrifying. The terror, the fear and the instability of her childhood mirrored that of Learned. And as with Learned it was this shame, abuse, loss of control, and guilt that drove her to embrace religious utopianism.

“I grew up in a home where immorality abounded,” she told an audience of Christian broadcasters in Anaheim, California, where she spoke for the first time in public about her past. “I grew up in a dysfunctional family, before there was knowledge of the word ‘dysfunctional.’ And it was not fun. There was fear, walking on eggshells. There was disarray, there was disruption and dissension. During my teenage years, my father was an enormous success in the business world, but an enormous failure in our family world. We were all eggshell walkers, at least around him.

“And let me try to explain. Until I was 12 years old, I grew up with a different name, a different last name. My name was June Wright. My father became romantically involved with my mother although he was twice her age. He was a married man with six children. My mother’s father, meaning my grandfather, whom I never knew, died when she was three years old. And I believe she was trying to fill the father-void when he came along. And he was persuasive. And we were a covert family on the side, with four children, me being one. Actually, I will say this: truthfully, I discovered my father had a third family with four children in another city, another major city. We were the ‘Wright’ family. W-R-I-G-H-T. I was told it was because my parents did what they thought was right. My mother was deceived, and later, she lived with horrendous guilt and shame. And I, as I share this with you, I can remember her taking us to church, and her craving to go inside, but she felt too guilty, and so she couldn’t walk into the doors of church. Shame poured out of every pore of her being. And she loved the Lord, and she felt trapped. She didn’t know what to do. She certainly didn’t have the skills to deal with my father; at least she didn’t know how to handle the situation. And I saw the agony on her face, and many times she would just go to a church, during the week, and just stay there for hours and just pray.

“I prayed, I wasn’t even a Christian at the time, but I prayed, ‘Oh God, give my mother a friend.’ You see, mother was afraid to have a friend, because she thought no one would accept her, that she would be rejected, and she didn’t want to bring shame on a friend. Eventually, the first Mrs. Hunt died, and my father married my mother, and I became June Hunt. It was very difficult to explain this because my name already on the birth certificate was June Hunt. Ruth June Hunt. You’d think this would make things so much better, but it didn’t. Dad was totally possessive of Mother. She was a beautiful, gracious, and kind woman, but she was his trophy whom he showed off nightly to his dinner guests. We kids were forbidden to speak at dinner; children were to be seen not heard, unless there was a conversation that would be of interest to everyone, and nothing was ever of interest to him.

“I truly hated him,” she tells the gathering. “I remember being 14 years old. I had a friend who had a father who was a lawyer. I asked him one evening, ‘I have a friend who wants to know what would happen to a 14-year-old boy who commits murder.’ He answered, ‘Well, the 14-year-old is a minor, so he probably would be released at age 18.’ That’s all I needed to know. A few weeks later, I approached my mother with a proposition. I said, ‘Mom, I figured out a way, how I can kill dad. There won’t be much of a repercussion because I am just a minor.’ I was dead serious. What I appreciate, is my mother did not chide me, she did not laugh at me. Instead, with heart she said, ‘Honey, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but that really won’t be necessary.’ It’s not that I actually wanted to commit murder, I just wanted the pain to stop.

“I know what it’s like also to look for love in all the wrong places, anything for security, anything for comfort,” she says. “I clearly know what it’s like to feel desperate for hope in the night. I had a nighttime of my life that lasted a number of years. The Book of Proverbs [Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25] says, there’s a way that seems right, but in the end it leads to death. Clearly, I was headed the wrong way.”

Those propelled into the movement, like Learned and Hunt, seek forgiveness for what they have thought or said, for what they have done, often for how they have lived. They seek meaning out of meaninglessness, worth out of lives that felt worthless. They seek firm, moral absolutes after being unable to distinguish between right and wrong. They seek safety, the safety that comes with a utopian vision that tells them they are protected, loved, guided and blessed. They seek a world where good people, which they have become, have good things happen to them and bad people are tossed aside to be destroyed. Converts seek a world where they will never again have to return to the lives they led, never again wonder if it might be better to end their lives, never again be tempted by the dark impulses that beset them. They embrace a collective madness to crush their personal madness.

This despair does not always rise out of severe want, the kind of want that plagues much of the developing world, or out of the immediate threat of war, but rather is the product of the disconnectedness and loss of direction that comes with living in vast, soulless landscapes filled with strip malls and highways, where centers of existence and meaning have been obliterated. It is a response to a national malaise. This despair has created, perhaps more than any other force, the opening for these utopian visionaries.

[roman-catholic-mass-readings]

15th August >> Mass Readings (USA)

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

(Liturgical Colour: White. Year: B(II))

First Reading Revelation 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet.

God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple. A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth. She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne. The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have salvation and power come, and the Kingdom of our God and the authority of his Anointed One.”

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm Psalm 45:10, 11, 12, 16

R/ The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold.

The queen takes her place at your right hand in gold of Ophir.

R/ The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold.

Hear, O daughter, and see; turn your ear, forget your people and your father’s house.

R/ The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold.

So shall the king desire your beauty; for he is your lord.

R/ The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold.

They are borne in with gladness and joy; they enter the palace of the king.

R/ The queen stands at your right hand, arrayed in gold.

Second Reading 1 Corinthians 15:20-27 Christ, the firstfruits; then those who belong to him.

Brothers and sisters: Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through man, the resurrection of the dead came also through man. For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the firstfruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ; then comes the end, when he hands over the Kingdom to his God and Father, when he has destroyed every sovereignty and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for “he subjected everything under his feet.”

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

Gospel Acclamation

Alleluia, alleluia. Mary is taken up to heaven; a chorus of angels exults. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel Luke 1:39-56 The Almighty has done great things for me; he has raised up the lowly.

Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” And Mary said:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has looked upon his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel for he remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.”

Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

The Gospel of the Lord

R/ Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

[fritextramole]

a hidden gem, my own goldmine

part 1 of a Vanessa Abrams playlist - best heard in order

tracklist and quotes under the cut

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ~ Gil Scott-Heron

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal The revolution will not get rid of the nubs The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner Because the revolution will not be televised, brother

Chain Gang ~ Sam Cooke

Can't you hear them singing I'm going home one of these days

The Rebel Girl ~ Hazel Dickens

There are blue blood queens and princesses Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl But the only and thoroughbred lady Is the Rebel Girl

The Mesopotamians ~ They Might Be Giants

In Mesopotamia (No one's ever seen us) The kingdom where we secretly reign (And no one's ever heard of our band) The land where we invisibly rule As the Mesopotamians

Myriad Harbour ~ The New Pornographers

(Ah, who cares, you always end up in the city) Stranded at Bleecker and Broadway Looking for something to do

Which Side Are You On? ~ Work O’ The Weavers

Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?

Thus Always To Tyrants ~ The Oh Hellos

Over hill, over dale, through the valley and vale Do not weep, do not wail, I am coming home to you Every tomb, every sea, spit the bones from your teeth Let the ransomed be free as the revel meets the day Let the valleys awake, let them rattle and shake

Twenty Five Miles ~ Edwin Starr

Now I'll be so glad to see my baby And hold her in my arms one more time, huh Now when I kiss her lips, I turn a back over flip And I forget about these feet of mine I got to keep on walking, hey

THE FRIEND SPACE ~ Ryan Woods

I really hope I don’t throw it away But you couldn’t imagine the way I feel And now I can’t see why You wouldn’t wanna be my baby I got all you need

Comin’ Down ~ Jackie Shane

What's wrong with me? I said it's a simple fact I don't believe you're ever comin' back

Even The Losers ~ Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Well, it was nearly summer we sat on your roof Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon And I showed you stars you never could see Babe, it couldn't have been that easy to forget about me

Sylvias Mother ~ The Refreshments

Sylvia's mother says Sylvia's packin' She's gonna be leavin' today Sylvia's mother says Sylvia is marrying A fella down Galveston way

Hot & Heavy ~ Lucy Dacus

When I went away it was the only option Couldn't trust myself to proceed with caution The most that I could give to you is nothing at all The best that I could offer was to miss your calls

I Can’t Stand the Rain ~ Ann Peebles

I know you got some sweet memory But like the wind, ah, you ain't got nothing to say

Radio, Radio ~ Elvis Costello & The Attractions

They say you better listen to the voice of reason But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason So you had better do as you are told You better listen to the radio I wanna bite the hand that feeds me

Stairway to Heaven ~ Led Zeppelin

There's a lady who's sure All that glitters is gold And she's buying a stairway to heaven When she gets there she knows If the stores are all closed With a word she can get what she came for

Solidarity Forever ~ Pete Seeger, The Song Swappers

We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong

American Idiot ~ Green Day

Welcome to a new kind of tension All across the alien nation Where everything isn't meant to be okay In television dreams of tomorrow

9 to 5 ~ Dolly Parton

There's a better life And you think about it, don't you? It's a rich man's game No matter what they call it And you spend your life Putting money in his wallet

Stop! In The Name Of Love ~ The Supremes

I watch you walk down the street Knowing your other love you'll meet But this time before you run to her Leaving me alone and hurt (Think it over) After I've been good to you

5AM ~ Amber Run

We run into a dark room And we spasm to the sounds Of a copy of Morrissey Or the blues of the Deep South

Val Kilmer ~ Bowling For Soup

So when you walk down that red carpet I hope you trip and fall I hope someone squirts you with a water gun A super soaker filled with pee

There’s A Ghost In My House ~ R. Dean Taylor

I can't hide (Ghost in my house) From the ghost of your love that's inside You're still such a part of me (Ghost in my house) Still so deep in the heart of me (Ghost in my house)

[enchantedbeingscircle]

September

September is here and I know this post is late, but I had to take a slight social media detox! I swear once September hits I am all Fall, y’all!! I’m about all things apple, pumpkin, fall leaves, sunflowers, soup, etc! Did you know that apples (and apple trees) are associated with love, health, divination, rebirth and renewal, life, learning, and so many other things? The original bobbing for apples game was a form of slight divination, even! It was said that marriage would come to the first person to bite into the apple while bobbing. Also, if you cut into an apple, you’ll find a pentacle type star!

Correspondences of September are sapphire and sardonyx for crystals, the bear and owl for animals, flowers are morning glory and aster, and the zodiac sign is Virgo.

Let’s talk about some days in September:

Not only is Labor Day the 2nd, but also the Celtic Tree Month of Vine begins…happiness and wrath are both symbolized with the vine, garden magic, magic for joy and happiness but also wrath, rage, anger.

Magical influences for this are empowerment, inner growth, introspection, and prophecy.

Sept 4th is bring your manners to work day (I liked this one, cause I’m constantly reminding myself to have manners in moments where people are pissing me off lol.)

Sept 7th national salami day and world beard day (I liked these two because we used to call our younger sister “salami” to piss her off when we were all younger and we still sort of joke about it to this day… and my boyfriend has a beard that I just love. I love feeling it, smelling it, looking at it…lol!)

Sept 8th grandparents day

9/11… a tragic day that affected so many lives in one way or another! On this day remember all those who lost their lives due to this tragic event and the war it caused!

Friday the 13th

FULL MOON in Pisces on Sept 17, Harvest moon aka the nut moon, barley moon, or wine moon (love that!), the color for this full moon is brown and crystals are carnelian, cat’s eye, iolite, lapis lazuli, peridot, sapphire, blue spinel, blue tourmaline, and zircon

Magickal influences from this moon are confidence, the home, manifestation, protection.

This is a Moon of wisdom, take this time to reflect back on lessons learned this past year, darker days are coming which is good for shadow work.

September 18th NATIONAL CHEESEBURGER DAYYYY

September 21st International Day of Peace

Sept 22 is Mabon, also known as the autumn (or Fall) equinox – this is a time where night and day or light and dark are balanced. This is a sort of mid-harvest festival, we are celebrating the second of 3 harvest festivals. I’ve read that there is a slight connection to Mabon for how Oktoberfest was created, by the Bavarians. They start celebrating this in the last week of September.

Celebrate Mabon and give thanks to the Earth for abundant crops, practice gratitude, give blessings, share with the less fortunate. When canning, infuse your recipes with magickal influences and charm your jars.

Mabon is also one of those “liminal times” or an in-between time. These are powerful times for spell-work, rituals, and magick in general.

Colors for Mabon are blue, brown, gold, maroon, orange, violet, and yellow

Plants, herbs, etc: aster, marigolds, sage, ivy, grape, fern, blackberry/bramble, chrysanthemum, grains, thistle, and trees are cedar, hazel, aspen, maple, oak, myrtle, and locust

gems: amethyst, topaz

animals: hawk, swans, swallows, geese, dogs, wolves

Element: water

Magickal influences: accomplishment, agriculture, balance, goals, gratitude, grounding

Deities are: Epona, Inanna, Ishtar, Kore, Modron (Celtic Great Earth Mother Goddess), the Morrigan, Persephone, Bacchus, Dionysus, Dumuzi, the Green Man, Hermes, Thoth, Mabon (translates to the divine son) is the son of Modron and he is associated with the element of water, grapes, ivy, dogs, horses, salmon and his magical influences are hunting, darkness, death, freedom, harmony, innocence, justice, the otherworld or underworld, quests, contacting spirits, strength, truth, and youth.

Ways you can celebrate Mabon:

Make a simmer pot with apples, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, vanilla, star anise, orange slices.

Host a harvest dinner and include apples, squash, corn, grains, root vegetables like carrots potatoes and onions, grapes and wine, nuts, pomegranates, mead, spiced teas.

Make a hearty stew with fresh baked bread, apple pie, mashed squash, mulled wine

Make a cornucopia, go to a pumpkin patch and farmer’s market, go for a fall nature walk, donate food, focus on balance in your life, write a gratitude list, decorate your altar for Mabon with apples, candles that are brown, orange, and gold, marigold and sunflowers, leaves, acorns, grape vines, a deity statue. Celebrate by giving thanks for the abundance and good in your life, and meditate on the things on the things from this past year you'd like to let go of!

Sept 30th Celtic tree month of Ivy begins which symbolizes life, death, and rebirth, spell work during this time would be great for self-work, healing, banishing toxicity, protection, binding spells

Magical influences during this time: decisions and introspection, growth, learning, developing skills.

September in general is a good time to work on magick and intentions for the home.

I feel like 2 of the biggest intentions you can work on in September however, are balance and change, so I’m going to share a spell for this month that I created!

Things you’re going to need: leaves, something to write with, sage, basil, apple, orange candle, oil, sunflowers.

Dress your orange (for balance and change) candle with oil of your choosing and sage for a clear mind, basil for opening yourself to receive messages, and sunflowers for overcoming obstacles.

Core your apple (for peace, rebirth and renewal, self-work) and place your candle inside. You’re basically using this apple as your candle holder!

Light your candle and meditate on the areas in your life that need balance and/or change. When you are done, write your setbacks and obstacles that you want to overcome (to make these changes and bring this balance) onto the leaves. Hold the leaves into your hands and let the wind take them away!

[laresearchette]

Monday, August 26, 2024 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

AMAZON PRIME CANADA NO GAIN, NO LOVE

NETFLIX CANADA HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS

2024 US OPEN TENNIS (TSN/TSN3/TSN) 11:00am: Early Round Coverage Day #1 (TSN/TSN2/TSN3/TSN4) 7:00pm: Early Round Coverage Day #1 - Primetime

MLB BASEBALL (SN) 2:00pm: Jays vs. Red Sox - Game 1 (SN) 6:30pm: Jays vs. Red Sox - Game 2 (SN Now) 6:30pm: Astros vs. Phillies (SN1) 6:30pm: Yankees vs. Nationals (SN1) 9:30pm: Rays vs. Mariners

2024 AKC DIVING DOGS CHALLENGE (TSN5) 2:00pm

WNBA BASKETBALL (TSN5) 7:30pm: Fever vs. Dream

BERING SEA GOLD (Discovery Channel Canada) 8:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): Chaotic El Niño conditions impact the ice, creating dangerous pressure ridges and flipping the gold miners' game plans upside down as some are forced off their claims.

CURSED GOLD: A SHIPWRECK SCANDAL (Nat Geo Canada) 9:00pm (SERIES PREMIERE): A maverick scientist begins his quest to find a shipwreck full of gold.

FACE TO FACE WITH SCOTT PETERSON (Slice) 10:00pm (SERIES PREMIERE): Expectant mother Laci Peterson vanishes in Modesto, California, on Christmas Eve 2002; while the community desperately searches for her, the police narrow their focus on her husband Scott, and the case becomes a national media sensation.

HISTORY'S GREATEST ESCAPES WITH MORGAN FREEMAN (History Canada) 10:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE):  A lone wolf prisoner, with aspirations of writing crime novels, ends up the star of his own break out story when he figures out how to escape from one of Mississippi's oldest and most notorious prison farms, Parchman Penitentiary.

DARK SIDE OF THE RING (Much) 10:00pm (SEASON 4 PREMIERE):  The teenage romance of wrestling prodigy Chris Candido and Tammy Sunny Sytch, his love-to-hate manager, gets torn apart by infidelity, addiction and mutual self-destruction.

EAST HARBOUR HEROES (Discovery Channel Canada) 10:00pm: Hundreds of skippers prepare to launch their biggest fisheries but an ongoing shore-side debate threatens to halt everyone's livelihoods.

[murderousink23]

09/24/2023 is European Heritage Day 🇦🇹, World Rivers Day 🌎🏞, World Bollywood Day 🌎, National Cherries Jubilee Day 🇺🇲🍒, Punctuation Day 🇺🇲, Schwenkfelder Thanksgiving 🇺🇲, Innergize Day 🇺🇲, National Gold Star Mother's Day 🇺🇲⭐

[marshalforgotten]

ACHIEVED//

Memories Served

ACHIEVED for a scene from my muse's past in which they completed / achieved something they were proud of

-----

"A high advisor?" the ivory monkey questioned, tilting her head.

Before her and the humans she lived with stood a king, one who ruled these lands in particular. A thick crown of gold ringed around his head with red stone at its center, to mark his status among the people. Said material also fashioned his earrings and woven necklaces went around neck. A cape made of leopard's pelt draped down his bare backside and onto floor, whilst orange skirt along with sandals kept his modesty. Despite the greying hairs on his beard, man was well built for his age. However such factors did not goad him into hubris, as evident by two soldiers who stood vigilant on his sides.

The groups were currently upon a balcony; overlooking capital, as sun began to set on horizon. Being called here instead of throne room was a change in their usual exchanges. Alkebu-lan could still recall the day she offered herself to help discover disappearing treasure's whereabouts. How amusing his surprise was! After her bargaining with the Grootslang, she, mother and siblings ended up visiting palace a few more times to help with certain matters.

This time however the king deigned to inform them on upcoming ideas he wished to lay out. Specifically, with monkey becoming a new, special category of advisor amongst his counsel.

The ruler nodded, his dark skin shining against golden glow of atmosphere.

"Yes. I have contemplated this for quite some time now, ever since your feat with finding and returning our jewels. Your recent accomplishments with the destruction of the popobawa however has left little room for doubt." As he explained this, the king poured banana wine into his chalice. He turned his head, gazing upon bustling town with sincerity. "My kingdom has always been... divided, plagued with warring tribes. It has long been my dream to move this nation forward and establish peace. With your help, lucky monkey I believe I can accomplish just that."

At this, Alkebu-lan frowned in contemplation.

"That sounds like quite the noble dream, my king. I cannot however leave those who first found me behind."

At this the king chuckled and set his cup down. "I am aware of your loyalty, baboon. It is one of your more endearing qualities... and it is very well placed. That is why I propose this idea."

He moved over besides surrogate mother, taking her hand in his. Both gazed at each other and Alkebu-lan saw a familiar expression on Andrietta's visage- one she wore when speaking of late husband. Now however there was less sadness.

"I will take captain Andrietta as my wife and her adopted children shall live in the palace with me. That is-" he brought bald woman's hand towards face and bowed his head, pressing nose's tip against knuckles with closed eyes; a sign of submission in their culture. "If she will have me."

At this, Andrietta's lithe fingers caressed his cheek drawing his rusty eyes to look into her caramel jewels. They were loving and lips smiled.

"If my king thinks me worthy, I will try not to disappoint."

"Wait-" chimed in the disbelieving voice of the young man, Tebello. "We are going to live in the palace now!?"

At this the young girl behind him squealed, before tackling Alkebu-lan into a hug.

"By the stars! Sister! Sister! We really are going to be living here! Mama found a man! We are going to become royalty!" Thandiwe exclaimed gleefully.

While surprised at first, her little sister's joy was infectious. Chitters escaping Alkebu-lan, she scooped girl into an embrace and spun around.

"Well if you put it that way, who am I to refuse?"

No longer would this family worry about gathering food, or monsters prowling in the night. Now, they would be safe with bellies full.

[lgbtqmanga]

New Releases July 18, 2023

Hirano and Kagiura vol. 3 by Shou Harusono

It just might work out if I try hard enough...At least, that’s what Kagiura keeps telling himself as he works himself to the bone studying for his final exams. After all, that’s the only way to protect his dorm life with his dear upperclassman. But although Hirano agreed to another year of their roomshare, does he really understand what it means to live with the person who’s crushing on him...?

My Mate is a Feline Gentleman by Arata Asanae

When Toushirou is hired as a servant for beastman diplomat Alex, he fears the very worst. As an omega, he’s gotten used to being treated as a mere plaything, and he prepares to once again “serve” his feline master. But to his surprise, Alex is appalled by the treatment of omegas in Japan and treats him with a kindness he’s never experienced before. Little by little, Toushirou’s feelings begin to change...

Namekawa-san Won't Take a Licking! vol. 4 by Rie Ato

FINAL VOLUME

Namekawa-san seems to get more oddball groupies by the day, and boy, do they love making her life crazy! But when a new girl enters the scene, it’s clear she’s not there to make nice. Claiming to know about Namekawa-san’s past, she breaks up their tight-knit group with ease. Too bad for her though, Namekawa-san always shines brighter the more you try to give her a licking! Just how will she fend off this final threat?!

Stars of Chaos: Sha Po Lang vol. 1 (novel) by Priest

The discovery of violet gold, a vital fuel for steam-powered machines, propelled the empire of Great Liang into an age of prosperity. But for Chang Geng, a young man raised on the impoverished northern border, the concerns of the empire are as distant as the stars above.

When raiders from the north attack Chang Geng’s small village, he discovers that the life he knows is a lie. His mother, his teacher, and even his godfather whom he trusted more than any other, Shen Shiliu, are not what they seem. As enemy nations close in, Chang Geng follows his godfather to the heart of the imperial capital, where a greater fate lies in store for him.

The Seven Seas English-language editions of these novels will feature the uncensored text in deluxe paperbacks with exclusive new covers and interior illustrations. The ebooks will also be available on digital platforms.

The Summer Hikaru Died vol. 1 by Mokumokuren.

Two boys lived in a village: Yoshiki and Hikaru. The two did everything together...until the day Hikaru was encompassed by a mysterious light. That was when everything changed—Hikaru most of all. Yoshiki still wishes from the bottom of his heart to always stay by his side...but is there even a Hikaru left to be with?

[steelfyre]

𓏲ּ  ֶָ  𝑤𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑠𝒕𝒗  ⁝         anya taylor joy,  26,  demi woman,  she / they.    announcing  the  arrival  of  alicent  of  house  lannister,  the  lady  of  lannisport.  whispers  among  the  court  name  them  to  be  both  shrewd  and  venomous  in  disposition,  and  those  closest  to  them  speak  to  their  interests  in  gossiping.  if  we  bards  could  compose  a  song  for  them,  it  might  tell  stories  of  a vision in silks of red and gold , sunlight caught in her hair , casting a long glance in the mirror before departing - not a hair out of place nor expense spared ; the smallest lioness lounging on a plush cushion but ears follow every noise and fangs hide behind saccharine smiles ; an unworn wedding gown locked away and collecting dust , a black dress and veil worn on the day instead ; your girlhood stood withered by reality - with your own hand , you bury it so a new flower grows , one in possession of thorns and a hunger for power.  the  seven  whisper  to  their  most  devout  queen  as  she  sleeps,  making  her  question  where  their  loyalties  truly  lie.  are  they  right  to  whisper?  for  their  loyalties  truly  lie  with  the lannisters.

basic information.

official name: alicent lannister. nickname: ali. noble title: lady of lannisport. date of birth: june 12th. age: twenty-six. birthplace: lannisport , the westerlands. home: lannisport. nationality: westerosi. gender: demi woman. pronouns: she / they. orientation: bisexual , biromantic. monikers: the jewel of the west / westerlands , little lioness. languages: the common tongue , fluent. knows some high valyrian. accent: a refined westerlander accent , sweet and smooth.

physical information.

faceclaim: anya taylor joy. ethnicity: andal. hair: blonde. eyes: emerald green. height: five foot , two inches. build: slender and lean. scent: tba. dominant hand: right. allergies: none. scars: none. distinguishing features: the traditional lannister look of golden tresses framing vivid , green eyes. her impeccable, fashionable attire. clothing style: tba.

personality.

positive: shrewd ,  magnetic ,  sociable , confident ,  clever , polished. negative: venomous ,  manipulative ,  haughty , materialistic , judgmental , selfish , devious. label: the mean girl, the it girl, the ice queen. mbti: estj - the executive. enneagram: 3w2 , the enchanter. element: fire. star sign: gemini. temperament: sanguine. moral alignment: neutral evil. character inspirations: regina george , miranda priestly , margaery tyrell. deadly sin: pride. heavenly virtue : patience. godly parent: hera.

drives.

hobbies: gossiping , gemstone and jewelry collecting , dancing , meddling in people's lives. religion: the faith of the seven. alliance: the lannisters , those of lannisport above all else. personal goals: to wed a powerful liege and one day become master of whispers. would they choose family or power?: power , for herself and then for her family.

family ties.

mother: ruling lady cerenna lannister. relationship: tba. father: lady cerenna's second husband, deceased. relationship: tba. brother: lord jaime lannister. relationship: tba. sibling: lord/lady/liege utp lannister. relationship: tba. cousins: house lannister of casterly rock. relationship: tba.

history.

the final child of lannisport entered the world screaming as if she was already demanding all of her parents attention. a trait that never faded. it was of little issue; alicent grew up never wanting for anything. the wealth of lannisport, not as great as their cousins but still worthy of awe, granted her all she desired from the best dresses to the finest jewels. in spite of being the youngest of the pride, expectations were no less high, only growing when lady cerenna saw much of herself in her youngest child. many would comment on how similar mother and daughter look but the similarities extended to temperament as well.

alicent quickly became their mother's shadow, following the ruling lady wherever she went. they did adore their father; he was who inspired her love for gemstones, a passion she never lost over the years, but her mother was who she wanted to emulate. as she grew, she did her best to mold herself into a daughter that her mother would be proud of, an aspiration the ruling lady encouraged, employing the same tutors and septas the family had for alicent's older siblings and also permitting alicent to accompany her on her travels, including to king's landing where court utterly charmed the lioness.

bliss was all they knew until her father fell ill. alicent's voice could be heard echoing through lannisport, demanding that the maesters save him or find someone who could but it was all in vain. their father passed. their mother appeared unaffected, and alicent tried mirroring her, leading to her coping with her grief in fragments and all alone.

her taste for gossip and whispers grew as she did. gathering them was surprisingly simple. on the surface, she looked like a perfect, dutiful lady but on the inside there was indeed something rotten about the lady of lannisport. joy was found in meddling, not always with good intentions, in the affairs of others. they'd whisper to their maids and have them spread rumors against those who upset them while smiling in their face, and she'd secretly listen to conversations or present herself as a confidant to garner more information. her actions garnered them an ever growing collection of gossip, treasured as much as her troves of jewels.

once upon a time, alicent did possess a softer side. they dreamed of a love like the songs and a spouse who would cherish and protect her. once upon a time, she believed she'd found that. she'd had many suitor, many desiring a piece of lannister wealth, but all paled in comparison to aren. he was charming, brave, and strong - everything her heart desired. from their very first meeting, the two had eyes only for each other and their courtship was one worthy of its own songs. the happiest day of alicent's life was the day he asked for her hand. it was to be eclipsed by the happiness of their wedding day.

the celebration was as grand as one would expect from the lannisters. before vows were even exchanged there was a large hunt. they bid their beloved farewell and good luck with a kiss; he returned to them covered in blood - a hunting accident. for alicent, lost in bliss, had forgotten that life was no song. the maesters rushed to save the young lord, and alicent didn't leave his beside. the wedding day came and went. the wound began healing only for a fever to take over. the song played familar notes. it didn't how much she prayed; aren passed with a week, alicent holding his hand when he drew his last breath.

a new coldness descended upon the lady of lannisport. externally, they remained constant: charming, sweet, and sociable. the perfect lady. the jewel of the westerlands. internally, however, her heart was encased in ice. thorns grew from their wounds. they swore they'd never allow such weakness to overtake them again. alicent knew that one day she would be expected to wed again, and she would for it was her duty, but any remaining longing for a great love was buried. when she wed, it would only be to increase her power - an outlook that soon shaped her entirely but remained carefully hidden.

headcanons.

very much charming and the image of a perfect lady on the outside but rotten to the core on the side. alicent's courtisies are polished, their smiles bright, and they know what words they need to say in each conversation, and despite often not meaning them, can speak them as if they are true.

but in truth, they look down on most people and are extremely judgmental. their kindness is nothing more than surface level. the minute a person doesn't benefit or please her anymore, she'll find a way to drop them from her circle, and if someone crosses her, she won't let it slide without retribution - ruining one's reputation via rumors is her favorite method of revenge.

can and will deliver the sharpest barbs with a smile. often views others inability to contain their hostilities, despite her attempts at bringing them about, as a sign of their inferiority.

extremely materialistic without any shame. alicent loves dressing up in the finest clothes and jewels their money can buy. they're known for their good style.

they also enjoy giving fashion advice ( and advice in general ) to others. whether she's sincere or not depends on the person.

also extremely spoiled. her mother and her still has a very positive relationship, and lady cerenna dotes on her youngest child, ensuring that almost everything alicent wants is obtained - but only for as long as they continue not disappointing the family.

has ruined other's reputations before and will do it again.

she becomes anxious when those she loves are out of her sight for long periods of time, particularly if they're off doing something dangerous. those she cares for being wounded/sick also makes her very agitated and enhances her demanding nature.

still wears the locket aren gave her as a betrothal present and keeps his portrait with her wherever she goes.

[arakawa-division]

"Sometimes a perceived obstacle is just an opportunity in disguise." - Michael Hyatt

Introduction

Hoàng Diệu is the second member of the Arakawa Division rap battle team, Sounds of Silence. She is known by her rap moniker, MC Lotus. A dazzling beauty with charm and mystique to spare, Dieu has charmed and seduced her way through every problem and situation she has encountered as a secret agent. This mysterious femme fatale, known for her temporary alliances and sudden betrayals, will not hesitate to use every tool she has in her arsenal to get what she wants.

Dieu is a beautiful woman of Asian descent, though her nationality is unknown. She has long, braided light purple hair that is in a large ponytail, purple eyes, and two birthmarks near her left eye. She is a tall woman, due in no small part to her long hips and legs. She has a noticeable-sized chest and a small waist.

She tends to dress somewhat like a movie star or a celebrity. She has on a white dress that shows off her cleavage with a black leather jacket over it. She has a pair of matching-colored leather pants and black high-heel boots. Around her neck is a loosely tied black scarf with white dots. Finally, she sometimes has on a pair of black sunglasses and blue diamond earrings in both ears.

Name Meaning

Hoàng - A last name commonly found in Vietnam among its Chinese community. It is the transliteration of a Chinese surname meaning: "yellow" or, "to fall through".

Diệu - A common masculine or feminine name found in Vietnam among its Chinese community. It commonly means, "mysterious", "subtle", or "exquisite".

Aliases:

Gorgeous, Beautiful, Pretty, etc.

"The Femme Fatale"

"The Enchanting Beauty"

Slave - Her former master

Biographical Info

Gender - Female

Age - 30

Birthday - July 8th

Ethnicity - Unknown (Believed to be Vietnamese)

Hair Color - Light Purple

Eye Color - Purple

Height - 172 cm (5'8")

Weight - Unknown

Star Sign - Cancer

Piercings - A blue diamond earring in both of her ears.

Markings - Faded whip marks across her body.

A slave mark branded in the middle of her back.

A Chinese dragon tattoo on her upper left arm.

A Chinese phoenix tattoo on her upper right arm.

A purple lotus flower tattoo on the back of her neck.

A nine-tailed fox tattoo on the back of her right leg.

Family -

Mother (Deceased)

Father (Deceased)

Former Master (Deceased)

Adoptive Uncle (Deceased)

Adoptive Aunt

Voiced By - Suboi (Rapping)

Fun Facts

MC Name - MC Lotus

Occupation - Jewelry Designer/Freelance Secret Agent

Division - Arakawa

Team - Sounds of Silence

Position - Second Member

Favorite Food - Sesame Almond Slaw

Least Favorite Food - Cold Soup

Likes - Nail care, sunny days, lounging on beaches, jewelry design, easy jobs, street orphans, her mystique, Tae Kwon Do, her family, shopping, designer clothes, her appearance, her freedom, good-looking men, lotus flowers, ponds, and her long legs.

Dislikes - Cracked nails, dry weather, sandy climates, thinking about her past, slavery, the slave mark on her back, dictators, imprisonment, being confined, people invading her private life, and abuse.

Hypnosis Microphone

Dieu's Microphone is a handheld pinkish-purple microphone that looks like a bud about to sprout into a flower. It soon transforms, opening up its petals to reveal the windscreen for Dieu to speak in.

Her Speaker takes the form of a gold lotus pendant with a circular ruby jewel inserted in the bottom. There is a speaker inside the jewel.

Her rap ability, Loose Lips, allows Dieu to "silence" one of her opponents, preventing them from attacking or using their ability, though they can still defend. She can keep this ability active as long as she wishes, but it uses up her stamina for as long as it's active. Plus, she can only use it on one opponent during battle.

Dieu's rap themes are centered around her mystique and intrigue. She raps about how she loves to keep people guessing about her, and how many questions are abound about who she is. She also raps about her freedom, how she will never be confined to anything again, and how she loves herself for who she is. She also raps about seduction and loving the feeling of men staring at her.

Personality

To say that Dieu is a seductive woman of elegance would be putting it mildly. A femme fatale to the core, this mysterious and enticing woman looks good and knows it. There is nothing she enjoys more than "playing" with her adversaries, both on and off the job, and she gets a certain thrill in battle, whether physically or not. She often states that, "A good battle is almost as good as sex. ...Almost." She behaves somewhat like a cat, acting sly and cunning when it benefits her.

Despite her flirtatious attitude, Dieu can be quite violent and sadistic, both in her fighting ability and in her balefulness. However, she's all for a fair and good fight, feeling that her opponents shouldn't hold back when fighting to provide her with a good challenge. She both likes and hates it when her opponents underestimate her, as she enjoys teaching them a painful lesson in that you shouldn't underestimate anyone simply because of their appearance.

Another aspect of Dieu is that she is largely insensitive when it comes to people being angry or upset at her, not really caring. She is largely indifferent to people's feelings or insults, finding them more humorous than anything. It's hinted that she enjoys people getting upset at her, because it means they won't hold back with her when they eventually quarrel. Though she doesn't go out of her way to make people upset, she certainly won't apologize when she does.

Despite her profession as a secret agent, it is unknown who exactly Dieu works for, and for what purpose. In fact, this is just one of the many questions that revolve around this flirtatious and lighthearted individual. Though many governments and organizations have tried to find out everything that can be about this woman who is clearly from an Asian country, no information about her can be found. Many believe it is because she is just that good of a secret agent, and that she changes both her name and identity every time enters or leaves a country.

One aspect of Dieu's that is well-known, however, is that she hates to be tied down or confined to anything, whether it be a job or even a place, like prison. She likens herself to a 'bird', an animal that is able to freely travel the world if it so pleases, having no limitations. It's unknown where this behavior stems from. Her family believes it may have something to do with the slave branding on her back, which she keeps covered at all times.

It's unknown exactly what Dieu's endgame is, or what forces her to be a secret agent. She is a very sly woman who doesn't divulge information when asked, not even letting her teammates know what she is up to. In fact, she is more than willing to deceive and betray them if it gets her closer to her goals. It's believed that this is why most people are afraid to get close to her, in fear that she will betray them too.

Despite that, Dieu is far from being a cold person. She has a soft spot in her for children. Whenever a child nearby is crying or hurt, she strangely becomes less cold and more motherly, helping to heal their wounds and cease their tears. Though many of the people she's helped would call her a "nice person", Dieu strongly disagrees with that notion.

"I'm not a nice person. In fact, I'm as far from nice as one could possibly be."

The main reason for this belief stems from her adoptive uncle, who, though was a firm man when business was involved, was nice any other time. Dieu believes that it was that same 'niceness' of his that caused him to be sadly killed by his enemies.

"If you're nice and you aren't rich, you're begging to be hurt, kidnapped, or worse."

When she was younger, it was initially thought that Dieu was mute, since she didn't speak. However, this was only due to the trauma that she had experienced at a young age. After she was saved by the priests of the temple, she gradually became more confident in herself. Though she likes talking, she is the kind of girl who prefers to let her actions speak for her. She enjoys dancing to the highest degree, and will dance any chance she gets. She values her skills, considering them a blessing, and never takes them for granted. She loves the attention she gets when she dances, as she loves having people's eyes on her. Because of her mother, Dieu also learned how to be flirtatious and charming, teasing men to get what she wants.

After becoming a well-known agent, she became even more confident. She soon garnered a reputation as a flirtatious, but mercilessly warrior. Everybody loves this agent's dancing, especially her enemies. Unfortunately, it is the last thing they see before they go to their graves with a smile on their lips and a knife through their hearts. Dieu is so alluring that hundreds of acts of heroism (and foolishness) have been performed in her name. When she appears on the scene, men stop breathing and women sit open-mouthed in wonder at the hip-swaying charms of this unearthly beauty. Using her God-given gifts as bait, she lures her enemies into her web and by the time they realize what's happened, it is too late as she already has got them in range.

Background

*Coming soon*

Trivia

As stated, much information about her is currently unknown as she keeps much of her personal life hidden. It's even unknown if Hoàng Diệu is her actual name, and not just an alias.

Though she doesn't do it often, she often pays money to orphans and homeless people in exchange for information.

She is a lover of purple lotus flowers, liking them simply for their beauty rather than what they symbolize.

She owns and operates her own jewelry company called, Lotus Bloom Jewelry, which is known for its lotus flower-shaped jewelry, which is popular among Asian women.

Besides her work in jewelry design, she also does some modeling on the side, and is quite good at it.

She was the one who came up with the team's name and insignia.

She has met many people of the underworld during her time as a secret agent, making her one of the most knowledgeable people in the D.R.B.

Lola Takahashi and Kureha Koizumi of Saitama Division, as well as Yuriko Kuromiya of Edogawa Division, have an extreme dislike for Dieu, due to the fact that she has either betrayed or used them during their time in the underworld.

[michaelnotwheeler]

HOLY FUCKING SHIT IM GOING TO ACTUALLY FUCKING EXPLODE IF I SEE SOMEONE SAY THIS AGAIN

This is about pride month, obviously.

• November being Military Family Month

• May being Military Appreciation Month

• February 19th Coast Quard Reserve Birthday

• March 3rd U.S. Navy Reserve Birthday

• March 25th Medal of Honor Day

• March 29th Vietnam War Veterans Day

• April 5th Gold Star Spouses Day

• April 14th Air Force Reserve Birthday

• April 23: U.S. Army Reserves Birthday

• May 1st Silver Star Service Banner Day

• May (Last Monday of May) Memorial Day

• June 27th National Post Traumatic Disorder Awareness Day

• July 27th Korean War Veterans Armistice Day

• August 4th U.S. Coast Guard Birthday

• August 7th U.S. Purple Heart Day

• August 29th U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Birthday

• September 15th National POW/MIA Recognition Day

• September 18th U.S. Air Force Birthday

• September 25th Gold Star Mother’s and Family Day

• November 10th Marine Corps Birthday

• November 11th Veterans Day

• December 7th Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

• December 13th U.S. National Guard Birthday

December 17th National Wreaths Across America Day

• December 20th U.S. Space Force Birthday