#the father of my paternal grandfather was a worker I think and I think also a drunk socialist

[mycrawfordcountyancestors]

Week 6--Earning a living

With roots in Crawford County, it should not be a surprise that I have several ancestors who worked in various aspects of the oil business. Crawford County, Illinois had an oil boom in the early years of the 20th century. This affected nearly every family in Crawford County, in one way or another. You can still see the pumpjacks (I called them grasshoppers when I was a kid) in many rural areas of the county. And I believe my mother still gets an occasional (small) check from a long-ago ancestor’s well.

(Photo from Library of Congress website)

For starters, two of my great-grandfather’s sisters married two brothers of John W. Shire, whose 1906 toss of an old whiskey bottle south of Stoy marked the site of the first oil well in Crawford County, starting the oil boom. The oil boom lead to a construction boom, and those brothers of John Shire and two of their brothers-in-law (my great-grandfather Earnest Bashears and another brother, W.C. “Tuckie” Bashears) were construction workers at this time.

My maternal grandfather C. Scott Bashears was enumerated as a blacksmith for an oil well supply company in the 1940 census and was a tank car repairman in the 1950 census. His younger brother worked in a laboratory at the refinery and one of my grandfather’s sisters married a man who worked in the oil industry and they moved to Wyoming.

My maternal grandmother Dorothy (Marbry) Bashears worked in the office of Lincoln Oil Company before my mom was born. Her family was very involved in the oil business. As a child in the 1910s and 1920s, my grandmother lived in Oklahoma where her father Will Marbry worked as a wildcatter. He traveled throughout the Great Plains drilling for oil in previously unexplored areas. My great-grandmother, Bertha (Hill) Marbry occasionally accompanied him on his expeditions.

From the back of the photo: “ 1st well  ‘the Winkle Man’.  The one with me in the picture is ‘Mrs. Perrin’ the lady that was with us at Dry Creek and one of the drillers and a tool dresser.�� My great-grandmother Bertha is on the far right. The Winkleman Dome Oil Field is in Fremont County, Wyoming, about 30 miles from Lander, Wyoming. Winkleman was first drilled in 1917.

After the family returned to Crawford County in the mid-1920s, my great-grandfather Will worked as a machinist at the Ohio Oil Company refinery in Robinson, later Marathon Oil. He and a coworker patented a metering valve in 1930. Two of my grandmother’s brothers, Zeb and Bob, worked at the refinery. Lastly, a favorite cousin (a son of my grandmother’s sister) worked as an engineer, and later in upper management, for Marathon Oil Company.

My paternal family also had ties to the oil industry, starting with my great-grandfather Rollie Wiseman. He grew up a couple of miles north of Stoy and by 1930 was working in the oil fields of Stoy as a roustabout. In fact, while walking home from lunch at a tavern in Stoy in 1963, he felt ill and died near the oil field pump station.

A tantalizing tangent to the oil industry: In early December 1911 the bank at Stoy was blown open with dynamite and robbed of about $1500. No one thought anything of the early morning booms; loud noises were common in the oil fields. Because of something said to my dad by his dad Ray (Rollie’s son) the family story is that Rollie had something to do with the robbery, or had inside information about the robbery. Rollie was, let’s say, an interesting man.

Rollie’s son (my paternal grandfather) Ray Wiseman worked at the Ohio Oil/Marathon refinery for 44 years. In 1950 he was a stillman. My grandfather had two brothers and they both worked in the oil business, too. Donald worked at the refinery in Robinson and Clifford worked elsewhere in Illinois.

The Marathon Oil refinery remains one of Crawford County’s largest employers, employing approximately 650 people with the ability refine up to 253,000 barrels of crude oil per day. I wonder what John W. Shire would think of the legacy of his random whiskey bottle toss today.

(Photo from the Marathon Petroleum website)

[lokilickedme]

The Queen of Springtown

I’m going to tell you a story.  It’s a true story.  There’s a bit of conjecture here and there to fill in empty spots, but not a lot.  It’s a story about my grandmother - my paternal grandmother, not my maternal grandmother - I feel the need to specify who exactly it is because mom’s mom has a bit of a story too, but that’s for later.

This one’s about the one I’m going to call Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was her middle name, it was a family name, it belonged to her mother and her grandmother I believe, though I didn’t know any of those people so I couldn’t swear by it.  The family records are long gone if they ever existed.

Elizabeth’s last name was one of those romantically ridiculous names that still clung to old families at the turn of the century.  It had a lot of extraneous letters at the end, a handful of unnecessary and partially silent sounds that looked beautiful in the flowery handwritten script of the time, a noble sounding -eaoux that did little more than tag a fancy sounding o onto the back end.  A lot of fuss for such a little piece of sound.  And when Elizabeth’s grandfather moved his family from France to Ireland and signed the manifests upon arrival in the new old land, he dropped the -eaoux and shortened the family’s name to four tiny letters and a single syllable.  They were Irish now.

Elizabeth’s father carried the new name and the new heritage, and when he was of age he went and married an Irish beauty named - yep, Elizabeth.  They say she was redheaded and blue eyed and fair skinned, though no pictures exist to prove it.  All that exists is my grandmother, who supposedly looked just like her mama.  She didn’t remember Ireland...she was too young when her daddy moved his family to a new land just like his own daddy had done, and she never really told anyone she was Irish.  No one actually knew, once her parents were gone.

But you could tell.  She looked it - flame red hair, china blue eyes, fair skin.  She had the bones of whatever French nobility had been in her lineage from way back, but her colors were the Emerald Isle all the way.  A beauty like you’d see in the movies, petite and ladylike and perfectly put together.

But my god that woman had a wild streak that dated right back to the Celts whose blood made up half of what she was.

(continued under the cut because long story)

So Elizabeth grew up in America, the daughter of an Irish mother and a French father.  She had brothers and sisters, quite a few, though I never knew any of them.  I believe I met two of them when I was too young to remember much about the encounter, but I’ve always found it hilarious that one of her sisters was named Bill.  Bill, like the man’s name.  I never found out why and I’m not entirely sure there was ever actually a reason.  It was just one of those things.

The newly American family settled in Texas.  And when Elizabeth was very young - probably not yet in her 20′s, though nobody knows for sure just how old she actually was because it’s likely she tended to fib a bit about her age to get into places she had no business being - she got herself involved with the Texas mafia.

Now let me tell you a thing or two about the Texas mafia.  It wasn’t an official operation - not like the Italian Mafioso or the Eastern Syndicates or whatever the hell was going on between Florida and Cuba at the time.  But it was every bit as dangerous and vicious and bloody and corrupt as any of those bigger organizations, and it was led for the most part by a man I’m going to call Big Joe.

This was the early 1940′s or thereabouts.  Elizabeth was a party girl - up for anything, always out and about, girl-gang at the swing club, the works.  And Big Joe saw her in the club one night, it may very well have been his club she was dancing at, and the proverbial first-sight thing kicked him hard in the gonads.  This girl was a looker, and she was dancing with everyone in the place, whooping it up, living life like tomorrow it was all going to take a header into the sea.  He had to have her.

And he did.

Big Joe was likely in his late 30′s, maybe early 40′s.  There’s not a lot of information on him other than a handful of facts mentioned once and only once by my grandmother to my aunt - that Big Joe was a handsome man, big and tough and a snazzy dresser, and he always had enough money in his pocket to take Elizabeth anywhere she wanted to go and buy her anything she wanted to buy.  And Elizabeth, party girl extraordinaire, was all up for that.

So Elizabeth and Big Joe become a thing.  Everybody knows she’s his squeeze - and suddenly not a male soul in Dallas or the surrounding metropolitan areas will dare to lay an eye on her, not even a quick glance, because she’s Big Joe’s girl.  And that means something.  Elizabeth doesn’t know quite what it means because she’s likely not even 20 yet, but Big Joe is fun and romantic and he takes her on trips and buys her nice clothes.  He buys her a ring, a blood red garnet, a ring that I inherit many decades later.  He’s going to marry her, he says.  She doesn’t care much one way or the other, she’s having too much fun dancing every night in his club, traveling with him, going shopping, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous of the Southwest.  She’s all but a star, protected and adored.  Big Joe’s men follow her everywhere she goes when she’s not with him.  And Big Joe starts going out of town without her a lot, taking care of business that he never tells her the details of.

She’s cool with that.  He’s a businessman, that’s what he’s always told her.  Things to take care of out of town.  The Boss.  He has a lot of operations to oversee, operations that make all that money he spends on her.

She has no idea what he actually does.

All she knows - or cares to know - is that when he comes back to town he ushers her around town in his big fancy black car, buying her furs and expensive dinners, showing her off to society.  When he isn’t slapping her around...but hey, that’s part of the deal isn’t it?  It’s the 1940′s, and Big Joe is very much a man of the era.  Women grew up knowing they’d have to take the back of a man’s hand from time to time, and Elizabeth knew which side her bread was buttered on.  She kept Big Joe happy, put a smile on his face, did the old grin-and-bear-it on the rest of it.

And then one night Big Joe comes banging on her door.  He’s frantic.  He pushes a set of keys into her hand - keys to the fancy black car that takes her everywhere - and tells her to keep it there, at her house.  Don’t drive it anywhere, just keep it there.  He’ll contact her soon and tell her what to do.

He leaves in another car with one of his men, and that’s the last time Elizabeth ever sees him.

A few weeks later she gets a letter from Big Joe telling her to drive the car into Grapevine Lake, on the far side by the shoals.  Don’t open the trunk, he says.  Put a brick on the gas pedal and put it in drive.  Do it at night and make sure nobody sees you.

That night Elizabeth picks up her best friend and they drive the car to Grapevine to do as Big Joe said, sinking it in the murky green water on the far side of the lake.  The two girls - just girls, barely even women yet - stand on the shore watching it disappear into the deep dark.

A week later Big Joe is shot to death.  A deal gone bad maybe, or a competitor moving into the territory.  Nobody really knows - grandmother never said.  Don’t think I haven’t done my research...I know what I know, and according to a nearly nonexistent little trove of newspaper articles microfiched in a tiny little library in Azle Texas that isn’t even there anymore, odds are very likely that Big Joe went down in a shootout with the Dallas Police Department.

Elizabeth never opened the trunk of that car.  At least she said she didn’t...it’s one of the many things that nobody ever knew or will ever know, because once she shut the door on that part of her life and moved on, it might as well have never happened.  Getting this much out of her was outrageously difficult.  Thanks to my very tenacious and very persevering aunt, what I’ve just told you managed to survive.  It’s very likely my aunt was the only person she ever told, and it’s very likely I in turn am the only person my aunt ever told.  And now my aunt is in her 70′s and in poor health, and this little unknown family story has started poking around at the back of my skull.  I don’t want it to be lost.  I don’t like the idea of soon being the only person alive who knows it.  It’s not a spectacular story, but it’s testament to the fact that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people, probably more often than you’d think - and that those ordinary people sometimes take it all to the grave with them.

Elizabeth - my dad’s mom, my grandmother, the one I look like and act like and laugh like, the one whose cheekbones and eyes and hair and size I was born with, passed away twenty-something years ago.  She lived through some extraordinary things.  After the demise of Big Joe she married an oil roughneck, one of the semi-transient oilfield workers that were prevalent in the Texas Panhandle at the time, and had two children with him - one of whom was my father.  The roughneck was the epitome of the James Dean romantic brooding bad boy type, handsome and manly, but unfortunately also a scoundrel who had a second family in another city that he went to every other month when he traveled to another rig for work.  She left him when she found out.  It was almost unheard of at the time, a young mother taking her two little kids and leaving her husband to be on her own, but she did it.  And when my father was 12 she met and married a very tall, very handsome, very Cary Grant-esque railroad worker who loved life every bit as much as she did.

They were together for the rest of her life.  I’ve never to this day seen two people more in love than Elizabeth and Jesse.  I spent many summers in Texas with them and not a night went by that I couldn’t hear them giggling in the next room after lights-out, talking and laughing quietly until granddad’s wallshaking snores echoed through the house.  It just about killed him when her heart gave out.  But she was old, and she’d lived a life worth living.  There was nothing in her face in those final moments that could ever convince anyone she wasn’t ready and willing to go when the time came.

I’d been married for a couple of years when she died, and my husband and I traveled to Texas for the funeral.  The first night there, as my aunt brought out grandmother’s jewelry box and told me to take whatever I wanted, the story was passed from her to me.  And when it was all told I opened a little drawer in the bottom of the jewelry box and pulled out an old garnet ring that I’d seen before, when I was a small child snooping in grandma’s stuff.  I’d always been fascinated with it...it just looked like it had a story to tell.  That’s it, my aunt said.  That’s the ring he gave her.  That’s all she ended up with.

It was the only thing I took.

The church was so full the next morning you’d have thought it was the final sendoff for some local celebrity.  Everybody loved my grandmother, everybody, but this was sort of astounding.  Some of them I knew from my childhood, from many many summers spent in the Panhandle, but people came from all over to say goodbye and nobody in the family knew who a lot of them were.  They just showed up, some of them cried, some just stood in the back of the church all stoic in black suits.  Some were very old.  And when it was over and I turned around to watch a group of distinctly important-looking old gentlemen quickly and quietly leave the building, I looked over at my aunt and pointed at them.  She arched her eyebrows in that way she always did, that way, the way that said What did I tell you?? - and I wondered if maybe all those years ago some of Big Joe’s men hadn’t pulled that car out of Lake Grapevine and found the trunk empty.

I mean...this is Elizabeth we’re talking about.

[alotsgonnachange]

Fan apprentice Bios

for the alotsgonnachange/the arcana cinematic universe that eye personally believe to be better than the original game...

Name: Isabella Ciccino

Meaning: Promise of God

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/Her

Height: 5′10

Birthday: October 28th

Star sign: Scorpio

MBTI: ISFJ-T

Patron Arcana: Justice

Sexuality: Lesbian

Favorite Food: Lemon chicken orzo

Drink: White wine (Vinho Verde)

Magical abilities: Plant care/recognition (green witch), Foraging

Ethnicity: A small rocky/mediterranean esque island off the coast of Venterre that would strongly resemble sicily and malta.

Family: Mother, Angela Ciccino (deceased). Younger sister, Annamaria Ciccino (deceased)

Backstory: WIP

Occupation: Seamstress/tailor

Hobbies: Ballet, reading, drinking wine, dancing, tending to plants

Familiar: None (for now i guess??)

Love Interest: Nadia

Description: Isabella is a mysterious and alluring magician. To most people she is kind and charming, but private. She is incredibly helpful and caring to those she is friends with and cares about and will drop what she’s doing to assist. Likes to do quiet introspective work like reading, sewing, knitting and caring for plants. She’s a bit of a homebody in that sense. She comes across as level-headed and assertive in formal settings and does not allow others to talk down to her. With friends, she is a bit more sassy and teasing. She hates answering personal questions and has strict boundaries, which can lead to her being standoffish and stubborn at times.

As a Love Interest: Very loyal and committed, generally very gentle towards whoever she is seeing. You are going to have to get her to open the fuck up though she’s not good at being vulnerable AT ALL. The type of gf who may or may not qualify as a therapist/mother which…yikes. needs to work through her fear of intimacy before she can have a healthy relationship awwww 5/10

___

Name: Danielle Dupont

Meaning: God is my judge

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/Her

Height: 5′6

Birthday: September 7th

Star sign: Virgo

MBTI: ENFP-A

Patron Arcana: The Sun

Sexuality: Bi

Favorite food: Pain au Chocolat (Chocolatine for my canadians…)

Favorite drink: Espresso or a good wheaty ale

Magical Abilities: Sexual magic, chemistry/potionmaking, candle magic, topical balms/solutions

Ethnicity: Whatever the Arcana equivalent is of like. Western Europe germanic? A country including but not limited to Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland. Who cares really she is white and an Orphan

Family: Orphan!

Backstory: WIP

Occupation: Shop owner who sells potions, balms, candles and various other uhhh items usually of the purpose of sex (literally think a modern day sex shop with dildos and shit but also candles and skincare too)

Hobbies: Socializing, singing, making/testing potions, foraging, baking

Familiar: None, is in fact frightened of several animals due to trauma :(

Love interest: Lucio (Her taste is questionable and that’s okay!), also portia

Description: Danielle is a cunning and animated witch. She’s outgoing, bright and carries herself with confidence. In the past this has made her friends and enemies alike. She’s charming but can be a bit of a trickster. Her demeanor is generally calm and she does not often experience strong anger. She’s very smart and dedicated to her craft, and she is a perfectionist. As a worker, she gives excellent customer service and is a good saleswoman. To her friends, she’s teasing and wild, but loving and encouraging. On her worst days, she has the potential to be a bit more inconsiderate and is not the best at handling huge displays of emotions from others.

As a Love Interest: Girlllll…. first of all she needs to stop being emotionally stunted! My good sis cannot handle open displays of emotion at all and tends to shut down! The physical aspects are all there and excellent and she is going to be sweet, caring and loving but she needs to take things more seriously and be able to talk about feelings!!! 3/10

____

Name: Jia Song

Meaning: In korean it’s “clear” or “good”

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/her

Height: 5’5”

Birthday: August 5th

Star sign: Leo

MBTI: ENFJ-A

Sexuality: Bi

Favorite Food: Pulled pork or a good seasoned steak

Drink: limeade

Magical Abilities: Potions/herbs and healing

Ethnicity: Her father is from the same country as Ki (in a modern AU, this would be like. Korea.) and her mother is from somewhere uhhhh near nopal or something. Warm tropical nice (in a modern au this would be Brazil), but she grew up in her mother's country.

Family: I don't currently have names but basically, her father, mother, aunt (deceased) and two younger brothers.

Backstory: will be linked coming soon

Occupation: Healer, researcher, linguist

Hobbies: Dancing, reading, adventuring

Familiar: None

Love Interest: Julian

Description: Jia is a bright and curious magician. She’s a bit nerdy and loves reading/learning new disciplines. She is an energetic and altruistic person who is liked by many. She comes off as kind and forthcoming. She is very helpful and if she can’t help directly she will find someone who can with her connections. To her friends, she is loyal and sweet and affectionate, but also has the potential to be grumpy and even a bit negative. She’s very determined in hard situations and won’t back down until things are made right. Despite this, she can potentially overthink and overestimate situations and is incredibly stubborn when she wants to be.

As a romantic partner: loving, but definitely also able to keep independence. Not necessarily a stage 5 clinger but somewhere in the middle. She will love just spending lots of time with a partner and just picking their brain and learning everything she can from them. The type to brag about them to her friends. A wonderful listener but give her a chance to speak too she likes talking a lot as well! 10/10 would recommend

____

Name: Ki (Kiyoung) Kim

Meaning: Debatable but Ki alone means arisen and i’m getting “Vigor and eternal” But i think names differ based on the characters u use i am not korean so take this with a grain of salt

Gender: Nonbinary i think...

Pronouns: He/him or they/them doesn't have a preference

Height: 5′8″ Short king

Birthday: February 27th

Star sign: Pisces

MBTI: INFP-T

Sexuality: Gay

Favorite food: Budae Jjigae or Yongeun jorim

Favorite drink: any alcoholic beverage where you can’t taste the alcohol and strawberry milk

Magical Ability: Divination and mediumship (idk what the proper term is) so he can communicate with spirits/the dead

Ethnicity: Think of a small nation veeeery far away from Vesuvia that's cold for a lot of the year (for reference, think Korea).

Family: a twin sister named Jiyoung, 3 older sisters (Jiwoo, Jeongyeon, Joonhwa), mother and father and paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother who are living.

Backstory: will be linked coming soon

Occupation: Musician - mostly guitar and piano. Enjoys instrument care, arranging and performing in large ensembles, not a soloist by any means. He’s a great singer but he’s shy and singing gives him anxiety

Hobbies: Playing guitar, composing/arranging, reading, writing, shopping

Familiar: a tiny white dragon named Egg. Idc if dragons exist in this world but i feel like they HAVE to..

Love Interest: Asra

Description: Ki is a perceptive and witty magician. To most he comes off as a bit anxious and shy, which he is. Once you get past that, he’s eager, forthcoming and empathetic. He is very kind and likes to believe people have good intentions. He is very helpful and always tries to make sure others are comfortable and happy. He enjoys music and learning musical instruments. He prefers to work more in the background so as to not draw attention to himself. With his friends, he’s actually very talkative, silly and goofy. He’s prone to anxiety and may tense up or feel attacked when put into frightening situations. Unfortunately he has self destructive tendencies and low self esteem and has a hard time due to that.

As a Love Interest: perfect little s/o shut the FUCK UP…. that is if u can deal with low self esteem and anxiety! He really really tries though! He’s also shy with physical affection but will warm up to it eventually with familiarity and trust. Very doting and randomly shows up with delicious food and takes care of u when ur sick. 8/10

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Name: Mathilde “Tilly” LaRue

Meaning: Mighty In Battle? Lol

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/her

Height: 5’11

Birthday: January 16

Star Sign: Capricorn

MBTI: INTP-A

Sexuality: Bi

Favorite Food: Lentil soup

Drink: Black coffee

Magical Abilities: Divination, telekinesis, herbs, defensive magic

Ethnicity: From a large urban area with a large population somewhere in an area a bit cooler and rainier than Vesuvia. (think like. England)(in a modern AU think Afro-caribbean)

Family: Mother and Mother and an older sister named Topaz

Backstory: will be linked coming soon

Occupation: Court Magician (but like simply a well rounded witch who goes wherever the money is)

Hobbies: Exploring, foraging, reading

Familiar: A white ferret named Elle

Love Interest: Muriel

Description: Mathilde is a gentle and thoughtful magician. She is soft-spoken and hates raising her voice, and is often making bizarre and thought provoking side comments in most situations. She is curious and intuitive when it comes to magic and often able to use several methods to predict the future for others. She carries herself in a dreamlike/contemplative manner and does not really care what others think - She’s off in her own world. With friends, she has a good source of humor and gives good advice and is a very good listener. She has an affinity for animals and nature, and would generally prefer to be outside. She can tend to be unrealistic and naive and loses hold on her emotions in tough situations (angry crier…) and feels misunderstood by those around her.

As a love interest: Downright adorable. Sweet, will bring you cool items she found and very endearing. She’s also encouraging and surprisingly cheesy. Not outwardly clingy but if you let her she will. but good fucking luck starting to date her! She is extremely pretty and gets asked out almost every day, turning down 99.999999% of applicants because other people do not particularly interest her and her taste is insanely picky! 10/10 but FAT CHANCE

[leam1983]

It’s the end of the work week and, well...

I’m having thoughts on labor culture.

My father was born in 1958. He lived as the son of an absent father of five children who had no ability to truthfully express his love and care, and who instead chose to bury himself in work as a means to display his commitment. My paternal grandfather made and sold mattressees and died quite young of a cancer strain that today would’ve seemed benign. He was described as a hard worker, either up to his neck in his business or wanting just a scant few hours per day to himself. It made an aloof lover out of him and a distant father - who still loved his wife and children to bits but who felt emotionally castrated in a sense, as were men of the era.

The family consensus is that his work killed him.

My father is now 65 and survived a bout of Non-Hodgkinian Lymphoma. The oncologist and anyone with half a brain agreed that stress was the culprit. Early on, Dad had the family as an excuse for his tendency to overwork. He had to provide for us, after all, and garnish my mother’s meagre savings. All she has is her government-issued pension plan, while my father does have his own pension as a retiree of the City of Montreal’s Real-Estate Appraisal service. Considering, he felt obligated to pull a heavier load to bring in more, so they’d have better investment opportunities. Later on, he kept working out of a sense of fealty and attachment to his division, breaking out of retirement during the pandemic to join the work-from-home team. He wanted to help techs and city officials find ways to bring more of the traditionally snail-mail-based parts of the system online so the city’s Land Management service wouldn’t be paralyzed by COVID-19. What was supposed to be a single month turned into four, which turned into twelve.

By the end, they were begging him to stay on the team and to pull longer hours. We’re talking twenty hours per day, in some particularly grueling stretches. That means being logged in by breakfast and scarfing bagels down with Urban Design techs on Zoom instead of your own family, or having supper with your boss because she needs a play-by-play of the situation to stave off her executive anxiety.

Long story short, I didn’t see Dad much during the first wave. His reasoning was that he’d eventually stop, pool all this cash, and chuck it into his and Mom’s Registered Retirement Savings Account - with maybe an extra two thou or so in case the country reopened enough for their postponed trip to Cuba to take place.

Guess what? His zona flared up and he ended up with odd, shingly bumps along his scalp which to this day the local dermatologist grimaces at and tentatively has us dab with cortisone cream.

Mom, though? She’s a retired and registered nurse with a self-negating streak and a chronic propensity to undervalue her own physical ailments. Someone who quite literally understands the pain of busted hips on a clinical level because she was trained in Gerontology - and also someone who refuses to schedule an appointment with her GP and who inexplicably self-medicates with white wine.

As for me, I’m a 37 year-old man with a paycheck I consider massive with its meagre six bucks above the minimum-wage threshold - someone who chose to shack in with his folks until the current crisis ends and who therefore has a history of a single, willingly terminated apartment lease that originally began in the Planned Housing market. The apartment I want is basically a Barbie doll house for adults, a gleaming fantasy I’ll never have enough capital to touch unless I feel like trying my hand with criminal applications of my skills. The apartment I can get right now is a shithole, and I have the audacity to think I deserve a shithole that at least wasn’t someone’s former cockroach den.

Now here’s the kicker: I value my sanity and my health. I know my mental stamina levels and I know from experience that after working seven-point-five hours per day with the occasionally shorter Friday, I’ve found my limit. I could invest more if I worked more, yes, and I’m already in a better position than my parents, retirement-wise. I’ll never be rich, but I’m already set to be comfortable, provided I don’t spend my golden years trying to make it as an unsponsored TechTuber or anything else that’s equally ludicrous.

Where that’s a problem is in the toxicity this is generating. See, I have the gall to slide my daily schedule later so I can start at an hour that fits my biological clock and ends at an hour where I’m at my most creative. That means the folks saw me spending my pandemic mornings on Animal Crossing while Dad was trying to wrangle Excel spreadsheets for non-tech-savvy fellow Boomers while preventing the dog from eating his meeting notes. That means they guzzled vinho verde like it was Kool-Aid after seven while I made sure to find more concrete means to distance myself from work - ideally ones that didn’t involve functional alcoholism.

Naturally, what was bound to happen, happened: Dad soon spent his evenings calling me shiftless or “unwilling to commit”, while I was stuck watching him miss all the cues his stressed-out body were sending him. We already had Trump’s last desperate months and a global plague to handle, I really didn’t want my work to turn into more of a nuisance than it already is. I already love the people I work for and hate what I do (repeating the family cycle, it seems), but I’ve at least decided to give myself ample Me time every single day. 

I’ve paired that with smaller, if consistent portfolio investments, along with a few new habits I wanted to get into to stay saner. Dad pulls crosswords or plays competitive chess in the wee hours, while I usually lay down to meditate around midnight and fall asleep by 1 AM at the latest. I’m half-expecting my father to pull a Tyler Durden and to sneer at me, at some point. “Self-care is masturbation,” he’d probably say.

Looking at classifieds for rentals, it’s obvious that the entire system is predicated on abuse. Work yourself down to the therapist’s office, right down to the fucking bone, and you just might earn a half-decent retirement because nobody’s taught you to invest incrementally. Nope, Society seems to say, you’re supposed to buy, buy and buy some more, until you realize you have ten years left to start from scratch!

I remember Dad’s face on my eighteenth birthday. “Why would you want a Disability Care Savings Account, Brain? You just turned into a legal adult by Canadian standards - you’re in no rush, right?”

I told him the real gift I wanted for my birthday, that day, was a ride to the family’s Financial Investments counsel. I pulled up the PDFs I’d printed out and filled and brought them over. From then on, if I dropped a penny in my nest-egg, Ottawa would drop another one. If my share grew, so did the government’s. In the twenty-odd years since, it’s expanded exponentially.

Dad thought I’d done this to have a big cushion by the time I’d retire. Mom thought I’d done this in case my disability worsened and I started requiring equipment or physical assistance. Honestly, my dumb, if slightly prescient eighteen year-old self figured I’d rather spend my time reading or playing video games than working. I knew I’d need something to help cushion my admittedly low career-related ambitions. I might throw several thousands at a new computer every seven to eight years, but that’s because I’ve saved them up for just as long, little by little. I have no vices beyond what sillicon offers and what you’d find in the pages of a book and don’t exactly need a big ‘ol, stonkin’ humidor stuffed with conoisseur stogies.

I have a shoebox with a poked-out Ziploc bag and a sponge, with a handful of joints and a few Santa Anas I got off of a buyer’s pool from work. Five of us occasional chair-bar goons pooled cash together on Cigar Chief and cushioned prices with a single, shared and massive order. I’m nowhere near rich, but assuming the housing market can catch its breath eventually, I’ll be able to live modestly - with one or two markers of occasional luxury I’ll have chosen.

I have a shittier job than my father has had and I’ve chosen to be happier than him. It’s just sad that the usual response elevates overwork as the supposedly one, true way to leave a mark in society.

No, Dad. I don’t want to die while my own cells eat me alive, I want to die blazed out of my fucking mind, happy because I’ll have had time to enjoy my friends’ company and to finally make some sense out of Kerouac’s Subterraneans or to figure out what the fuck is going on in Joyce’s Illiad. I’ll die crusty as shit and fulfilled as a Pop Culture jockey, because I’ll have either finished Persona 5: Golden in my lifetime or I’ll have watched the entirety of the MCU’s output before Disney finally manages to kill their golden goose.

I want to die decades from now, feeling like I at least owned my choices and didn’t spend my time tethered to someone else’s professional expectations of me.

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

My personal connection with Taylor’s discography, part five: Marjorie

Basically this is just a series I’m doing where I write down my feelings on what each of the Taylor songs means to me personally on a line to line basis both for my own sake to have it somewhere and for anyone who wants to know anything further about me. So with that in mind, let’s get started.

Marjorie

This song is a little weird for me because as a whole, it’s about losing the almost romanticised view I had of my family. Like most of the people I think of when it comes to this song are still very much alive, but our relationship reached a point where I will never speak to them again. But despite our relationship being like that now, much like most kids, I grew up thinking these people were near perfect and those memories don’t go away just because I’m not on good terms with them now. Because of that, this song has been a very bittersweet song for me and one of the harder Taylor songs to listen to.

Never be so kind, you forget to be clever

When I was younger, I was one of those kids who never wanted to see anyone hurt and would give up if it meant someone else was happy. And that cost me a lot of opportunities. And a remember each time I’d do it, my mother and paternal grandparents would sit me down and remind me that I am a female and that the world is harsh and doesn’t give us as a gender many chances, so I shouldn’t be throwing away chances like that, especially to people who were more likely to achieve those goals through different means. I particularly remember having one of these talks in the third grade when I asked the teacher to allow my competitor in a maths competition to have a second try when he got an answer wrong only for him to quickly declare victory when I messed up a question later. Let it be known that I will never again forget that 7x8 is 56 and that even if I still have issues with it, I do not need to make things harder for myself by giving a leg up to people who would keep me down given the chance.

Never be so clever, you forget to be kind

As much as I tried to be nice as a kid, I definitely grew up with some privileges and a bit of a god complex when it came to my academic skill. Cringily, up until like 9th grade I was that kid that gloated about their grades and was like “well if you just tried harder, you’d get these grades too!”. I was particularly like this with my sister given my parents spent our childhood pinning us against each other and that was the only “win” I could take, especially in terms of my mother. Except it really wasn’t because my mother was also someone who hated school and didn’t do well through no fault of her own. As a result, “You’re smart Jessica, but there’s always going to be someone smarter and nobody is going to care how good you are if you can’t be nice” was a common phrase I heard as a kid. Whether or not it’s true is yet to be seen given some of the biggest names in the world are assholes, but I’ve definitely come to a place where kindness will always outclass cleverness in my life.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were talking to me now

When I have a hard decision to make or I feel like I’m making the wrong choice, I still imagine these idealised versions of my family were still in my life and talk myself into what I think is the next right move. Is talking to yourself still counted as being crazy? Perhaps, but it works and is weirdly comforting given everything that’s happened.

If I didn't know better, I'd think you were still around. What died didn't stay dead. You're alive, you're alive in my head, so alive

Despite everything that happened, my anger towards it, and the way I’ve tried to put it out of mine, I still look back fondly on these memories with these people before they showed who they actually were.

Never be so polite, you forget your power

Like I said, as a kid I hated inconveniencing anyone. This meant I ate a bunch of food I hated, did activities I didn’t want to and even went out while sick because I didn’t want to ruin the day for anyone else. In particular, I remember getting a big stomach ache while on holiday at my paternal grandparents’ house but still trying to get ready and go out to the beach for the day. When he immediately realised something was wrong was told that I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t want to ruin the day, he sat me down and reminded me that it was my holiday too and that was my body so I could and should take control of that and say no sometimes, even if it is just because I don’t want to do something.

Never wield such power, you forget to be polite

For all their flaws, my mother’s side of the family did teach one one thing. I came from nothing, and even if someday I broke the poverty cycle, I was not above anyone else. A lot of conversations with that side of the family was about how oftentimes it was “higher class” people who refused to tip or use manners and felt above it all. Also, when I was a smartass about my grades and jobs I wanted to get, I was reminded that even if I had the best paying job in the world, I would still need the “lesser” workers in order for my life to run smoothly. While the words “class struggle” never came into play, these conversations very much helped to form a lot of my beliefs and remind me to stay humble.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were listening to me now

When someone dies, a lot of people believe they send signs from beyond the grave. Sometimes these happen in the form of seeing associated animals on a bad day, sometimes it’s a random thing coming to you and pushing in a certain direction when needing to make a choice. And there are days when it feels the same with my family even though most of them are still alive. 

But most of all, I think about this line in reference to my uncle who passed when I was 12 who always had mine and my mother’s backs. I remember driving home from my partner’s place during a depressive episode a few years back thinking about how my grandparents live in the same suburb and considering dropping past even though I had cut them off years before to have not only roadworks happen to be happening in a way to make me go past their street, but also their light being off implying they weren’t there. And despite not being a spiritual/religious person anymore, something about that felt very much like my uncle had heard me and was making it clear that his parents were out living their lives and I was making the right choice by doing the same.

The autumn chill that wakes me up. You loved the amber skies so much. Long limbs and frozen swims. You'd always go past where our feet could touch

This line screams my sister to me. The best thing about my sister and the thing that I will spend forever missing is how she got so excited about the little things in life. Doing her makeup or wearing nice clothes was exciting, listening to music was exciting, getting up early on special days to open gifts was exciting, hell even going to a concert for an artist she hated was exciting for her. She was also the biggest risk taker of the family. And given her auburn hair, the autumn/amber visuals just caps the whole thing off.

And I complained the whole way there; the car ride back and up the stairs

I was a whiny and impatient kid (who somehow turned into a more impatient adult, yikes). Looking back, I spent so many occasions with my family whining about little things or asking how long it’s going to take instead of just enjoying the moment. And ultimately, I think that’s one of my biggest regrets in life so far.

I should've asked you questions. I should've asked you how to be, asked you to write it down for me

Like most people, I really underestimated how much time I was going to have with my family and I took for granted the notion that there was always going to be a time that they’d be around to help and get advice from. So I never asked. And now I’m here, 25 and feeling incredibly unequipped for handling the world around me like I should and wishing I had taken those opportunities to ask for more advice. Likewise, while people make jokes that white people have no culture, I genuinely really feel like I don’t (and as a result struggle with my place in the world) because I didn’t bother asking about our history or the family members I never met or any of that and don’t have anything in my possession to give me that information.

Should've kept every grocery store receipt 'cause every scrap of you would be taken from me

Kinda continuing from above, I hated taking photos and really didn’t keep much that my family gave me growing up. Like realistically when it comes to the extended family, I have a few really low quality photos, a piece of art my paternal grandfather gave me before moving to the UK because I loved it as a kid and my memories. And even with my sister and father, I have a single box of things my sister left behind and one Taylor Swift fan book and a necklace my father gave me. That’s it. 

I don’t have any family heirlooms, I don’t even think I have one picture of me with most the members of the family and I don’t even have the loving perception of them because that was taken from me in the fallout of the family. And despite everything that happened, that upsets me whenever I think about it.

Watched as you signed your name Marjorie. All your closets of backlogged dreams and how you left them all to me

To be honest, this line just reminds me of the women in my family and how much they sacrificed in order for me to get where I am today. Like both my grandmothers never finished school (with my maternal grandmother being unable to read) in order to get jobs to look after their families after both fathers abandoned them before marrying into abusive relationships. My mother quit her higher paying job to raise me and my siblings full time because my father had epilepsy and couldn’t. And my mother started working again in my teens in the form of cleaning the dirtiest of houses so I could go to Japan which was one of the happiest memories of my life. She also mentioned she wished I could have been a performer because she had always wanted to be. None of these women got to experience their dreams or even the lives they should have had all to make sure I had the best chance of living mine and again, no matter what happens, that will always be something I remember.

And if I didn't know better, I'd think you were singing to me now

Again, this line just screams my sister. Any time I hear one of her old favourite songs or a top ten hit I think she’d like, especially if it comes on shuffle or out in public, I think of her.

I know better, but I still feel you all around. I know better, but you're still around

Obviously I know these people are not talking to me. They’ve moved on with their lives and outside the moments where they feel the need to try PR the situation to keep me quiet, I imagine they don’t really think of me at all. Additionally, it’s hard to say that the idealistic versions of them I created in my head even existed to be around in the first place. And yet, I still feel their influence on me in my day to day life.

[foggedgrief]

okay, hello, this is going to be a part one to a series of introductions ! i have already hit my five character cap because i’m a menace but that means you get more content and honestly that feels like a fair trade off. without my rambling, i give you nicky ( click here to find some quick facts about my boy ) and emi ( click here to find some quick facts about my girl ) ! wanted connections can be found here.

be warned ! before you click that handy dandy little read more, the following triggers will be discussed : death ( multiple deaths due to the fog, not explicit : both nicky and emi ), grief ( parent losing a child : emi ), religion ( turning away from : emi ) !

losing  friends  and  family  to  the  fog  and  blaming  yourself  for  not  being  more  vigilant,  taking  guardianship  of  your  little  sister  and  getting  a  second  job  to  make  sure  ends  meet,  trying  your  hardest  and  kicking  yourself  for  not  doing  better,  bloodied  knuckles  aggravated  by  vodka  to  clean  them  and  wrapped  so  tightly  you  fear  your  fingers  might  turn  blue,  anger  replaced  by  grief  replaced  by  the  understanding  she  needs  you  and  you  will  tear  down  the  rest  of  the  world  to  keep  her  safe.

nicholas adam locklear was born in inverness, scotland, and still has a scottish accent even though he’s been in the country for twenty years. 

nicky and his family moved to maine a few months before his seventh birthday. they moved to maine because his mother, a once american ex pat, had a father who wanted his kids to be closer because they all seemed to have scattered to the wind. he walked into the fog a week after the locklears had unpacked their home. 

the fog has always been a thing of morbid fascination from nicky and after grandpa took his walk into the woods, nicky was kept particularly far away from the forest line, fog warnings or not. on all saint’s day, the day after he turned eight, nicky found himself in the fog. and then he found himself in his bed with no explanation for either event. 

he started drawing that day, intricate sigils that gave themselves meaning but no voice, so he spoke them into existence: protection from sorcery, protection from evil, wards off negative energies, heal the body and the spirit. four symbols that he couldn’t stop drawing on everything he owned. homework, notebooks, on the walls of his home in crayon ( if you look in those spots today, in the locklear family home, they’re painted now. a whole interior room covered in the sigils intended to look like an artsy photo collage wall. ).

some in town say that the locklears are cursed, that their family bears bad blood, that they owed some kind of karmic debt too large for one life. whatever the rumor, they all boil down to one thing: too many locklears have gone missing in the fog. nicky’s paid little mind to them, though there’s a voice too strange to be his but too familiar to dismiss that encourages him to go in ( to go back ). 

nicky’s life revolves around his little sister, belle, who was born when he was twenty. a few months later, their mother went into the fog and their father went about an hour later to try and look for her. neither came home. though the courts tried to pass belle off to the next living relative, nicky petitioned for rights to guardianship because he lived in the home and could find a way to make ends meet for him to be belle’s caretaker. enter the diner and blue valley.

nicky’s always been a hard worker, never one to take a short cut and never one to take the easy way out. his focus has always been to take care of belle above board, so no one could have a reason to take away the last of his family. that little babe was his world and is nicky’s driving force in most things. he started working at the bar first and took on a job at the diner when he realized that tips got slow after a certain hour and what better way than to make more money by helping to sober up the people you just got drunk ?

when customers offer to buy nicky drinks, he usually puts together a couple of complimentary mixers ( cranberry juice, pineapple juice, and orange juice ) and pours in water from an old tito’s bottle to make it look like he’s adding tequila. he’ll pocket the cost of a drink as an extra tip. he never drinks on the job. 

his jobs aren’t glamorous but they keep the roof over his head and belle’s. he works 14 hour days ( 9 pm to 11 am ; 9 pm - 3 am at blue valley and 3:10 to 11 am at the diner ), 6 days a week ( sundays off ), 84 hours a week and he’s damn good at what he does, and seldom calls out for anything. nicky’s the kind of guy to pound three monsters and call it a day just to keep himself going. he’s used to running on little sleep because of his paternal role with belle and wanting to keep as engaged with her as possible. he usually leaves her with the finnegans so he doesn’t have to pay any babysitting money.

the one time nicky tried, dottie looked at the bills in his hand and just hugged him tightly and said, “no child of mine is going to pay me to watch theirs.” nicky cried that day and spent ten minutes crying into her shoulder and then slept on her couch for a few hours while belle played with the finnegan twins. 

nicky is a good person and he’s a really good dad. at 22 he became licensed in the state of maine to be able to foster and has fostered ten kids in the last five years. right now it’s just him and belle in the house that his parents bought that he keeps up as best as he can. the guest bathroom needed a remodel three years ago and the kitchen appliances only work when you knock on them the right way and if the wind’s blowing in the right direction, but some things are just the way that it is. 

other important things that i couldn’t work in above but you should know: 

nicky gives like ,,, just really comforting hugs that suggest a level of emotional intimacy that is likely to catch you pleasantly off guard. 

will help you buy your groceries because he has a better chance of making fifty dollars tonight than you do. 

usually sleeps on disney princess sheets because belle insisted they would look best in his room ( she was right ). his other sheets are bubblegum pink and he bought them for himself because that’s the vibe he was feeling and sometimes you just have to do what will put a smile on your face. 

his little sister is seven but nicky is the only parent she’s ever known and she usually calls him dad over nicky even though she knows the difference. 

nicky calls her his kid a lot. everyone in town pretty much knows the story. 

steady  hands  and  steady  heart  are  starting  to  shake,  pleading  with  officers  don’t  let  me  bury  an  empty  casket,  the  table  set  for  three  but  you  can’t  bring  yourself  to  put  the  plate  away,  pale  yellow  front  door  once  made  your  laugh  now  just  makes  you  sad  because  your  daughter’s  sunshine  still  lingers,  and  there’s  no  place  to  put  your  faith,  nothing  so  powerful  would  take  away  a  little  girl.

emi is considerably less fleshed out than nicky but we’re still going to do our best to give her a fair shake at an intro, so here goes ! 

noemi was born noemi sofia ibarra in pine haven, maine. though she’s always considered pine haven her home, she’s always desired that her upbringing was somewhere warmer. 

she’s a third generation doctor at the clinic, following in the footsteps of her grandfather and mother and knew from a young age that she wanted to help people. she bounced from pine haven for a while ( from ages 18 to 28 ) and followed her dreams to go somewhere warmer and graduated from emory university’s medical school in atlanta. 

she pushed through medical school immediately after graduating with her undergrad and returned to pine haven as a permanent resident when she was 29. having been home, officially, for ten years, she has found herself in the center of the community. more often than not, residents of town know they can call emi and come sit on her kitchen table if they need urgent care. 

life outside of pine haven’t wasn’t all medical school, though, because she also met her the father of her daughters. at 23 emi gave birth to her elder daughter, evangeline. that sweet little girl meant the world to her and emi spent double the amount of time awake those first semesters trying to get used to having a baby and school to balance. she was the center of emi’s universe, this baby and her father. 

emi’s second daughter, catalina, was born about eight years ago and is as much emi’s pride and joy as her older sister. the pair never fail to blow emi away in their creativity, kindness, and love, and she has made that known to them from the time they could open their eyes. though these times were sweet it’s time to fast forward to the current day because this is where emi shifts for the worse for as much as she doesn’t want to. 

two weeks ago, during the fog warning, evangeline wasn’t home with the family. emi was at work, locked down with a few patients, and when she didn’t get a phone call from her daughter, like she asks of all her family, she started to worry. panic didn’t settle in until after the fog warning and no one had heard from evangeline. frantic, begging, trying to stave off the final moments before the inevitable declaration, emi found herself begging the officers at the station: find me something to bury before absolutely crumbling against the weight of her own fears.

prior to her daughter’s disappearance, emi had put at least some stock into god but spite consumes her whenever she thinks about him. something all loving doesn’t steal child from the arms of their mother’s and something all powerful doesn’t let whatever lives in the forest to exist after taking the first soul. this town suffers because of that fog and venom pools in her mouth waiting to spit at the first person who proclaims that god will watch over her daughter. some people turn to faith for stability. emi has turned away. 

[knives-out20]

Late Night - Malcolm Whitly x Harlan Engelmann (OC)  - Prodigal Son - Part 2 (FINALE)

Fandom: Prodigal Son (2019-)

Pairing: Malcolm Whitly/Bright x Harlan Engelmann (OC)

Word Count: 1450

Warnings: Mega Soft, Mentions Of Nazis And Bullying, 

Notes:  Hey Guys! This Is The Second Part- And Final Part- Of This Lil’ Series Of My OC, Harlan, And Malcolm. If You Guys Like Harlan And Wanna See More Of Him, Or Him And Malcolm, Don’t Hesitate To Say So! Anyways, Enjoy!

Harlan leaned against the counter of his bar, after serving someone a daiquiri. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes and hanging his head. Malcolm said he'd come visit the bar today. Well, Harlan knows Malcolm said maybe, but still, he had been eagerly waiting Malcolm's arrival all day. Maybe Malcolm will show up at his house tonight, instead. God, if Malcolm wasn't so busy, Harlan could've loved him more.  "Ey, Harley!". Harlan cracked a smile, opening his eyes and turning to the right."Yea, Declan?". Declan's a regular at the bar, and he always orders the same kind of drinks."Same as usual?". "No," Declan nodded to a pretty girl beside him."Give us a round, will you? Please?". "Got it-" Harlan stood up, then feeling a pat on his shoulder. He turned to see his co-worker, Leo."Hey, Leo". "I got this, Harlan. You continue...Looking sad, alright? Hey, we still on for D'n'D on Saturday?" Leo asked, eyebrows raising."I'll get Deccy his shots". Harlan nodded, smiling warmly."Thank you, Leo. And, yea. We're still on for D'n'D. I'm just...Waiting for someone who said he'd show" maybe said he'd show, Harlan, maybe. Harlan rubbed his eyes, then scratching his jaw in thought."Well, maybe. Just- go get, uh, Declan's drinks, I guess. Thanks, again. I love you" he giggled. “I love you, too” Leo ruffled Harlan's hair, nodding and turning to set up a round of shots for Declan and his new girl.  Harlan turned away, glancing up at the clock. He chimes out soon. Harlan checked his phone; nothing from anybody, except for a notification that both Harlan's brother and Leo liked a tweet of his about cinnamon buns.  "Are you allowed to be on the phone while on the job?". Harlan looked up, immediately tucking his phone away and into his pocket."Malcolm" Harlan breathed out a smile, leaning against the counter."Says the one who takes calls during on-sight profiling. And, uh, I- I didn't think you'd actually come. You said maybe, after all, so I- I didn't- I didn’t really expect you. Well, I did, but slowly started to not expect you". Malcolm scoffed."I'm hurt, Harlan, truly". Malcolm took a seat at one of the bar stools, placing his interlocked hands on the counter. He raised his eyebrows, looking up and around when he noticed the song change."You guys play Bob Dylan?". "Everyone loves Bob Dylan" Harlan just wants Malcolm to love him like that."I'm obsessed". "Oh, no you're not. You live and breath Gord Downie, Bob Dylan's a sideline for you" Malcolm chuckled, looking confused at the shot glass that appeared in front of him."I...haven't even ordered anything yet" he reminded. "Your best friend works at a bar. This one's on the house, as will any other drink once I get JT's first name. So-?" Harlan raised his eyebrows hopefully, leaning in like Malcolm was either about to kiss him, or tell him the biggest secret of his life."Got any news?". "Sadly, no" Malcolm shook his head, daintily holding the glass, and gently swirling it."Not yet, at least. I'll get it for you, free drinks or not" Malcolm's smile grew when he heard Harlan utter "I'm honored", both hands over his heart."He knows my real name isn't Malcolm Bright, the least he could do is tell me what the 'J' stands for, just the 'J'" he groaned, downing the drink quickly. "I'm sure you'll get it one day, Mal" Harlan encouraged. He tilted Malcolm's chin up to look at him, gaze going soft when it locked onto his best friends own. Harlan looked to the left, then the right, and leaned in, kissing Malcolm. He tasted the scotch on Malcolm's lips, and pulled him closer, to deepen the kiss."Glad you came" Harlan mumbled against Malcolm's lips, who muttered "I'll come again later, at your place". He chuckled, kissing Malcolm's cheek. Harlan pulled away, slowly licking his lips."Scotch is still your favourite, right?". "Hasn't been anything else a day in my life" Malcolm shrugged."I could deal with whiskey every once in a while, though. If you wanna spice things up" he winked, tracing shapes onto the counter using his finger."Also, I have a question about us, growing up". Harlan arched a brow, pulling away and crossing his arms protectively."Yea-?" He asked. "Did you...Did you really expect no one to call you a Nazi, back then? Being German was one thing, but...your grandfather, was...y'know" Malcolm gestured his hand by rolling his wrist, presenting nothing in particular."With or without that grandfather, the narrow-minded kids at our school would've called you one either way. Why did you expect them not to?". "Ah," Harlan nodded, hanging his head after. He sighed heavily, gnawing on his bottom lip."Same reason you didn't expect people to call you a freak, and a monster because of your dad. My grandfather fucked up any chances I had with that cute Jewish kid in fifth grade" Harlan answered. Malcolm looked nostalgic."Stanley". "That's the bitch, with his cute, curly hair" Harlan nodded."Anyways- Yours is more direct in mine, yours was your own father. Mine was my father's father, less direct, but, uh, still biological. Funny, I regret not interviewing my grandfather about the Holocaust ‘n’ being a Nazi soldier and such, before he died, when we hit high school. You have every opportunity to interview your father...I think" he explained."It wasn't funny, being called a Nazi as a kid. And it definitely wasn't funny when that damned insignia was drawn onto my desks, my backpack, notebooks, anything that black marker ink could easily stick onto" Harlan rolled his eyes, following up what he said with calming breaths and tapping the fingers on his right hand with his thumb. Malcolm caught the self-soothing action, and cleared his throat."Just curious, y'know?". "When are you not, Malc? When are you not?" Harlan asked rhetorically. Malcolm reached his hand up slowly, cupping Harlan's cheek gently. He smiled when Harlan leaned into the touch, eyes closing."No wonder we're best friends. We both had a paternal figure that fucked up our childhoods". "The last thing I need is you comparing your own serial killer of a father to my- at the time- bed-ridden Nazi grandpa who I only had to visit very few times in my life" Harlan pointed a finger at Malcolm blindly, taking another deep breath."I appreciate the thought, though, but which one of us got diagnosed with night terrors and two mental disorders? And which one just of us got stared at during a majority of the time our class spent reading The Boy In The Striped Pajamas?" He asked, his fingertip-tapping becoming quicker."I even remember the dumbass nickname- ‘Harlanazi’" Harlan remembered, eyebrows jumping when he felt a pair of lips on his, immediately recognizing them as Malcolm's. Harlan pulled away, and opened his eyes. He looked into Malcolm's, a wave of safety crashing over him. Harlan gulped, a sad smile on his face when he reconnected their lips.  Malcolm pulled Harlan closer by his coat, pushing his empty shot glass out of their way. He even stood up, out of the stool, to get closer to Harlan, the counter being the only thing physically diving them. Malcolm pulled away soon after, both hands now flat on the counter as Harlan had that same, something-struck look in his eyes.  It was love, but Malcolm doesn't exactly know that yet. It's most likely, but Malcolm knows Harlan, and Malcolm also isn't the most willing to believe it. Only one thing was left for him to do, to truly find out. Malcolm pat his cheek."How's about we go out this Sunday? If you're free?" He asked, a hopeful look on his face. Harlan opened his mouth, but no words followed."I- excuse me?". He couldn't believe Malcolm was actually asking him this."Go out in what sense, exactly?" Harlan asked, knowing what sense he wanted it to be, but also what sense it most likely wouldn't be. "Go out in a...Non-platonic sense" Malcolm interlocked his hand with Harlan's."What'd'ya say?" He asked, smiling adorably."We can finally be open, too, if you're comfortable with that". Harlan felt a blush creep onto his cheeks."Uh, I- well...yea. Yes, that'd be great" he nodded eagerly, standing up straight. Malcolm smiled proudly, the excitement in Harlan’s eyes confirming his theory on his feelings for the prodigal son. Malcolm leaned in, kissing Harlan passionately. Harlan kissed back just as lovingly, a wide smile on his face. He knows this relationship will be rocky, especially with Malcolm's line of work, his night terrors, and state of mind. But it's Malcolm Whitly- Bright, here. And he's Harlan Engelmann, he knows how to handle Malcolm just as well, if not more than Malcolm's family does. This is all he's ever wanted. 

They're all the other one is ever gonna need.

[leatherxandxlead]

Before anything.

This eventually will end up on a page on my blog, but I want it to be visible as people find me.

I’ve played Jason Todd since I was 18 years old, and because of that I have a very specific idea of who he is and I have basically told canon to fuck off.

The very basics are the same, so don’t worry its not some super out there take, but still.

here is a list of headcanon to start.

Jason was raised almost entirely on her own by Catherine Todd, who knew she wasn’t his mother, but never did anything but treat him like she was. Before she met Willis Todd; Jason’s father, she was an aspiring actress, and had become to make waves in the local theatre community before developing addiction problems she fought for the rest of her life. After Willis was arrested, Catherine began to fight towards true sobriety, to help support Jason. She died of an overdose when Jason was eight. He, to this day suspects foul play from inside the big house.

Willis Todd is still alive, currently survive two consecutive life sentences, plus 90 days for pissing off a guard. He has an option for parole ever ten years and not once has even come close to gaining said parole.

Willis’s sentence is bogus, he took the fall for Two-Face early on. Jason doesn’t care. He’s glad the old bastard rots.

 Jason was killed, and revived before Joker gained the services of Harley Quinn. In fact, during his stint as Arkham Asylums newest John Doe, he was one of her few patients before the fall. He thought she was a good doctor. 

Jason hates above all else drug dealers who sell to kids, and anyone who lays their hands on a woman. He’s pretty sour on animal abuse too.

As the Red Hood, Jason takes particular care to make sure sex workers are kept safe, and are able to get out of the life if they wish to do so, for those who chose to do such work, he promises them protection when he is around, and even has purchased and gifted buildings in Gotham to act as safe havens.

Jason has one cat, her name is Stripes. she’s an orange tabby. He was drunk when he named her.

Jason is a problem drinker, whiskey is his posion

Jason is a neat freak. His safe house is intensely cleaned and organized in between every major mission.

Jason’s favorite food is chili dogs.

Jason possesses a genius level intellect, he reads constantly, is a mechanical wizard and a tactical master. He speaks over a dozen languages, and is passible at about ten others.

Jason’s Russian is terrible, as is most of his slavic, but Russian particularly.

Jason is of Irish and Italian descent. His paternal grandmother was a first generation immigrant for Italy, his grandfather, second from Ireland.

He’s not sure about his ancestry from Shelia, his birth mother’s side. She seemed very white when he met her.

Jason drives what, visually at least seems to be, a black 1966 Pontiac GTO, internally of course it is a Batmobile, with all the bells and whistles. He calls her The Deadbird.

Because Catherine was a stage actress, Jason grew up with Showtunes and listens to them to this day, mixed in with the sort of music you’d expect from him.

Catherine was pregnant when Willis was arrested. The baby didn’t make it. It was a girl, her name was going to be Isabel.

Jason keeps a .500 Magnum handgun at all times. He never uses it, he just wants it ready because he wants the biggest, and most comical looking revolver to be the one he uses to pop the Joker’s head off. He’s fired it 4 times. He hates that he missed.

Jason’s helmet houses a micro supercomputer, hooked up to a backdoor version of the Batcomputer’s network. He’s pretty sure Bruce knows he’s there, but its sort of a “don’t ask don’t tell” agreement. He has a running HUD that helps him track, mark, and collect evidence. He had a rudimentary collision detection system as well, but it was just annoying during a fight. The hood can manage a full light spectrum, allowing Jason to detect large heat signatures, and several types of dangerous radiation. The levels of each need to be somewhat high, as fine and minute detection would take more memory than the space of the hood allows. He also has a rebreather present in the hood, which is air tight. He thinks it’s stupid so many people run around with their mouths exposed when so many villains use gases and spores.

Jason is blatantly embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from Bruce, again he’s pretty sure Bruce knows and lets him out of pity.

He really hates being pitied.

In order, from least to most Jason hates the other Robins, Steph, Dami, Dick and Tim.

In fact he’d go so far as it say he enjoys the company of Stephanie Brown.

He loves all the Batgirls. Not like LOVES, but you know what I mean.

At 17 Jason Todd was taken advantage of by Talia al Ghul. He doesn’t like to talk about it.

Jason developed claustrophobia after waking up in his own coffin. Its why his safe houses are all open design.

Jason’s a little bit bisexual.

He won’t let a man top him though. He doesn’t trust other men.

Jason Todd smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Jason chooses to never attempt to fight the Sirens. They’re alright in his book.

Jason tends to stick to the Narrows of Gotham as his stomping ground. He will fight bats and birds who cross into his turf without asking.

[rootshml]

Meet the 2019 Roots Cohort

In search of their ancestral villages, 11 people of the Chinese diaspora hailing from the Bay Area and Boston will soon travel to the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong 廣東省, China. We will visit 5 different areas, including Kaiping 開平, Taishan 台山, Xinhui  新會, and Guangzhou 廣州. 

Sarah Tan 譚美婷

Village

My mother’s and maternal grandparents’ village. 永安村 (Yong’an Village) in 台山 (Taishan)

What do you do for fun?

I enjoy strength training at the gym, hanging out with friends and family, attending music concerts, watching basketball, and learning more about photography.

How did you hear about Roots?

My sister had a handful of co-workers who participated in Roots Plus (2018). They wrote a blog post for work and my sister shared it with me. I also recently found out that my favorite professor at UCLA was a rooter!

What are you looking to accomplish?

Growing up, my mother told me many stories about her humble beginnings and what it was like to grow up in a village. I look forward to living and experiencing the community and environment my mother and maternal grandparents came from before immigrating to the United States.

What are your expectations?

I do not have any expectations going in. I just know it will be a trip of a lifetime and this experience will help me reflect on who I am today

Choose a food that describes you?

 BURRITOS! Yummm!

Alexander Kwok 郭智光

Village

I would like to visit my paternal grandfather's village 隔塘村 (gaak tong cyun) in Zengcheng 增城. I decided to save my paternal grandmother's village 南朗鄉 in Shunde 顺德 for another time, as I have a lot more resources on my paternal grandfather's side than I do for my paternal grandmother.

What do you do for fun?

I like to read, play video games, blog, listen to music and podcasts, bake; go camping, hiking, kayaking; try new foods and explore new places!

How did you hear about Roots?

I've been doing research on my paternal grandfather's side of the family for 5 years now but hit a wall when I tried looking for our home village. As a lot of the resources seemed to focus on the Sze-yap area of 廣東 Province, I wasn't able to do much more and stopped trying to find it.

One day, I was looking for more resources and came across an old website under the Chinese Culture Center, which redirected me to the Him Mark Lai Digital Archive. After some exploring, I found the database of villages in 廣東 with associated surnames, but none of them included my home village.

I thought I had hit yet another brick wall - until I started googling one of the headers in the Digital Archive, "The Roots Program". I quickly found references to the program and old exhibits on a few websites but thought they might have stopped the program because I didn’t see anything recent. Imagine my surprise when I found the Friends of Roots site & the Tumblr blog…!

What are you looking to accomplish?

Growing up my paternal grandparents spoke mostly Cantonese, so I never got to ask them questions about their childhood, how they met, or what it was like to raise a family in Hong Kong, let alone about my ancestors or our home villages. I’m hoping to regain some of these stories from our family through visiting relatives in Hong Kong, where my grandfather’s and father’s generation grew up and paying my respects at family graves across Hong Kong.

Through visiting my paternal great-grandfather’s home village in China, I also hope to regain a sense of identity that our family has since lost. Even though my paternal great-grandparents left the home village to go to Hong Kong in the late 1930’s, my great-grandfather had to leave the family at the start of the war, because the family was afraid something would happen to him in a city under Japanese occupation. Our family never heard from him again, and it was presumed that he had passed away back in the home village. Though my grandfather has been back to the village in the late 2000’s, he didn’t talk much about his trip with the rest of our family, and we don’t have any records where the village may have been.

So, in visiting my home village and reconnecting with whatever family is left there, I hope to learn more about my great-grandfather and grandfather’s generation, as well as reconnect with family still there. I also hope to get a sense of what growing up in the village might have been like for my great-grandfather, what he liked to do, what the village looks like, etc.

What are your expectations?

I don’t have many expectations other than going back, reconnecting with family there, and seeing what the village looks like. My great-grandfather returned to the village in the early 1940s, so I would like to visit his grave if I can. I’ve heard that when my grandfather went back to the village, he rebuilt his father’s tomb at the time. 

But I can’t wait to taste all the delicious food in Hong Kong & Guangdong, learn more about overseas Chinese - including those who migrated to Southeast Asia, hopefully, and get a sense for what Southern China is like.

Choose a food that describes you?

Jakarta-style bakmie - It's something that I grew up eating as a part of birthday celebrations, represents both the Chinese & Tionghoa (Chinese Indonesian) sides of my family, & reflects on a range of experiences that I share with others being a part of multiple cultures.

Rachael Tang 鄧安琪

Kathleen Wong 黄玉明

Village Kaiping, Guangdong Province, China. 開平中股鄉赤坎屋上樓村. 

What do you do for fun? Rock climbing, running, cooking, and adventuring!

How did you hear about Roots? I heard about Roots through co-founder Al Cheng.  My boyfriend introduced me to him as we were having a delicious bun bo hue lunch.  At the end of the lunch, Al remarked that I probably have roots in Guangzhou.  We connected on Facebook and I saw his program posts.  I was intrigued, applied, and the rest is history!

What are you looking to accomplish? After an intimidating visit to Hong Kong in 2011, where I could not demonstrate enough language skills to get around, a visit to China seemed so intimidating.  This will be my first trip to the mainland so I’m hoping to get a better understanding of Chinese culture and connect it with my upbringing.

What are your expectations? Good food, good company, and hopefully not too many mosquitos!

Choose a food that describes you? Ice Cream :) Sweet and refreshing!

Jenny Lau 劉健儀

Village

漢塘村 in 台山市省冲蔞镇達材鄉. The village is where my parents were born and raised and also where my paternal grandfather was born and where my maternal grandfather grew up starting around five years old. 

What do you do for fun?

I enjoy hanging out with my friends, eating good food, being in nature, exercising, watching movies, sharing stories, being present. 

How did you hear about Roots?

I visited the Roots website after seeing a facebook post linking to it from a friend.

What are you looking to accomplish?

I am looking to better understand my parents by visiting the village where they were born and grew up and to imagine what life must have been like for them. I also want to talk to people who might remember my grandparents and have information about them.

What are your expectations?

I would like to connect with my fellow Rooters, hear their stories and why they wanted to do Roots, visit my village with my brother, who is also a Rooter this year, and to see the village that he chose. I would like to learn more about Chinese history, especially when my parents and grandparents were living in China and to contextualize family events within broader Chinese history.

Choose a food that describes you

Some of my staple foods: white rice with laap cheng and chau baak toi thlem (Chinese sausage with stir-fry baby bok choy) and unsweetened Hong Kong (HK) style milk tea. The rice dish appears simple but is very hearty like me, with the right mix of meat/veggies, sweet/savory. At the same time, I am unique in my bold and deep expressions, similar to HK milk tea, which is a unique spin to a classic tea with milk concept but it's particularly bold in flavor because it's double- or multi-brewed and it's full of depth from evaporated/condensed milk. 

  Michael Tom 譚振豪

Village: 台山水步毛坪村 (Taishan Shuibu Maoping Village)

What do you do for fun?  I like to do indoor bouldering, taking photos, and hanging out with people

How did you hear about Roots?

My cousin, Scott Leung, and my aunt and uncle, Ray and Karen Leung, all went on Roots and recommended that I check it out

What are you looking to accomplish?

I just wanted to see where my grandfather grew up and where my greatgrandfather and greatgrandmother lived

What are your expectations?

 I didn't have any expectations because my family hasn't had any communication with the village since for the past 40 years. I went in with an open mind, ready to accept every new experience

.Choose a food that describes you? 

Kettle Corn. Savory is serious. Sweet is fun. I'd like to think I'm both, but also 90% hot air.

Angela Yip 叶嘉宝

Village

Wong Cyun in Toisan - 台山 三合 潢村 河清里. This is my paternal great grandfather's village

What do you do for fun?

Eat! There's so much amazing food in the Bay Area. I also love keeping up with my bullet journal, going on hikes, and reading fiction. I've really been enjoying reading books by Asian American female authors lately. Some recent favorites are Chemistry by Weike Wang, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, and A Place for Us by Fatima Fahreen Mirza.

How did you hear about Roots?

I heard about Roots from my mom's cousin's wife Liana Koehler, Roots alum and Roots lecturer. It came up in conversation at dinner after my grandpa's funeral. She said I had to do Roots, and I was immediately sold. Roots came at the perfect time.

What are you looking to accomplish?

I am hoping to learn more about a side of my family that I don't know much about--my paternal grandma's side. I grew up extremely close to my grandma, and I want to be able to show her pictures of her father's village because she was never able to visit. I also just want to learn more about Toisan, even basic information like what people eat and grow and what they do for fun. Both sides of my family are from Toisan, so it has shaped my family and my experience of being Chinese in the US in huge ways, but I know very little about the region.

What are your expectations?

I hope to find the right village! Other than that, I am trying to approach my rooting with little expectation and to stay open to whatever might happen. I expect it to be an emotional experience for me for sure.

Choose a food that describes you?

Fried rice from Fung Wah on Mission Street in Daly City

Jeffrey Lau 劉健仁

Village: I'm visiting my paternal grandma's village of 衝洋向南村

What do you do for fun? I hang with people that are easier for me to hang with for fun.

How did you hear about Roots? I learned about Roots two years ago from a friend's Facebook feed! I marinated on the idea of applying until I actually did.

What are you looking to accomplish? I’m looking to reflect on my relationships with family members who’ve had the most direct impact on my life—like the one with my paternal grandma, who raised me. I want this trip, in the long run, support my process of grounding more of my life in my Chinatown organizing work.

What are your expectations? My expectations are simply to get a feel and look of where my grandma grew up. She don't tell me much herself, so I’m gonna discover more about her myself.

Choose a food that describes you? I'm gonna say fries. Fries done well are golden and crispy, but get kinda whack over time as they get soggier. I usually start strong in many things but my energy dips over time and some times I'm kinda whack towards the end, haha...

Hannah Yee 余壽玉 

Village - Dick Hoi, Toisan

Fun - I dance, garden, bake, and love being in the outdoors

Hear about Roots - Through my sister who found out through social media haha

Accomplish - (?) in life? in roots? - For Roots I wanted to accomplish finding my village, seeing the school I have heard so much about, and finding a base of friends who want to explore their Chinese American identities together and eat good food together. Expectations - I didn't know what to expect from this program. I expected it would be exciting, rigorous, tiring, and fun. I also expected it to be like solving a mystery/Clue/puzzle

Food - Dung/Jung - Have to open up the leaves to enjoy the inside! Filled with surprises like peanuts, lup cheong, egg, etc. Warm, comfort food that is a classic! Picture - I'll send you one once I get home!

Fiona Wong 黃寶賢

1. Village

中國廣東省台山市白沙鎮潮境众亨鄉潮興里

Bak Sa, Toishan

2. What do you do for fun?

I enjoy exploring new places, trying new things, and checking things off my to-do/travel bucket list during my free time. I love spending quality time with friends and family while having delicious food. As long as it is a day with blue skies, I do not mind what I'm doing as long as I'm outside!

3. How did you hear about roots?

I heard about roots through a friend who went on this program and shared her experience through social media.

4. What are you looking to accomplish?

I am looking to dive deeper into the history of China and Chinese immigration to the states with emphasis on Cantonese and Toishanese context. I am excited about the opportunity to visit other villages in the Pearl Delta River Region and to return to my ancestral village.

5. What are you expectations?

I did not have much expectations going in other than hoping that our cohort will support one another wholeheartedly.

6. Choose a food that describes you

Some type of dish that has onions because I have a lot of layers.

Nicole Wong 王雅斯 

 Village

I'm visiting my paternal great grandfather's village: 江門市蓬江區荷塘镇三丫沙滘村.

What do you do for fun?

I love to cook food and sing with friends, join the occasional pick-up soccer game, try different dance classes, read, and get outside.

How did you hear about Roots?

I first learned about Roots from my mom, but it wasn't until I heard Steve Owyang speak about the program at a CAA anniversary dinner that I seriously considered applying.

What are you looking to accomplish?

To learn more about my family's history so I can understand myself better and connect more deeply with my Chinese heritage.

What are your expectations?

To meet my Xinhui relatives and see the village, old house, house, and gravesite of my ancestors.

Choose a food that describes you?

Peanut butter (because I love it and chew on ideas/questions for a while

[ograndebatata]

More Elena of Avalor headcanons, though they’re on Princess Valentina of Paraíso and her guard Manuel

I think the title says it all. 

These are my headcanons for Princess Valentina and Manuel, how they met, what their relationship is like, and what the future may hold in store for them (though more Valentina). 

Again, this post really got away from me in terms of length. Like the previous one, it is divided into parts to make things a bit easier and clearer (I hope...).

One important detail: in regards to my headcanoning Valentina as heir to her kingdom, I am following that route because I’m interpreting Manuel’s announcement of her as ‘17th Heir to the Golden Throne’, as meaning that there were seventeen heirs (herself included) since the kingdom was established, and thus she will be its 17th monarch.

To pre-emptively address the accusation that I may have gone a bit too far with Valentina in terms of Mary-Sue territory, I plead that at least I can see where you’re coming from. That said, many of the traits I mention down there will be taken from the series and I tried to make the way she gained them believable. 

I also plead guilty to injecting perhaps a tad too much Manuelentina into it, but I think the way I portrayed it still makes a minimum amount of sense.

As one final tidbit, some details here are inspired from posts by @pizzansunshine , notably the detail about how Valentina cooked with her abuela and how Manuel was Valentina’s only real friend before Elena.

With that said, read on for my headcanons on Valentina and Manuel, with appearances by Princess Charlotte of Isleworth, her goblin Morris, and the sorceress Zinessa (all characters from Sofia the First), and references to Rafa and Elena herself.

Edit: Made a very small correction below (regarding the kind of té that Valentina took from her abuela’s garden) after realizing I mixed it up. Hopefully this will teach me the wisdom of not proof-reading headcanons so late in the night...

Princess Valentina Montañez Torres

Although Princess Valentina is the crown heir to the kingdom of Paraíso, one can say that her life there was anything but paradise.

Like many rulers in long bygone days - although unlike most in more recent eras - her parents had an arranged marriage. Some of it was for the sake of a political alliance, but a strong motivating factor is because Valentina’s paternal grandfather, father to the current king (then prince) of Paraíso, was a traditional sort who believed in keeping up appearances and felt that his son should marry someone ‘appropriate’.  As a result, he set up an arranged marriage between his son and a noblewoman from Cariza.

Both Valentina’s father and mother resented the relationship, as they loved other people, but as their parents were both pushing the relationship to an inescapable stretch, they had no choice but to go forward with it. That said, they made a private agreement on their wedding night: they would conceive a single heir to make their parents happy (which had to be theirs because of magical ways to determine paternity), and then they’d go back to their affairs (which they knew their parents wouldn’t mind as long as said affairs remained behind closed doors).

Less than a year after their marriage, their heir, a girl who they named Valentina, was born. The king was less than happy, as he believed a grandson would make a better heir than a granddaughter, but he hardly had time to convey his disagreement, because he died less than a month after Valentina’s birth. After the mourning period, Valentina’s father became king.

Valentina turned out to be a very bright girl as she grew up, learning to walk and talk before the average ages for both things and learning to read at the age of three. Unfortunately, her intelligence meant she was bright enough to realize that neither of her parents truly loved her, as she could tell the difference between the way loving parents (both palace workers and villagers) treated their children and the way hers treated her.

In her young mind, she believed that her parents treated her that way because she wasn’t good enough, and as a result she strove to be even better. She tried to find as many things to do and tried to be as good at each of them as possible, but it never seemed to be enough. To both her parents, she was the child they had been forced to conceive rather than the one they’d had with someone they loved. To her father, she was a girl as well, and thus an inferior heir by default (as he agreed with his father on that point).

All the same, Valentina was close to her father’s mother, with whom she did plenty of things, from gardening to cooking. Her abuela always tried to shower her with all the love and affection she could in an effort to compensate for the one her son wasn’t giving her granddaughter, but it never seemed enough. Valentina loved her grandmother very much, but she still wished that, some day, her father and mother would love her.

Valentina kept up her progress as she grew. She started learning how to ride at the age of seven, with a mare named Maravilla (who had just been trained as a learning mare, and who she later was given as a personal mount), and started learning how to fence at the same age. She also took subjects many other children who learned them deemed as extremely boring, such as politics and economics.

And as she learned more, she started realizing the poor conditions that some of Paraíso’s citizens lived in, and vowed to do what she could to improve them. At first, she could do little, but as she grew older, learned more, and gained more ‘personal clout’, she managed to do more. Sadly, it only seemed to enrage her father, who now had to inwardly acknowledge that his daughter was a better ruler than him. He needed so many advisers that most of the palace couldn’t even keep track of all of them - his daughter would likely do with six at most.

In general terms, the people loved her. They called her ‘Defender of the Realm’, ‘The Shining Light of the South’, ‘Beloved Champion of The People’, and even more epithets, some so grandiose they crossed the line into ridiculous. Noblemen were a bit more divided, but by and large they knew she would be better for the kingdom than her father. It only took someone with half a brain to realize that if not for his army of advisers, the king would have put Paraíso in a rather bad state.

Valentina even managed to find some romance of sorts in the process, as she, to her great surprise, fell in love with her best friend, who she had known since she could remember, and the only one she trusted with literally everything, except with not having the shock of a lifetime once she poured that part of her heart out to him, because there surely was no way he could have such feelings for her (now being older, Valentina knew she could be difficult to put up with in many ways).

But there was a bump in the road when Valentina was nineteen, and her mother died from childbirth after an exhausting pregnancy - and it became clear that the child simply could not be the king’s. The identity of the man with whom she had the affair was lost, but a rumor came up that perhaps Valentina was not the king’s daughter either - which if true, would make her ineligible to rule.

An uproar ensued. Many shouted that Valentina had to be the king’s daughter - one simply had to look at them to see. Others said they didn’t care whether Valentina was the king’s daughter or not, she’d be the best ruler the kingdom ever had.

But royal protocol had to be observed.

And while it was decided that the kingdom’s wizards (of which there were a great deal) couldn’t be trusted with finding the truth, a visiting princess from Isleworth and her goblin friend happened to have the solution. They’d ask Zinessa, the most famous sorcerer of their kingdom, to do the magical paternity test.

She made it, and it turned out that Valentina was indeed the king’s and the queen’s daughter, to the joys of many, but to the ire of those who were interested in having her removed from the throne.

But her father finally got what he wanted - a marriage to the woman he loved. He cut the official mourning period short by months and married the woman he’d been having an affair with for years, bringing her children along and giving Valentina a set of three ‘step-siblings’ (two of which were ‘not so step’, as they were her father’s illegitimate children) she had to learn to live with.

And the pressure on her only mounted. She had worked herself into such a pinnacle of perfection that she dreaded the consequences of making even the slightest error.

And she could only confide in one person about it.

Manuel

The son of the palace gardener, he knew Valentina since they were both in diapers and was the only friend of Valentina’s age that she had until her early adult years. All the other children, both from the royal court and from the palace staff, were too intimidated by and jealous of her. Not only she seemed to be better than them at everything, but she took everything too seriously. Everything was a competition for her, and she had to win them all. There seemed to be no way to be friends with her.

While Manuel was more easy going than Valentina, he had known her long enough to be used to it, and simply went with the flow on that aspect.

The two of them were joined at the hip since they could remember, and did everything they could together. Manuel could not take part in her royal training (which he was thankful for, because he found it dreadfully boring) but he did everything he could with her. They learned how to ride together, they learned fencing together, and they played olaball together. Valentina even learned topiary from Manuel’s father as he taught Manuel.

Other than her royal training, the only thing Manuel never learned alongside Valentina was magic. It seemed too complex, and he did not trust himself to wield such a powerful thing.

The only things Manuel was better at than Valentina were topiary and olaball. But instead of pursuing either of those careers, he started training to be a royal guard, as his parents wanted him to have some kind of prestige and financial security in his job, and Manuel found the wisdom in their words enough to agree. It was something he was familiar with at any rate (he ended up spending a lot of time defending Valentina) so he should be able to do it.

And he did, but right before starting officially, he was discovered by an olaball sponsor, who wanted him to be part of Paraíso’s olaball team. As Manuel liked olaball, and the pay was quite good, he accepted.

But it didn’t take him long to be disappointed. For one, olaball revolved too much about winning, winning, winning. It seemed too much like being around Valentina, but with much less of an actual concrete reason for winning and none of the tempering qualities that made Valentina such a joy to be with. And, he had to admit it, it was hard also because Valentina wasn’t there.

Manuel wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not even to Valentina (who he trusted with literally everything else) but he had fallen in love with her. But he kept it quiet. How could someone as amazing as her ever fall in love with someone like him?

Eventually, it came the time for Manuel’s first olaball tournament… and to his surprise, Valentina was there in the audience, cheering louder than anyone else, and cheering only for him. Seeing and hearing her made Manuel think that, no matter what, she would always be a great friend.

They ended up winning the tournament, but Manuel thought one was enough. He couldn’t tolerate having his life be all about olaball. So he went back to the palace and asked for a post as a royal guard. Many were disappointed, as Manuel had been the most promising player of the season, but if that was his will, then it was it. Valentina however turned out to be thrilled that he was back, and even more so when he was assigned as her personal guard.

Manuel was relieved to be back with her, both for his sake and for hers. He knew how life her hard was, and had worried about how she had been doing without him. They had regularly corresponded, but it wasn’t the same thing as being back together.

And it was only shortly after his return that Valentina’s mother died and there was the whole public uproar about her possible paternity, which cost Valentina several nights where she cried herself to sleep in Manuel’s arms. Though it was proved she was the rightful heir, the ordeal of having such a personal matter come to light publicly, not to mention her father’s all-too-prompt remarriage, almost lead to her having a breakdown.

But to Manuel’s relief, and thanks in no small part to his support (though Valentina’s abuela and her supporters among nobility and the people also played important roles) she recovered.

The end of the feud with Avalor

Like every surrounding realm, Paraíso heard about the return of the rightful princess of Avalor, and of how the one they thought was the rightful queen (thanks to an elaborate ruse involving forged documents) was overthrown by a rebellion from the people. It was a frightful experience for them, as only a short time before they’d had a visit from Shuriki, and they’d spent forty-one years right beside her.

Unknowingly to them, they had actually been the main reason Shuriki never expanded her tyranny beyond Avalor. Not only did they have a strong army, but they had enough magical people in their kingdom that Shuriki would never stand a chance against all of them. Even Princess Valentina had ended up impressing Shuriki with her magical talent (during a visit she made to see if it would be safe to invade Paraíso) to the point she reluctantly decided to leave them alone.

Had it not been for their feud with Paraíso (and the fact that Paraíso stated their support of Shuriki while they believed she was the rightful ruler) the people of Avalor would have gone to them for help early on. Rafa de Alva, daughter of the royal wizard of Avalor, had particularly regretted that she had never been able to apply for magic lessons in Paraíso, but with all the risk factors at stake, she had been too afraid of what could go wrong.

At any rate, shortly after the stories of Princess Elena’s return came the stories of her many incredible deeds. Her treaty with the noblins, her pacifying a rock monster, her handling of a Yacali threat, her vanquishing of the fairy Orizaba, her participation in the olaball tournament, her victory of the fencing tournament, her defeating of Marimonda… it all painted such a portrait of her as to be inimitable. Even some in Paraíso (thankfully for Valentina, not many) started saying ‘She’s even better than Princess Valentina!’.

Manuel reassured her that no, Elena couldn’t be than her. All those stories had to be blown out of proportion. But, shortly after the second Dia de los Muertos after her mother’s death, an emissary from Avalor came for a peace treaty - the first attempt made in over a hundred years.

Valentina decided to go, and between herself and Manuel, they planned out everything they would need to prove things to them, just in case. A mirror to focus the sun on her, té de limón from her abuela’s garden, trumpets for a musical number, a bright parasol, and her tamborita for magic displays. Maravilla also went.

When they arrived at Avalor, they quickly found out two things.

One - the stories about Princess Elena were, if not true, at least not exaggerated beyond any reasonable amount. She really had done all those things, even if some details might have been blown a bit out of proportion.

Two - Princess Elena truly seemed interested in becoming friends with her and their kingdom. Despite the pragmatic goal, there seemed to be a genuine offer of friendship. And Valentina simply couldn’t comprehend such a thing. She got along well with many heirs of foreign kingdoms - Princess Charlotte of Isleworth had even shown true concern for her when the issues of her paternity came about - but none was her ‘friend friend’. Valentina assumed that Elena had to be trying to put her off guard, and, still insecure after seeing how she truly couldn’t compare to Elena, simply went for her plan of impressing them.

But eventually, after an ordeal that involved her being overbearing to everyone in Elena’s palace, a crushing victory at olaball, and two accidentally-awakened Xolos, Valentina and Elena struck up a true friendship, and Valentina went back to Paraíso much happier than she had been when she left.

Which later turned out to be all the better for her, given everything she ended up having to face in Paraíso.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Rachael Dottle

I grew up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.1 That determined so much.

My maternal grandparents bought the house where I grew up in 1949. They were the rare Catholics in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and they lived at the edge of the city, a few blocks away from a Jesuit college and parish. They were entering their 40s, and that they could buy in tony Shaker carried a certain cachet. The city probably wasn’t quite as excited to have them. My paternal grandfather, who was a real estate agent and lived a town over, was sometimes told by sellers in Shaker that they didn’t want their homes shown to any Catholics (like him) or Jews. The city had few black residents then. After one black couple did move to Shaker in the mid-1950s, their newly built home was firebombed in the middle of the night. That determined so much, too.

Parma, a city on the other side of the Cuyahoga River — which bisects Cleveland both geographically and transcendentally — was on the precipice of a wild population sprout in ’49. The city’s neat rows of modest houses still speak to the enthusiasm of its post-war suburban sprawl. In the course of two decades, Parma’s population grew from 30,000 to more than 100,000. It was the butt of Cleveland jokes, though. In a blue-collar part of the country, Parma was almost too blue collar — its flamingos-on-the-lawn, pierogies-in-the-kitchen reputation was so infamously parodied by a local 1960s TV personality that the mayor of Parma called the comedy “a dangerous slur to the community.”

For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t. To Clevelanders, this split followed a certain logic. Shaker and Parma have long been of different tribes, though the same political party.

The two cities, one racially mixed, the other homogenous, have become my reference point for a cultural fissure in the Democratic Party that gaped open with the election of Trump. White Americans have split politically along class lines, and their alienation from each other following 2016 seems utter and complete. But the split that’s happening isn’t just between residents of rural and urban places. It’s also apparent in some suburbs, among people whose lives aren’t, at least on the surface, all that different from one another’s.

Much of my life since 2016 has been subsumed by politics talk — on podcasts, at parties, in conversations I scribble down in my notebook. Those discussions are often about how Americans find their tribe. Whom you date or befriend might hinge on politics. What city you move to might also, as well as what news you read and what books you take as gospel — whether you take the gospels as gospel matters politically, it turns out.

So, I decided to go home to look at the tribalism of where I’m from. Perhaps familiar ground might lead me down some road of insight. By dumb luck, we’re all born some place, to some kind of people. The choices made for and by us along the way, and the histories we absorb, are what shape our politics. They did in 2016, and they will again in 2020.

On the left, the Ridgewood Inn in Parma’s Polish Village. On the right, Shaker Heights High School’s bleachers.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

We don’t spend much time thinking about the suburbs. That’s sort of the point — they’re purposely and pleasantly boring, a cul-de-sac monolith of culture. But the suburbs also form the worldviews of 175 million Americans. Whom you live next to, where your parents went to school, what store opens down the street — all these small things shape the politics of Americans before they even know what politics are.

In the past few years, the suburbs have also shown themselves to be the heart of the shifting politics of the nation. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton lost the suburbs to Donald Trump in 2016, continuing a slump for Democrats — Obama lost the suburban vote in 2012 after nabbing it in 2008. But in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took back the House on the strength of their showing in suburban districts.

Lots of theories for the changing political proclivities of suburban Americans have been floated, and white Americans are front and center. (White people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties.) Class has something to do with it. Over the past few years, college-educated white people have been increasingly more apt to vote for Democrats, while those without a college education skew Republican.

But what do we mean when we talk about “class” and politics? While Trump’s campaign consistently served messages of blue-collar empowerment, the people who voted for him were often quite well-off. According to an analysis of American National Election Studies data, 1 in 5 Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Our concept of class is far too vaguely defined, and our political discussions of it too two-dimensional. Class means more than how much money you make or whether you went to college. It encompasses your understanding of racial identity — your own and that of others — and your perceptions of history, whether you look favorably or unfavorably on the country’s evolution. When we say “working-class white,” what we actually mean is a set of people whose understandings of politics is rooted in a specific set of values: those of racially homogenous communities who came up in America through middle-class jobs, often unionized ones.

If Democrats lose these voters in 2020 — both white blue-collar workers and their blue-collar-identifying descendants — it might portend a dramatically different party over the next few decades, or even century. When I went back to Ohio, I gleaned that how white people vote has quite a bit to do with their pasts — the formation of political identity comes from experiences, oftentimes inherited ones.

Parma and Shaker Heights lie on opposite sides of Cleveland’s metropolitan area and on opposite sides of a cultural divide. That cultural divide became a political one in 2016.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Politics are an iteration of ongoing history. So to understand Shaker’s and Parma’s present moment, I went back to the beginning.

Shaker Heights — current population, 28,000 — is named for the Shakers, the celibate Christian sect that settled in what they called “The Valley of God’s Pleasure.” The Shakers rather predictably lost their mojo around the turn of the 20th century because young people kept leaving, rumspringa-style. By 1905, the 1,366 acres of land they had worked found its way into the hands of real estate developers, the Van Sweringen brothers, who bought it for a cool million.

Shaker was to have neighborhood schools, lakes, canoeing, and no undesirables that would bring down home values. Deed restrictions stipulated architectural style, and only four were acceptable: Tudor, Colonial, French provincial and English cottage. (Historian Virginia Dawson has researched the city’s exclusionary real estate tactics extensively, cataloging the stringent regulations of Shaker’s early years.)

It was a rarified, exclusive atmosphere. An early advert talked about “friendly neighbors of our own kind … the peace and beauty and hominess of Shaker Village can never be invaded.”

Early advertisements for housing developments in what would become Parma.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

The crucial Van Sweringen innovation, though, was a railway line that took Shaker residents directly from their suburban homes to downtown Cleveland. “Open rolling country and deep woods lie beyond, yet the Public Square is but 30 minutes away by Shaker Electric Express,” an ad from 1926 read. Shaker was cosseted suburban life done to perfection yet still had access to the cosmopolitanism of Cleveland.

Perhaps that’s why early news and advertisements for the development that would become Parma conjured up visions of Shaker Heights. (Parma was incorporated as a city in 1931 and before that was known as Parma Township.) “In many ways, it will rival the Heights district,” a 1921 newspaper item said of Ridgewood, the brainchild of developer (and Shaker Heights Country Club member) H.A. Stahl. There were artificial lakes, and “many acres are set out in wonderful orchards,” an ad trumpeted. “Children … will grow strong and healthy out in Ridgewood. Three hundred and twenty-five feet above Lake Erie, where the air is pure and fragrant with the perfume of flowers.”

But the West Side development seemed ultimately more intent on attracting a humbler demographic. Stahl’s company promised that “the man of modest income can buy a homesite at the price of an ordinary lot in a manufacturing district and live amid beautiful surroundings.” And indeed, the real Parma boom came after World War II, driven by migration from the Eastern European Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. As Andy Fedynsky, director emeritus of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland tells it, Tremont’s big Ukrainian Catholic church had purchased a cemetery plot out in the suburb. “People started gravitating to Parma because every time they buried a loved one, they went there,” Fedynsky said. The churches and people kept coming in droves thanks to the 10-minute drive on the highway from Cleveland to Parma.

Parma’s identity has remained remarkably cohesive — 88 percent of its residents are white, and it’s still a community centered around churches and the Eastern European experience. Most of the city’s immigrants are European — 71 percent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Evidence of the city’s ethnic pride is still easy to see — on a recent visit, I spotted the Polish eagle on the side of one building and signs for “Old World Christmas” on street lights.

Shaker, meanwhile, has seen drastic change.

Homes in Shaker Heights.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Shaker was built for segregation, at the very least the socioeconomic kind. South Woodland, a lovely, tree-lined boulevard, cuts across the belly of the city, dividing it into north and south. The northern reaches are where the real wealth dwelled and still does — it’s where the Van Sweringens built themselves a Tudor fortress. There, larger lots for mansions were built, close to the Shaker Lakes. To the south of South Woodland, there are smaller lots, meant for modest dwellings, including two-family homes.

Neighborhoods on both sides of South Woodland evoked a certain suburban idyll, but the city was far from immune to the racial violence that typified 20th-century America.

The Baileys were a black family that bought a home in Shaker in 1925. Their garage was soon set on fire, and the windows broken. At the time, the Van Sweringens were adding provisions to deeds that stipulated homes couldn’t be sold to people they didn’t approve of. That was mostly code for black and Jewish buyers. The Baileys soon moved back to Cleveland.

Thirty-one years later, in Ludlow, a neighborhood that straddles Cleveland and Shaker, there was another act of racial violence, this one sparking a much different reaction. On Jan. 3, 1956, a bomb destroyed the garage and part of the dining room of John and Dorothy Pegg’s newly built home in Ludlow. The Peggs were black. In the wake of the bombing, a kind of proto-wokeness in the city was born. For decades to come, a part of Shaker’s identity would be its pride in diversity efforts.

Shaker’s Ludlow Community Association formed after the bombing of a black family’s home. The group tried to deter white flight by giving loans to white buyers while also trying to attract black residents to the Ludlow neighborhood that bordered Cleveland.

CLEVELAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY / SHAKER HEIGHTS LIBRARY

After the bombing, Ludlow residents formed the Ludlow Community Association, a group with aims to integrate the neighborhood purposefully. White real estate agents had stopped listing Ludlow homes by the time the community association formed because the neighborhood was integrating, and homeowners feared that a further increase in black residents would decrease property values. Its strategy was to prevent white flight by setting up a mortgage company, offering help to potential white buyers, while still welcoming black residents with open arms. It was a difficult proposition for the time.

Dawson, who lives in Shaker, lauded the careful strategy of the group. “The genius of the way Shaker Heights integrated was that they were trying to attract white liberals who would move in and become cheerleaders for integration,” she told me. To do that, the community association put white residents front and center, she said, even while black residents “were really the leaders.” Today, Ludlow remains an integrated neighborhood.

But elsewhere in Shaker, similar strategies worked with varying degrees of success on the integration front. The Moreland neighborhood had a less proactive neighborhood association, according to Dawson, and its white residents left. Today, it is nearly entirely black.

American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation. A 2011 analysis using Census Bureau data found that a “typical white” American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.

Shaker has spent 60 years trying to fight that. And in the process, the city cultivated what might be called, in the parlance of 2019, a woke white demographic. The identity of the city, which once rested on being wealthy and WASP-y, turned unmistakably liberal.

This sort of wokeness has become a trope in today’s Democratic Party, empowering to some, alienating to others. But there’s evidence that white Democrats’ views on race have shifted quite a bit over the past few years. In 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of white Democrats agreed with the idea that the country needs to make changes to give black Americans equal rights to white Americans. By 2017, 80 percent of white Democrats agreed with that position. This shift has come alongside gains for Democrats among white college-educated voters, which seems notable given the change in racial attitudes. Shaker has a lot of that well-educated demographic — 65 percent of the population has a college degree or higher.

Share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, based on the 2013-17 American Community Survey five-year estimate

Bachelor’s Degree or higher Shaker Heights 64.7%

–

Parma 20.7%

–

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Since I moved away, I haven’t spent much time in the parts of Shaker outside my family orbit — Van Sweringen geography still at work. But on a February afternoon, with time to kill, I took a drive around Moreland and found myself in front of Chelton Park, where I’d played summer-league softball as a kid. Moreland and Ludlow look a decent amount like Parma. Most of the homes around Chelton are doubles. In Ludlow, there’s a mix of the traditional Shaker colonials and Tudors, along with G.I.-era ranch-style homes. As I drove around the area, the street signs switched back and forth from the blue of Cleveland to the white-and-black lettering of Shaker.

Some called the traffic barricades separating Shaker Heights from Cleveland “the Berlin Wall for black people.” Portions of the barricades still stand.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Down the block from Chelton is Scottsdale Boulevard, the boundary between Shaker and Cleveland. During the 1970s, Shaker set up traffic barriers along Scottsdale in an effort, the city said, to control vehicle flow. To many, though, their purpose seemed clear: “the Berlin Wall for black people.” A couple of barriers are still there.

Most Shaker residents probably don’t like the “build the wall” chant that Trump has popularized, but they built one of their own here, years ago, a reminder that the city’s integration was done on its own particular set of terms; it wasn’t necessarily meant for everyone.

Parma was at the very least honest about its discriminatory practices.

“I do not want Negroes in the City of Parma,” City Council President Kenneth Kuczma said in 1971, garnering Parma all the wrong kinds of attention.

He made the statement at a public meeting on whether a proposed new development should have low-income housing. People were worried that Parmatown Woods would attract, as Mayor John Petruska put it at the meeting, the “entire east side of Cleveland,” a thinly veiled reference to black people. The comments were picked up on local and national TV, and the federal government soon got involved. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Parma, accusing it of engaging “in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in housing in violation of the Fair Housing Act.”

Parma’s Polish Village.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In 1970, Parma, a city of 100,000 people, had only 41 black residents, 0.04 percent of its population. The city was eventually found to have systematically discriminated and was mandated by the court to establish its own public housing committee and to advertise the community as welcoming to minority homeowners; unusually, city officials were required to take a course on housing discrimination. (Historian Dennis Keating, emeritus professor of urban studies and law at Cleveland State University, detailed the events surrounding the lawsuit and its fallout in his 1994 book, “The Suburban Racial Dilemma,” which focuses on Cleveland’s suburbs.)

Today, with a population of around 80,000, Parma is 3 percent black.

“There are places I won’t go here because I know I wouldn’t be welcome,” Karyn Dukes, who is black and lives in Parma, told me recently. “There’s a bar at the end of my corner” — I’d seen the Irish bar with cinder-block half-windows when I’d driven up her street — “I’ve never been there.”

Dukes told me that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them. “You’re scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there,” she said. “I feel like I have to put on this air. I feel like I can’t act like myself — ‘Hi, how are you!’” She put on an exaggerated perky voice.

Polish sweets at Rudy’s Strudel & Bakery in Parma.

CLARE MALONE

A couple of days earlier, I’d gone into one of those businesses to buy Polish jelly doughnuts. The place smelled like pure sugar, advertised polka dancing lessons and had a picture of Joe Biden on the wall. The woman behind the counter was lovely and insisted on giving me free doughnuts when she found out I was visiting from New York. It felt like a Cleveland hug of kindness, the kind of out-of-nowhere warmth I miss on the East Coast. Would Dukes have felt comfortable walking in, I wondered.

Dukes lives in the upstairs of a two-family home with her son, a sweet and gangly preteen. One of the reasons she moved to Parma nearly five years ago was for the schools, the better housing and the chance to be near her mother, who lives in a town not far away. “I think the area that I live in is a prime location,” she said. “There’s a Sam’s Club, a Walmart. There’s a park, bike trails, all that stuff.” Suburban-ideal kind of stuff.

The 2016 election made things hard for Dukes in Parma. She said that Trump yard signs made her feel like people were signaling that they didn’t believe in having people like her there. “I feel like people have had deep feelings about a lot of the issues that he raises, but they didn’t really say anything about it [before] because Cuyahoga County is predominantly a Democratic county.”

Parma has been shaped by the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing and by generations of close-knit communities of Eastern European descent.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In their book on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis,” political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck talk about something not far off from the phenomenon that Dukes describes: “Once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics.” The Democratic Party, it was becoming clear, was a party for liberal racial policies. That realization coincided with the party’s loss of white people without a college education. In 2008, roughly half of non-college-educated white people identified as Democrats and half as Republican. By 2015, the share that favored the GOP had grown to 57 percent, while the share that favored the Democrats had dropped to 33 percent.

Dukes told me that she is “an empathizer.” I asked what she thought it was that made some people in Parma hostile to people like her. (The politicians I talked to in the area — all white — said racism isn’t a problem anymore in Parma.) “I think because a lot of them were probably immigrants, from immigrant households themselves,” she said. “They probably feel they worked hard to build a community here so how come people of other races can just come in here and benefit from anything they’ve built.”

Dukes said she’s mostly worried about how the environment in Parma will affect her son. “I’m scared to let my son go down the street and play with other kids because I don’t know if their parents are OK with my son being black,” she said. “And that’s the most frightening part.”

“My son loves everyone,” she said. “I don’t want him to see color, but I also have to put the warning out to him.”

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter is a Democrat. So is most of the City Council, the city’s state representative and its Cuyahoga County Council member. “Right to Work Is A Lie” is emblazoned on a billboard above the highway near Parma. (Parma has a General Motors plant, and its United Auto Workers chapter is active.) Online, you can watch a 2008 video of a young Barack Obama working the rope line for an adoring crowd at one of Parma City School District’s high schools; a 2012 clip shows Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen rallying a Parma crowd in support of Obama.

Hillary Clinton footage?

“Their campaign didn’t focus on places like Parma,” DeGeeter told me, sitting next to Mickey Vittardi, the head of the city’s Democratic Party. The three of us were discussing which, if any, national Democrats could win the city back after 2016. Parma Democrats, DeGeeter said, were Reagan Democrats: “You know who plays best here — Joe Biden.”

Parma’s Democratic identity is a union identity. Its political history is a union town’s political history. That’s in part because the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing figure heavily into Parma’s well-being as a city. DeGeeter said that when GM announced the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, “we for sure got on the phone and talked to them.” What would happen if the GM plant in Parma closed, I asked. “I wouldn’t want to think about it,” the mayor said.

The Clinton campaign did send Biden to Parma in 2016, and he returned on a midterm swing through the area in 2018. The former vice president likes to commune with the blue-collar union demographic by talking about Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. Despite a national party that’s heavily flirting with left progressivism, Vittardi said that he was hopeful the Democratic presidential primary would winnow the field to a more moderate candidate. “My friends that I grew up with are strong Democrats, but they’re tired of our party sliding so far to the left,” he said.

In recent years, Parma has tried to court new residents with its affordable housing and cohesive sense of identity.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

While Parma’s Democratic identity comes from union politics, its cultural identity is probably best described as “white ethnic.” Because of that, it’s a place that’s well aware of Cleveland’s traditional ethnic geography. “So you’re Irish, what are you doing on the east side?” one person asked me a few minutes into a casual conversation, after he’d found out my last name and that I’d grown up across the river.

DeGeeter told me that the city’s Polish Village, paczki-laden Fat Tuesday celebrations and Ukrainian parades and festivals were real selling points for Parma. Young people, he told me, were eager to move to a community with cheap housing and a cohesive sense of identity.

“People work hard, play hard, want their kids to do better than they did, want their kids to go to college at the Kent States, the Bowling Greens, and be able to afford to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,” he said. And they want their politicians to confine themselves to kitchen table issues.

A couple of nights later, I was due in Parma for the city’s local Democratic Party meeting. My usual route west from Shaker takes me by Lake Erie, which I don’t just love for the blue haze it gets in summer or how the spray freezes into icicles in the winter. It’s a useful beauty — you could drink all 127 trillion gallons of fresh water if you needed to. But the route to Parma skirts inland, passing over the industrial heart of Cleveland, where belching towers of smoke sometimes take on the same pearlescent glow of clouds at sunset and shoot ribbons of flame into the night sky. It’s eerily, hellaciously captivating, a reminder, just like the lake, of what made the region. Someone recently said to me, “Who wants to read about Ohio? It’s not even beautiful.” This is just to say, of course it is. Some people just don’t know how to look. And if there is one thing I learned growing up in Ohio and then leaving it, it’s that people dismiss the place. They think it’s the past.

Bill Clinton visited Parma Pierogies Restaurant during his 1992 presidential campaign.

Joe Sohm / Visions of America / UIG via Getty Images

The party meeting was in a VFW hall tucked into a residential neighborhood. I arrived halfway through, and one official had already left for the Cavs game. The small crowd — all white — sipped beer and chatted. Jeff Crossman, who represents Parma in the Ohio House, nursed a beer and told me about a call that he’d gotten a couple of days after his November 2018 victory: “It was [Sen.] Sherrod Brown, and he had called to congratulate me. And we were talking about the [2020] general, and I told him how concerned I was that the national party narrative was hurting us in places like Ohio.” Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Crossman told me, ran the risk of “overpromising and underdelivering.” Ohioans probably weren’t going to go for “Medicare-for-all,” he said. “I don’t know that you can promise free tuition and free health care — it’s not free, first of all,” he said. “There’s a cost somewhere along the line. And I think people in Ohio are smart enough to know that. We’re very pragmatic.”

The break over, Ryan Puente, the soft-spoken, baby-faced executive director of the Cuyahoga County Democrats, got up to brief the crowd on November’s election. The performance of Ohio Democrats has been disappointing over the past couple of cycles, and Puente seemed well aware that his job was to boost morale by putting a spin on the numbers. “Is Ohio a red state?” he asked. “The short answer is ‘no.’”

A lot of that optimism about the competitiveness of the state centered on Brown’s performance. Puente was at particular pains to emphasize the importance of blue-collar suburbs like Parma that might be moving away from the Democratic Party. In Cuyahoga County, he noted, Brown outperformed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Richard Cordray, who lost his race to Republican Mike DeWine, by around 26,000 votes. Puente said that one way to keep Ohio competitive would be to bring all the people who had voted Democratic in the Senate election and Republican in the gubernatorial election back into the fold.

He wrapped up. Were there any questions?

A man wanted to know what to do about Republicans who kept tearing down yard signs by the UAW.

On the left, a flag supporting President Trump flies in Parma. On the right, a sticker in Shaker Heights protests the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer in 2014.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Given FiveThirtyEight’s predilections, I suppose the most pressing question at hand is whether the Democrats can re-unite the political interests of Parma and Shaker in 2020. Can they knit two different tribes back into a single cloth? Will the primary produce the moderate of Parma’s dreams who also appeals to the sensibilities of Shaker’s liberals? That’s what people like to talk your ear off about.

In some ways, though, this near-term political dilemma is far from the only interesting one — what comes after 2020 matters just as much. The realignment of white America’s politics along class lines is likely to continue to define our partisanship.

How that will play out in the culture is an unknown. White Shakerites live in a racially mixed city, a relative rarity in American life. But there is an alliance forming in the Democratic Party between minorities — who are estimated to become the majority in the U.S. by 2045 — and another group of college-educated white people, those who say they share a race-conscious worldview but who don’t live in the same cities as minorities or send their children to the same schools. What that portends for our politics after the upheaval of the Trump era isn’t entirely clear.

Already, that alliance can be tense, particularly on issues where politics are personal. In Shaker, for instance, the schools are ostensibly integrated, but some people feel black students have limited academic opportunities compared with white students.

“There are three Shakers,” Kevin Lowery, the current co-president of the Ludlow Community Association, told me recently. Lowery is black and the father of two children in Shaker’s public schools. He thinks the city isn’t doing enough to grapple with its inherent disparities. “You have your upper-class, elitist Shaker, you have your middle-class Shaker — and those groups have taken ownership of the city,” he said. “Then you have the third group of students that are lower middle class.” Many of those students are black, and in Lowery’s view, they’re treated differently by the city schools. The white parents “have their students placed in upper-level classes whether they can do the work or not,” he said. “But the African American parents and students are steered away.”

Shaker Heights has a diverse school system, but some people have questioned whether white and black students have the same educational opportunities.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

When I was in Shaker’s public schools, we all had to attend programming done by the Student Group on Race Relations to talk openly about our inherent biases, although our cafeteria, like so many others, was racially segregated. I was one of two white girls on the middle-school basketball team, but when I got to high school, I switched to the swim team, which was mostly white. Well-intentioned institutional forces were everywhere, pushing us to integrate, but as humans tend to do, a lot of us settled into what seemed like the most familiar territory.

And Shaker seems less preoccupied these days with proactively implementing pro-integration housing policies. The last loan-giving housing integration group in the city, The Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights, dissolved in 2012, handing over its funds to the Shaker Heights Development Corp. It was the end of a grand social experiment in housing integration. Mayor David Weiss told me that the transition to a focus on business development by no means marks an end to Shaker’s efforts to maintain a racially balanced city. “Inclusion is part of our identity and what we bring, part of who we are and part of what makes us different than other communities,” he said. (Full disclosure: My brother is a member of the Shaker Heights City Council.)

I still wonder if Shaker is special, though, or whether one day it too will regress to the American mean of segregation.

And then what? What does it mean to be politically allied with people you don’t live with? Perhaps Parma gives a glimpse of what happens when that distance becomes too much for a political alliance to bear.

Democrats have started attracting more white, college-educated Americans. Will that always be the case? A few months ago, I was writing a story about California, a state that’s so robustly Democratic that its politics are beginning to divide along class lines, as manifested in debates over housing and gentrification. Justin Garosi, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office there, told me that a lot of political conflicts in the state “aren’t so much left versus right as pro-development versus anti-development.”

What else could divide Americans in a future class-based political paradigm?

I’m not entirely sure, but it makes me wonder what it will mean, 10 or 20 years down the line, to have grown up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.

[rescuemom2020]

One of the many flaws I have is the inability to accept stupidity and the lack of common sense.It just takes me to the edge of pure unfiltered anger. I was not always this way.It has just gotten worse as I have gotten older. I was born with an innate ability to recognize those who had less than good intentions. The neighborhood pedophile,the friend of the family who wanted to sexually molest me under the guise of babysitting. I always just knew what they were thinking about. It made me uncomfortable,causing me to look around for a way to escape the horror I knew would come. Back in the late 60s early 70s people did not think about pedophiles,child abuse was unheard of and kidnapping and killing a child,if it happened,was covered up to the point that it never happened. I spent my early childhood locked in my pink and white girly bedroom,immersed in books. Escaping from the abuse dished out by the person who gave me life.Although she gave me life,she could not give me anything of positive value. I have a half brother but,he has never been a part of my family. He was named after my paternal grandfather,even though he shares no DNA with that side of the family.I can only assume it was an effort to kiss my grandfathers ass. Everyone knew he was not my fathers child. So,I am my fathers first born and a huge disapointment to her.I was born with paralyzed muscles in my right eye.Which gives my eye a lazy eye look and also prohibits my eye moving up or in tandem to my left eye.It gives me a look of being cross-eyed or my eye wanders .My paternal aunt advised her to put a patch over my left eye in order for my right eye to strengthen.She never bothered.Instead,because I was damaged,she did everything she could to let me know I was stupid,would never amount to anything and she would make sure I knew that everyday. There are few days that I remember not being bullied or teased. I also can not name one teacher that made a lasting,positive impression on me. Maybe it was because I came from a small town,where everyone knew my paternal grandparents and also knew my maternal grandparents who I might add were the subject of lurid gossip. Everyone knew that maternal grandmother was sneaking into the farm workers living quarters and having sex with my maternal grandfather.This was during the middle 30s to the beginning of the 40s. It was a huge scandal. In the meantime,my maternal greatgrandfather and my maternal grandfather had a conversation in the back of an ambulance in 1940.Greatgrandfather had a massive heart attack,and he made my grandfather promise him,on his death bed, that he would NOT marry the woman he was currently involved with.According to GreatGrand,she would ruin him,bring shame on the family and destroy his only son. He promised and then broke the promise he had made to the father he loved and respected. I truly believe that by breaking that promise,he caused something akin to a curse. Many people back in the 1700 to 1900s believed in bad blood.I know my family believed it. I could never figure out why we were treated differently in the family.Not by my Paternal Grandparents but by my aunts and uncles. I didnt find out until I was 50 years old.

[dweemeister]

Movie Odyssey Retrospective

Oliver! (1968)

It would be wrong to read any of the reviews on this blog as unbiased. When biases are personal, reviewers should not be afraid to reveal their biases, so here are mine. Some months after Carol Reed’s Oliver! was released to North American theaters, my paternal grandfather – an honor guard unit in the South Vietnamese military – saw the film, presumably with Vietnamese subtitles or someone over-dubbing the audio. Upon fleeing to the United States and settling in Indiana after the Fall of Saigon on April 1975, my grandfather passed along his love of Oliver! to my father when the film aired on television. And, as you might guess, my dad passed along arguably his favorite movie musical to me at an early age. Oliver! is an early childhood favorite (being an easily scared kid, the movie somehow never creeped me out, and today I can sing the songs from heart), and almost certainly the first non-Disney musical I was ever exposed to. Based on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and the West End musical based on the book, how remarkable that Oliver’s story and Lionel Bart’s beautiful musical score found its way to South Vietnam amid a year of international political turmoil and the deadliest year for North and South Vietnamese and American forces.

I avoid writing on Academy Awards history in these reviews, too, so this paragraph will be an aberration. Films that win Best Picture are, in a way, burdened with the title. They are subject to greater outrage and scrutinized more closely than other nominees and non-nominees are. Oliver!, by virtue of being released the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey (and also by being more popular in Britain than in America), has suffered with this burden. In an Internet culture that discourages nuance while talking about Oscar history and rewards proclamations for how much smarter one is than the Academy for recognizing one movie over another, this subsequent statement might be unpopular. I think 2001 is the better film and deserves its masterpiece status, but I think Oliver! is fantastic and, if given the choice to watch one or the other, give me Oliver! every single time. For those behind and in front of the camera during Oliver!, they should be nothing but proud of what they brought to this movie.

We first meet Oliver Twist (Mark Lester; singing dubbed by Kathe Green) at a workhouse outside London alongside his fellow orphan boys. They are served gruel every day – much to their disdain. As a stunt and for drawing the longest straw, Oliver will go up to the overseer Mr. Bumble (Harry Secombe) and utter those immortal lines: “Please sir, I want some more” (”WHAT?!”). The workhouse’s board of directors quickly decide that Oliver should be sold off. Bumble will sell Oliver to an undertaker, but the young boy will escape and make his way to London. Minutes after arriving, Oliver encounters another young boy named the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild), who makes Oliver feel welcome and promises him a place to stay for the night. Dodger leads Oliver to a near-abandoned corner of London – abandoned with the exception of a cadre of young boys working for the aging Fagin (Ron Moody) as pickpockets. Even for those unfamiliar with this narrative, I think you can see where this is going. Also critical to the plot are the violent, abusive criminal Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed); Nancy (Shani Wallis, Nancy is Bill’s lover); and a gentleman named Mr. Brownlow (Joseph O’Connor). Hugh Griffith cameos as a magistrate.

Charles Dickens, being the writer that he was, might be horrified by how Lionel Bart adapted his novel for the West End. The original novel – touching upon class disparities, skewering characters profiting from child labor, and even attracting justified accusations of anti-Semitism in its depiction of Fagin – is necessarily simplified here, offering comedic angles where there previously were none. Bart, who wrote the music and lyrics for Oliver!, made Fagin more sympathetic (Bart was Jewish) and shifted his focus from early nineteenth century British class tensions (which remains in the film adaptation as well, but is deemphasized due to its specificity) to themes of belonging and the importance of families – surrogate and otherwise. Other musical adaptations have done a better job retaining their source material’s darker themes, but given that Oliver’s arc from overworked and underfed child slave to a misguided “criminal” to a fully loved and welcomed member of a family remains, not all is lost.

There is no one character that ever dangles far from actual belonging, but their relationships to those who they feel they belong with vary. Oliver is physically and spiritually itinerant in the opening minutes, searching for someone or someplace willing to respect and nourish him. He believes he has found it with Fagin’s gang – it would be wrong to deny whatever positive feelings he keeps with his time with Fagin and his young pickpockets – but will realize the violence, personified by Bill Sikes, lurking underneath the surface. The most complicated case is Nancy, who clearly loves Bill even if his behavior is finally beginning to break her. Decades before the ideas of toxic relationships and hamstrung by Dickens’ near-predestined treatment of his characters, Nancy is a woman who has outgrown from her love with Bill, but that same love renders her unable to see life without him. She is a tragic character that never understands the agency she might have until the very end (in which she is punished for it, but the punisher pays dearly) – Oliver! may be no feminist triumph, but it clearly respects Nancy as a character and her dreams even if she never breaks from the poisonous masculinity impacting her life.

When adapting stage musicals for Hollywood productions, the norm is to cut a handful of songs; in rare instances, like West Side Story (1961) and My Fair Lady (1964), none of the songs are cut even if a few lyrics are rearranged. Carol Reed cut three songs for his adaptation of Oliver! – a decision which strengthens and streamlines the movie – including the Bumbles’ “I Shall Scream!”, “That’s Your Funeral” (sung by the Sowerberrys, the undertaker family, to intimidate Mr. Bumble and Oliver), and “My Name” (sung by Bill as a sort of introductory song). All of these cuts are made in service of decisions where the ideas in each of these songs might better be represented visually. Cutting “I Shall Scream!” is Reed’s decision to maintain the focus on Oliver in the early minutes and downplaying the Bumbles’ role in the film. The points in “That’s Your Funeral” and “My Name” are made obvious enough by the actors – Mark Lester, who looks fearful throughout the movie, captures Oliver’s fear of the Sowerberrys and the movie already hammers home the idea that everyone is terrified of Bill Sikes.

The strength of Lionel Bart’s musical score to Oliver! endures. The singing is excellent, and thankfully it is only Mark Lester who has to have his singing voice dubbed (for the record, I largely do not consider dubbing singing voices as a sin for movie musicals – maybe I am lenient to a fault) “Food, Glorious Food” (sung by the Temple Choir of London under the direction of Sir George Thalben-Ball; they also sang “Consider Yourself”) barely needs an introduction, even for those tangentially aware of this musical’s existence. No political diatribes needed, just desperate, bony boys fantasizing about food that is not gruel. As Bumble, Harry Secombe – an established tenor – can belt out “Boy for Sale” and display his masterful pipes. It takes a little bit to find a character-building song in “Where Is Love?”, but the song is a success in its simplicity and heartrending lyrics.

After Oliver escapes the Sowerberrys and finds himself in London, Bart’s songs are empowered: Onna White’s choreography. Making use of space that could not be possible on a theater stage, White gifts the film with choreography respective to the workers (the meatpackers move in ways that make sense given their job, as do the high-strung policemen) seen in “Consider Yourself” – the dance direction is never tedious, and there is so much interest packed into the screen on this busy London day while keeping some sense of distance and geometric sense (there is no rapid cutting or close-up cinematography to disorient the viewer from location). And if that was not enough, “Who Will Buy?” is a valedictory, post-intermission triumph as morning vendors gradually populate the streets just outside of Mr. Brownlow’s home. Fans of Pete’s Dragon (1977) will recognize White’s choreographic style in the two excellent pub songs led by Shani Wallis as Nancy: “It’s a Fine Life” (which serves to introduce the audience to Nancy and develop the character and her relationship with Bill Sikes) and “Oom-Pah Pah” (another celebratory song, but it doubles as having a function for the resolving scenes). White contributes to the scope of Bart’s score, lending an intrigue not as apparent in the stage musical.

Not as ambitious or essential to characterization or plot progression but closest to my heart is “I’d Do Anything” – a more modest song still benefiting from White’s dance direction. Like so many songs in Oliver!, it is pure unadulterated joy to watch and listen to. There may be minimal clever wordplay, but the score wears its emotions on the sleeve and expresses them honestly, and is beautifully orchestrated and arranged.

For the performers, Mark Lester is slightly disappointing as Oliver – a bit of a blank slate, but Dickens did not care to enrich his eponymous protagonist with much character either. Beyond that, Harry Secombe is great for the short time Mr. Bumble is in the film and Oliver Reed (Carol Reed’s nephew) is a physical menace as Bill Sikes. The young Jack Wild has the perfect surname and is a natural as the rapscallion Dodger – a character more mature than the adults probably give him credit for. But the two best performances belong to Shani Wallis and Ron Moody. Wallis, as Nancy, is luminous despite having to put up with the indiscretions of the men surrounding her. Wallis embodies Nancy totally: she shows us how Nancy clearly cares for the young pickpockets in Fagin’s gang and, seeing Oliver’s gentleness, wants only the healthiest and happiest possible life for our title character. I am just surprised Wallis did not become a bigger star following the film’s release. Opposite her, Ron Moody is a riot as Fagin. The fourth choice behind Peter O’Toole (too expensive), Peter Sellers (who declined the part after a late stage in negotiations), and Dick Van Dyke, Moody (regarded in Britain; unknown in the United States) is a shining example how those who originate stage musical parts – usually not the first choice among movie studio executives – excel when given the damn part. Moody’s comedic timing is incredible, and his ability to make a villainous character so sympathetic without being a punchline is something I am not sure O’Toole or Sellers could have accomplished.

Also of note behind the camera: Oswald Morris’ fluid cinematography and Ralph Kemplen’s editing are most noticeable during the musical segments and keep the narrative flow at a brisk pace that emphasizes the scope when needed to and cuts down on the excessive pomp. The production design by art director John Box and set decorator Terence Marsh and the costume design by Phyllis Dalton places us in the mid-nineteenth century – going beyond a movie soundstage (okay, aside from the fact the production is quite large and never emphasizes confined spaces) and inundating the seedier parts of London with detail. For Oliver!, the film uses a greater proportion of open-air sets than the average stage-to-screen musical adaptation, and the film feels more lived-in as a result.

The producers at Romulus Films and the distributing executives at Columbia lavished their expenses on Oliver!. They permitted a long six months of rehearsal before any film shoots began. That is more than double, sometimes triple, the preparation time needed for a new production of a stage play or musical – resulting in a movie adaptation of Oliver! that exceeds the limitations of the source material and confines of a theater.

1960s movie musicals represented the last remnants of a Studio System Hollywood – where the immense theatricality in such wholesome (Oliver! is not without some darkness) musicals matched their scope. Oliver! arrived after the end of the Studio System, but was created by individuals who had long operated in that environment. It is a tremendous film, regardless of the adapted material. For children, the film can serve as an introduction to Dickensian England and the injustices and indignities the most societally vulnerable faced in those times. Oliver, having lived in the workhouse all of his life, has never understood love before fleeing to London. He finds fragments of love with Dodger and Fagin, and pieces them together with the help of Nancy and Mr. Brownlow. The first acts of kindness are overdue, but it is to the film’s credit that Oliver is a gracious recipient.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

This is the eleventh Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are write-ups on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include Dracula (1931), Dumbo (1941), and 12 Angry Men (1957).

[cincinnatiburn]

accepted - kurt hummel

thank you to all those who applied for kurt. it was a very difficult decision but i am so glad to accept aly. please follow the checklist and welcome to the game.

out of character information

My name is Aly and I’m 26. I live in Michigan, so I occupy the eastern timezone. I typically stick to the glee rp community playing Kurt, but occasionally I try Sebastian, Marley, and Ryder. I’ve also been known to play Jughead Jones, original characters, and occasionally Hummel twins in multiples groups. I can be found on Skype as alyjfc and my tumblr url is currently kurtsrp (previously jugheadjonesrps). I’m currently in school and working part time in one of the offices on campus Monday through Thursday, so I’m mostly around at night and on weekends. I’m super laid back and chill, so I don’t bite unless you’re super rude.

general statistics

BASIC

NAME: Kurt Elijah Hummel. NICKNAMES: None pre-established. AGE: 29. BIRTHDAY: 06-12-1990. GENDER: Cismale. PRONOUNS: he/him. ZODIAC SIGN: Gemini. MOTHER: Catherine Elizabeth Hummel (née Fulton) FATHER: Burt Atticus Hummel PARENTS: Burt and Catherine Hummel. FAMILY: Lucy Quinn Fabray (maternal cousin), Francis Anne Fabray (maternal cousin), Judith Lynn Fabray (née Fulton, maternal aunt), Atticus Elijah Hummel (paternal grandfather), Carolyn Anne Hummel (paternal grandmother), Andrew James Fulton (maternal grandfather), Rose Elizabeth Fulton (maternal grandmother). SIBLINGS: None.

LIFESTYLE

BORN: Ann Arbor, Michigan RAISED: Ann Arbor, Michigan VEHICLE: Black 2014 Chevy Impala LTZ PETS: Adopted a kitten named Cat Benetar. POLITICAL AFFILIATION: Liberal. RELIGION: Non-religious from a traditionally Catholic family. BELIEFS: Kurt doesn’t believe that any higher power would be cruel enough to take away his mother, therefore he doesn’t believe that there is one. He believes in science, evolution, and facts proven without a shadow of a doubt. MISDEMEANORS: None. FELONIES: None. TICKETS AND/OR VIOLATIONS: One speeding ticket at 17 for driving 5 over. He’s been diligent about keeping to the speed limit since. DRUGS: Recreationally only. He isn’t interested in anything hard and only smokes weed while partying. Otherwise, he prefers the high of being around his friends, dancing, and having a good time. He’s far from interested in becoming a drug Queen. SMOKES: Weed occasionally, but only socially. ALCOHOL: He’s an alcoholic by no means, but he does have a tendency to shoot one too many tequila shots and insist on dancing on the bar. His preferences lie in Manhattans or Margaritas - anything with whiskey or tequila. He’s not incredibly particular, but he’s definitely not a fan of beer. DIET: While Kurt is typically very meticulous about his diet, he definitely divulges in a good cheesecake now and again. He has a sweet tooth when he’s feeling particularly down, otherwise he sticks well to his salads, smoothies, and ridiculous amounts of coffee.

interview section

“ just to get us comfortable and started, tell us a bit about yourself in your own words.”

My name is Kurt Hummel and I’m a social worker living, breathing, and loving in Cincinnati, Ohio. That doesn’t sound as fabulous or appealing as New York or L.A, right? That’s wrong, actually. Cincinnati is a gem of a city and it’s become a home away from my home in Michigan. I have a kitten by the name of Cat Benetar and a lifetime gym membership.  

“ we’ve heard you be referred to as the savior of fire street, is that a serious thing or a joke among friends? ”

I wouldn’t exactly call myself the savior of anything, unless you’re referring to my ingenious moisturizing routine because that’s something to be commended for. I’m sure what you’re referring to has to do with the fact that I don’t believe all gay men have to fit the stigma of lacking morals and sleeping with whoever they can get their dick into. Being gay doesn’t equate to being horny twice as often as any other guy. We’re just as capable of love, romance, and commitment as any other couple. Whether that love last a night, a week, or a year. It’s not a foreign concept. And I mean, yeah, I help kids. But that doesn’t make me a savior. Just a decent human being.

“ the image of the gay man has certainly changed over the years, what image of a gay man do you think you reflect? ”

The one’s that work hard to live the kind of life that they desire but still have a good time at the end of the day. The workaholics that care more about the lives of those around them than their own. The romantics that believe there’s love out there and not just steam rooms and one night stands.

“ some guys seem to have a lot of notches on their bedposts, do you feel like you are one of those kind of guys? or do you collect hearts? ”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with spreading a little love around. You won’t find the man of your dreams without kissing a few frogs. Sometimes that means putting another notch in the bedpost and other times it’s just a blow job behind the 7-11 (not romantic and quite the desperate act, I’ll admit; but he had great abs and a 401k - he would have been a wonderful husband). But I prefer the more romantic things in life. What’s wrong with wanting to feel appreciated or admired? I’ve certainly had my fair share of beaus, but I’m just waiting for the right guy to come along. That doesn’t mean I’m keeping the hearts of men in jars in my basement. I’d at least give them the courtesy of mantle space.

“ there is a lot more to come, so where do you see your life heading in the future? ”

At some point I’d like to settle down and have a family. That’s probably ridiculously trite. Some boys want to get high and sleep around and I want to find my soulmate and have kids. Working with them, even though they’re usually in trouble, has really had me thinking about having my own. I have to find a husband first, of course. But I’m working on it.

[daziechane]

Bear the Babies, Bear the Brunt

(an essay for English 306, Environmental Literature, University of Kansas, Spring 2016)

Bear the Babies, Bear the Brunt

“By slow violence, I mean a violence that occurs gradually, and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” (Nixon, 2)

 “That night our mother went to the shop and she didn’t come back. Ever.”  (Gordimer, 11)  With those few words, Nadine Gordimer sums up the bleak reality that many women and children face when affected by slow violence as Rob Nixon describes it. Whether it be from erosion picking away at their fields, or from aftermath of war dooming them to becoming refugees, women and children across the globe bear the brunt of delayed destruction.  In The Ultimate Safari, a small family of orphans, displaced by war, accompanies their grandparents across dangerous Kruger Park to reach relative safety.  This story brings up important points about being women or children faced with not only the real and present dangers of wild animals or warring factions, but women and children faced with the "slow" dangers of malnutrition, access to healthcare, and the burdens women especially must take on when men aren't around.

In The Ultimate Safari, the family is often without any food, and almost always without nourishing food. "Little Brother" suffers the most, with a healthcare worker suggesting to his sister that "there's something wrong with his head, she thinks it's because we didn't have enough food at home, Because of the war. Because our father wasn't there." (Gortimer, 18) More to the point, because of the war, the family lost what little it had in terms of farmland, livestock, and income.          

"Our grandfather used to have three sheep and a cow and a vegetable garden but the bandits had long ago taken the sheep and the cow, because they were hungry, too; and when planting time came our grandfather had no seed to plant." (Gortimer, 12)  

While this story is a fictional account, access to the benefits of healthy food is a focal point for many environmental justice studies, including that of Alison Hope Alkon and Kari Marie Norgaard, whose study Breaking the Food Chains: An Investigation of Food Justice Activism revealed

"Through access to land and water, black farmers and Karuk fishermen once provided  the bulk of their community's food needs.  Today, West Oakland residents and Karuk tribal members live in food deserts.  They cannot purchase what they once produced on their own."  (Hope, 300)

Alkon and Norgaard also discovered that "because of the greatly reduced ability...to provide healthy food to their community, the Karuk experience extremely high rates of hunger and disease."  (Hope, 299) Diseases such as diabetes and heart disease are markedly higher in both populations that were studied, and it is attributed to the fact that the communities have been denied access to traditional food sources, such as family farms and rivers full of fish.  

           Little Brother’s health problems also highlight another sad fact of slow violence, that of poor, indigenous peoples’ inadequate access to adequate healthcare, as well as increased exposure to environmental contaminants. In their study Indigenous Peoples of North America: Environmental Exposure and Reproductive Justice, Elizabeth Hoover et al. examined the fact that 

“Indigenous American communities face disproportionate health burdens and environmental health risks compared with the average North American population. These health impacts are issues of both environmental and reproductive justice.”  (Hoover, 1645)    

What the team discovered was that after years of poor treatment and historic antagonism toward non-native governments, some native communities deliberately avoided seeking help and assisting research that would alleviate continued illness in the community.  

           It would be easy for some to write off Hoover’s work as being “just” about Indigenous Americans, and fail to see the bigger picture of healthcare and environmental impacts on groups of lower socioeconomic standing worldwide, but a recent study Climate change and fetal health: The impacts of exposure to extreme temperatures in New York City, penned by Nicole S. Ngo and Radley M. Horton, researchers found that “increasing heat events from climate change could adversely impact birth weight.”  (Ngo, 158)  Their study focused on New York City, “not only due to its large urban population of 8.4 million, but because temperatures in NYC increased approximately 1.5℃ between 1901 and 2011.”  (Ngo, 158)   This is obviously of worldwide concern, and even more so as we consider Little Brother’s upbringing in sub-Saharan Africa.  Researcher Kyle Clendinning wrote “Projections show that the African continent is likely to warm this century with the largest temperature increases occurring in the drier sub-tropical regions.” (Clendinning)  It is also interesting to note that Clendenning went on to say “As environmental resources decline due to climate change, so too will the livelihoods of those dependent upon them. Taken together, these challenges can increase the prospects for violent conflict.” (Clendinning)  Since Little Brother was born during wartime, in sub-Saharan Africa, we can postulate that maternal stress, poor nutrition, and excessive heat all contributed to his health problems during and after his family’s relocation.  

           Nadine Gordimer contrasts Little Brother’s weakness (albeit- weakness not his fault) with the strength of Gogo, the grandmother.  Interestingly enough, Gogo is the only person in The Ultimate Safari who is granted a name.  This alone would set her apart in the story, but her actions go further.  Unlike patriarchal family structure more familiar to Western readers, Gogo’s family organization is decidedly matriarchal.   From the very start of the story, we see what the children’s mother had to do after their father had gone, she fixed the roof after “bandits” burned the village, she walked through a decimated village to get oil for cooking.   After mother’s disappearance, Gogo took on the responsibility of the children’s safety, even though she was already dealing with a husband who had some problems of his own.  Gogo scavenged for greens for the family, she sold her clothes, even her church shoes, all to help her little family make the arduous journey through Kruger Park.  When it came time to make the decision to remain looking for her husband or helping the children to shelter, Gogo put her own needs aside and made sure the children were safe.  Time and again she was forced by circumstance to make tough decisions, and to bear the brunt of the family’s problems.  

While this matriarchal hierarchy might seem unusual to Western readers, African women in the past were traditionally farmers and cultivators. However, due to “the colonial bureaucracy’s authoritarian paternalism” (Nixon, 139), women were supplanted in their role of provider by men, often with disastrous effects, such as the soil erosion in Kenya due to deforestation that drove Wangari Maathai to start her Green Belt Movement. According to Rob Nixon, in his chapter on Maathai,

“Rural women suffered the perfect storm of dispossession: colonial land theft; the individualizing and masculinizing of property; and the experience of continuing to be the primary tillers of the land under increasingly inclement circumstances, including soil erosion and the stripping of the forests. As forests and watersheds become degraded, it was the women who had to walk the extra miles to fetch water and firewood; it was the women who had to plough and plant in once rich but now denuded land.” (Nixon, 140)  

Even though it was her husband who’d had the livestock, and who had looked for the children’s mother with help from young men from the village, it was Gogo who shouldered the burden of getting everyone to safety as best as possible.  “So they decided - our grandmother did; our grandfather made little noises and rocked from side to side, but she took no notice - we would go away.” (Gordimer, 12)

           In this way, Gogo echos strong women of the past, including Rosie the Riveter, and even my own grandmother, Lois Allen, who was a schoolteacher in rural Nevada, serving mostly poor areas.  In a recent biography of Allen, my mother Shirley Mink wrote:                        

“At one point during the summertime construction, there was a spate of vandalism, broken windows, graffiti, and the like.  Sun Valley still had no law enforcement quartered in the community, so Lois decided she would prevent further damages.  Every evening for a few weeks, she took her dog, drove to the school from her home in Sparks, and remained there overnight.  She made sure the word got out that there would be someone in the building at night, and the vandalism stopped.”  (Mink, 3)

Just as Gogo sold her belongings to ensure her family’s safety, Lois Allen did what she had to do to make sure “her” children had what they needed (ie: a school) to succeed, even though they were poor and from a rural area.

           We can look at The Ultimate Safari as a thrilling adventure story, full of outlaws and wild animals, we can see it as a commentary on postcolonial ecotourism, or we can view it as an ecological justice piece, which reveals the delayed destruction and attritional violence that Rob Nixon describes, especially as it affects women and children.  As the narrator of the story says “We were in the war, too, but we were children...we didn’t have guns.  (Gordimer, 11)

  Works Cited

Alkon, Alison Hope, and Kari Marie Norgaard. "Breaking the Food Chains: An Investigation of Food Justice Activism*." Sociological Inquiry 79.3 (2009): 289-305. Web.

Clendinning, Kyle. "Climate Change and Conflict: The Implications for Sub-Saharan Africa." Earth Reform. 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 10 Mar. 2016.

Gordimer, Nadine. "The Ultimate Safari." 10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing.  Oxford: New Internationalist, 2009. Print.

Hoover, Elizabeth, Katsi Cook, Ron Plain, Kathy Sanchez, Vi Waghiyi, Pamela Miller, Renee Dufault, Caitlin Sislin, and David O. Carpenter. "Indigenous Peoples of North America: Environmental Exposures and Reproductive Justice." Environ Health Perspect Environmental Health Perspectives (2012). Web.

Mink, Shirley L. "A Biography of Lois Allen." Biography.

Ngo, Nicole S., and Radley M. Horton. "Climate Change and Fetal Health: The Impacts of Exposure to Extreme Temperatures in New York City." Environmental Research 144 (2016): 158-64. Web.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

[consciouscliff]

Before you read this article about domestic violence, I want you to know a few things.  First, I’m not writing this for sympathy or pity; second, this is not an easy subject to write about; third, what I am writing is true and not exaggerated; and fourth, I hope that in reading this, it will help someone find help, leave this situation, or reach out to those who may know someone in this situation.

I’m writing about something serious that could possibly be affecting someone near you.  If you know someone is being abused, if you think you hear someone being abused, don’t hesitate to call it in to 911 or directly to the police.  You never know if that person is being beat daily or if they are at the end of their rope. Whether it is your neighbor, your relative, co-worker, classmate, or fellow church goer, you ought to feel obligated to intervene or provide help in some way.

It is the moral thing to do, it is the Christian thing to do, and it is the ethical thing to do, it is never the wrong thing to help someone who is a victim of domestic violence.

Clifford

My first memories as a child are those of domestic violence, where I witnessed my biological father assault my mother as I sat on the floor a few feet away watching cartoons.  He was a boxer for many years, and she was an average woman half his size.

Other moments of abuse happened when my paternal aunts and uncles were present at my the house of my paternal grandparents in Clarksville, during episodes of abuse.  Nobody intervened, not Andy, not Bobbi, and not Earl.  None of these aunts or uncles who claim to love me, loved me enough to keep my mother from being assaulted and beat up by a trained boxer.

Nobody from his family was man enough to step in to stop the abuse, spare her the humiliation, or keep the woman crying in front of them safe.  Nobody said stop, nobody called the police, nobody called an ambulance, and nobody helped her escape.

In the later years of their marriage, my biological father not only assaulted my mother but held her at gunpoint in front of me because he thought she might be cheating on him.  Those early memories that should be happy and filled with love are instead filled with memories of my mother crying for help and begging him to stop.

Although we lived in a small, thin-walled apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nobody came to help my mother.  She had to risk her life escaping with me, drive out of state, and hope that he wasn’t brave enough to harm her at work or in front of her family.

Many years later, when I finally lived with my father, I was abused verbally and mentally.  I was used as a means for him to exploit and steal from while I was in the military.

Mike

My second step-father, Mike Tilley, started out as a nice, somewhat charismatic, and hard-working person.  When he  married mother, that changed and he became verbally and physically abusive to both of us.  In order for my mother to keep me away from most of the abuse, she sent me to church on Sundays.  In all the years my mother was married to Mike, nobody ever came to rescue my mother or me when we lived in town when we were being abused.

He wasn’t as bad when he was sober, but when he would drink, he would slap my mother and talk down to her.  He physically assaulted me a few times, until one Thanksgiving I snapped at him.  I was 11 or 12 when he threatened to beat me in front of my maternal grandparents and one of my uncles, which resulted in me running at him to beat him as badly as I could.  My grandfather and my uncle were barely able to hold me back.

Finally, after three years, she left him in the middle of night. I remember my mother and I coming home late on a school night, but when we came in one of his friends was inside the home waiting for his and acting weird, and said we needed to wait for Mike.  My mother grabbed me and we rushed out the door just a few seconds later.  My mother then sped down our long, winding, unpaved driveway in the outskirts of Dardanelle, driving towards town as fast as possible.  As we made it part way down the drive way, Mike came speeding up the driveway and attempted to run us off the road.

If we had not left when we did, I might not be alive today even though friends and his family knew he became violent when he was drunk.

Resolution

I am partially a product of domestic violence, but it does not define me.  Although I was traumatized by it growing up, it has prevented me from living my life or helping others.  However, this is not the case for most of the people who grow up in this environment.  Domestic violence is a common problem in America, in Arkansas, in Pope County, and in Russellville. The good news is no matter where you live, you can help someone escape it or prevent it from becoming someone’s life.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence:

On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.1

1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of [some form of] physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime.1

1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.1

1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.1

On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.9

The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.10

Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime.2

Women between the ages of 18-24 are most commonly abused by an intimate partner.2

19% of domestic violence involves a weapon.2

Domestic victimization is correlated with a higher rate of depression and suicidal behavior.2

Only 34% of people who are injured by intimate partners receive medical care for their injuries.2

CHILDREN AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

1 in 15 children are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, and 90% of these children are eyewitnesses to this violence.5

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Victims of intimate partner violence lose a total of 8.0 million days of paid work each year.6

The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $8.3 billion per year.6

Between 21-60% of victims of intimate partner violence lose their jobs due to reasons stemming from the abuse.6

Between 2003 and 2008, 142 women were murdered in their workplace by their abuser, 78% of women killed in the workplace during this time frame.4

PHYSICAL/MENTAL IMPACT

Women abused by their intimate partners are more vulnerable to contracting HIV or other STI’s due to forced intercourse or prolonged exposure to stress.7

Studies suggest that there is a relationship between intimate partner violence and depression and suicidal behavior.7

Physical, mental, and sexual and reproductive health effects have been linked with intimate partner violence including adolescent pregnancy, unintended pregnancy in general, miscarriage, stillbirth, intrauterine hemorrhage, nutritional deficiency, abdominal pain and other gastrointestinal problems, neurological disorders, chronic pain, disability, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as noncommunicable diseases such as hypertension, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Victims of domestic violence are also at higher risk for developing addictions to alcohol, tobacco, or drugs.7

National Network to End Domestic Violence:

Red Flags of Abuse

Get Help for Yourself or a Friend

Domestic violence encompasses a spectrum of behaviors that abusers use to control victims. The following list includes warning signs that someone may be abusive. If you or a friend experience these behaviors from a partner, remember: it is not your fault and there are advocates waiting to help.

“Red flags” include someone who:

Wants to move too quickly into the relationship.

Early in the relationship flatters you constantly, and seems “too good to be true.”

Wants you all to him- or herself; insists that you stop spending time with your friends or family.

Insists that you stop participating in hobbies or activities, quit school, or quit your job.

Does not honor your boundaries.

Is excessively jealous and accuses you of being unfaithful.

Wants to know where you are all of the time and frequently calls, emails, and texts you throughout the day.

Criticizes or puts you down; says you are crazy, stupid, and/or fat/unattractive, or that no one else would ever want or love you.

Takes no responsibility for his or her behavior and blames others.

Has a history of abusing others.

Blames the entire failure of previous relationships on his or her former partner; for example, “My ex was totally crazy.”

Takes your money or runs up your credit card debt.

Rages out of control with you but can maintain composure around others.

Abuse is never the fault of the victim and it can be hard for many reasons, including safety, to end the relationship. If you experience these “red flags,” you can confide in a friend or reach out for support from a domestic violence advocate. If you believe a friend or relative is being abused, offer your nonjudgmental support and help.

For help and information:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or TTY 1-800-787-3224

Womens Law Email Hotline: hotline.womenslaw.org

Frequently Asked Questions about Domestic Violence

1. What is domestic violence?

Domestic violence is a pattern of coercive, controlling behavior that can include physical abuse, emotional or psychological abuse, sexual abuse or financial abuse (using money and financial tools to exert control).

Domestic violence is a pervasive, life-threatening crime that affects millions of individuals across the United States regardless of age, economic status, race, religion or education.

High-profile cases of domestic violence will attract headlines, but thousands of people experience domestic abuse every day. They come from all walks of life.

In a 24-hour survey, NNEDV found that U.S. domestic violence programs served 72,245 victims and answered 20,352 crisis hotline calls in one day alone. [1]

Batterers make it very difficult for victims to escape relationships. Sadly, many survivors suffer from abuse for decades.

It’s important for survivors to know that the abuse is not their fault, and they are not alone. Help is available for those who suffer from domestic violence.

2. What are resources available for victims?

Survivors have many options, from obtaining a protection order to staying in a shelter, or exploring options through support group or anonymous calls to a local domestic violence shelter or hotline program.  There is hope for victims, and they are not alone.

There are thousands of local shelters across the United States that provide safety, counseling, legal help, and other resources for victims and their children.

Information and support is available for victims of abuse, their friends and family:

If you are in danger, call 911, a local hotline or a national hotline.

NNEDV’s website has important safety tips and resources.

U.S. National Domestic Violence Hotline provides confidential and anonymous support by phone 1-800-799-7233 or TTY 1-800-787-3224

U.S. National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline: Love Is Respect: provides teens and young adults confidential and anonymous support by phone 1-866-331-9474 or online real-time chat.

WomensLaw has legal information and resources for victims.

The National Resource Center on Domestic Violence has information for survivors on the Domestic Violence Awareness Project site.

The Allstate Foundation has resources to end financial abuse at: PurplePurse.com.

Before using online resources, know that your computer or phone may not be safe. Some abusers are misusing technology to stalk and track all of a partner’s activities.

3. Why do victims sometimes return to or stay with abusers?

A better question is, “Why does the abuser choose to abuse?”

The deck is stacked against the victim when confronted with leaving or not.

Abusers work very hard to keep victims in relationships.

There is a real fear of death or more abuse if they leave.

In fact, a victim’s risk of getting killed greatly increases when they are in the process of leaving or have just left. [2]

On average, three women die at the hands of a current or former intimate partner every day.[3]

We, as a community, must do more to ensure the safety of victims when they leave.

Batterers are very good at making victims think that the abuse is their fault. Victims often believe that if they caused the violence, they can also stop it.

Victims stay because they are made to think they cannot survive on their own, financially or otherwise. Often abusers create a financial situation that makes leaving nearly impossible.

Survivors sometimes want the abuse to end, not the relationship.

A survivor may return to the abuser because that’s the person she the survivor fell in love with, and she believes his promises to change.  It’s not easy for anyone to let go of hopes and dreams.

4. Do abusers show any potential warning signs?

There is no way to spot an abuser in a crowd, but most abusers share some common characteristics.

Some of the subtle warning signs include:

They insist on moving too quickly into a relationship.

They can be very charming and may seem too good to be true.

They insist that you stop participating in leisure activities or spending time with family and friends.

They are extremely jealous or controlling.

They do not take responsibility for their actions and blame others for everything that goes wrong.

They criticize their partner’s appearance and make frequent put-downs.

Their words and actions don’t match.

Any one of these behaviors may not indicate abusive actions, but it’s important to know the red flags and take time to explore them.

5. Is it possible for abusers to change?

Yes, but they must make the choice to change.

It’s not easy for an abuser to stop abusive behavior, and it requires a serious decision to change.  Once an abuser has had all of the power in a relationship, it’s difficult to change to a healthy relationship with equal power and compromises.

Sometimes an abuser stops the physical violence, but continues to employ other forms of abuse – emotional, sexual, or financial.  Some abusers are able to exert complete control over a victim’s every action without using violence or only using subtle threats of violence. All types of abuse are devastating to victims.

6. Are men victims of domestic violence?

Yes, men can be victims of domestic abuse.

According to data collected from 2003 to 2012, 82 percent of domestic, dating, and sexual violence was committed against females, and 18 percent against males. [4] This is corroborated by a 2012 study which states that about 4 in 5 victims of domestic, dating, and sexual violence between 1994 and 2010 were female. [5]

Men living with male partners are more likely to report domestic, dating, or sexual violence than men living with female partners. 15.4 percent of same-sex cohabiting men reported experience sexual/physical violence or stalking, compared to 10.8 percent of men with a female partner. [6]

Pervasive stereotypes that men are always the abuser and women are always the victim discriminates against male survivors and discourages them from coming forward with their stories. [7]

Male survivors of domestic violence are less likely to seek help or report abuse. Many are unaware of services for male survivors, and there is a common misconception that domestic violence programs only serve women. [8]

When we talk about domestic violence, we’re not talking about men versus women or women versus men. We’re talking about violence versus peace. We’re talking about control versus respect.

Domestic violence affects us all, and all of us – women, children and men – must be part of the solution.

7. How does the economy affect domestic violence?

A sour economy does not cause domestic violence but can make it worse. It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire.

The severity and frequency of abuse can increase when factors associated with a bad economy are present.

Job loss, housing foreclosures, debt, and other factors contribute to higher stress levels at home, which can lead to increased violence.

As the violence gets worse, a weak economy limits options for survivors to seek safety or escape.

Domestic violence programs need more staff and funding to keep up with the demand for their services.

Victims may have a more difficult time finding a job to become financially independent of abusers.

8. What can I do to help?

Everyone can speak out against domestic violence. The problem will continue until society stands up with one resounding voice and says, “no more!”

Members of the public can donate to local, statewide or national anti-domestic violence programs or victim assistance programs.

We can teach our children about what healthy relationships look like by example and by talking about it.

You can call on your public officials to support life-saving domestic violence services and hold perpetrators accountable.

  Thanks to Huff Post for the images below:

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Save the woman, save the child Before you read this article about domestic violence, I want you to know a few things.  First, I'm not writing this for sympathy or pity; second, this is not an easy subject to write about; third, what I am writing is true and not exaggerated; and fourth, I hope that in reading this, it will help someone find help, leave this situation, or reach out to those who may know someone in this situation.