#the last 5 years of my “youth” have been in a pandemic and i was so worried about wasting all that time

[revisitnormal]

so i'm turning thirty shortly and i've been having thoughts about "wasting your youth"

namely: lmao

[itsmrvlxh50]

Thanks @cherikdogfood for tagging me, I really enjoyed answering these questions.

Are you named after anyone?

Yes my great grandmother, and they told me she was a viery fierce and strong woman, she had also resisted to the Bulgarians during their occupation of Thrace in WW2. I am proud to be named after her!

When was the last time you cried?

Like real, physical tears? I never cried like that as far as I remember. I am physically unable to cry and currently working on that with my therapist, yk letting myself feel things. But this quite sobbing, when my team got knocked out of thecup a couple of months ago because of a shitty referee. I tend to get angry when feeling overwhelmed so I usually shout.

Do you have kids?

No, unless you count my pets

What sport do you play/have played?

A lot! I mainly did horseback riding my whole life but I also played basketball for about three tears and my team were in the first youth league at the time. I also played handball and tennis and did track and kick boxing. I also played football (where you kick the ball with your feet) for three years and I was a goalkeeper, I would have played in my national team if I didn’t have so many injures and an acl surgery during my second season and my exams and also the covid pandemic during my third season. But if I have to sum up, I do horseback riding for 15 years and football for 3, I hope I get back to it one day.

Do you use sarcasm?

Yeah, more now that I grew up.

What's the first thing you notice about people?

How tall they are, and their colour of their eyes!

What's your eye color?

Blue!

Happy ending comedies or horror?

Happy ending comedies, B99 is a huge fave of mine.

Any talents?

I am a very good artist, I draw very well on pen (but I barely post it) and I have been writing screenplays ever since I was 5 y/o. I have a talent for languages as well but I barely use it since I hate learning grammar. I can speak 3 so far (my native Greek, English and French) and I still work on two more (German and Dutch).

Where were you born?

Greece!

What are your hobbies?

I am a scout, I love horseback riding, I love to draw and write, watching movies and our favorite football team with my sister and play lots of sports. I also like to go for a run at 06:00 in the morning and recently got into watching F1.

Any pets?

Yes, my dog Teddy, my mom says he is a mini copy of me but he is afraid of everything in this world and I am of nothing. I also count my sister’s cat Kitty and my brother’s parrot Corey since we all live in the same house and because they are younger than me, I used to help take care of them.

How tall are you?

180cm (I think it’s 6ft)

Dream job?

Military officer! I want to join the Air Force. Or a police officer!!

Favorite food?

Rice with schnitzel and white sauce with mushrooms, cheese and bacon.

I know I am supposed to tag more people but I really have no idea who to tag, so I didn’t.

[autistic-ben-tennyson]

How Dinosaurs made me a leftist

I’m going to change gears a bit after being burned out from with dealing with liberal Zionists all day. Since one of the most prominent paleontology blogs on tumblr, a-dinosaur-a-day/jewish-kulindadromeus, has been exposed as a Zionist, I decided to write my own post about why dinosaurs have been important to me and how they’ve actually had a significant impact on my political philosophy. Dinosaurs are a stereotypical special interest for a lot of autistic kids and can be a good jumping point for getting into other science fields.

I first discovered dinosaurs when I think I was 5 with the first movie I saw in theaters being Ice Age 3 as well as being given a bunch of old models by my uncles. When I was 7, I got a documentary for Christmas and that same year, we visited a traveling exhibit at the Detroit zoo with animatronics. At the time I thought they were real. They became one of my favorite things and something I could ramble about for hours. During Christmas of 2013, the Walking with Dinosaurs movie was what I really wanted to see when everyone else was gushing over Frozen. I know it’s not a good movie but I liked it at the time and it was even a bit emotional for me.

Jurassic Park became an interest of mine after a trip to Universal Studios in 2014 and seeing JW the following year, although now I hate it especially because of Chris Pratt. Out of the movies, TLW was actually my favorite and I was surprised people hated it. That actually contributed to my dislike of the Nostalgia Critic/Doug Walker for his nitpick filled review, before I learned about any of the Channel Awesome controversy. I still have the collector’s set of the first two JP films as well as Disney’s Dinosaur and the Walking with Dinosaurs series in my dvd collection.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this but I used to be a big fan of Jack Horner, the infamous “T. Rex is a a scavenger” guy. At the time I was interested in his Dino chicken experiments as well as his work on the JP series. Then I learned about the controversy of him dating an undergrad student and that ship sailed. I do find it a little amusing that the irredeemable villain of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has the same name as the sleazy paleontologist I used to admire. I can appreciate him for mentoring Mary Schweitzer who’s an actual good paleontologist and has made some important discoveries.

So what does being a leftist have to do with any of this? When I was 6, I was exposed to creationism for the first time. My parents thankfully weren’t but we knew a lot of people that were. In middle school, I met a lot more of them. Many of whom went to the same church youth group and school. It was there that I got into some debates about evolution. Sometimes, kids would tell me “dinosaurs aren’t real” or “you should read the Bible more” and I was expected to just put up with it. At the time I really wanted to be a paleontologist and while I no longer do, sometimes I felt bad for wanting that because of what people said. I stopped talking about dinosaurs for a while after that.

Becoming more knowledgeable about evolution pushed me to learn about climate change too and many of the same people who were creationists were also climate deniers. I watched parts of the Bill Nye vs Ken Ham debate and began doing more research. Climate change in turn was a big part of my radicalization which led me to breadtube. I know that breadtube is heavily flawed but it helped me see a lot of the problems with milquetoast liberals and the lies told by American propaganda. I watched those videos during the pandemic around the same time events like George Floyd’s murder and BLM and that cemented me as a leftist.

So that’s the story of how dinosaurs helped make me a leftist. They’re not my special interest anymore, that’s anime, but they still have a place in my heart. Spielberg may be a Zionist but the first two JP movies are still fun to watch. My favorite paleontologist these days is Stephen Jay Gould who that racist Zionist, prismatic-bell, should read after their disgusting post about aboriginal people with his work against scientific racism. I may not want to be a paleontologist anymore but I am considering anthropology. Some may view them as a childish thing but they were a way of escapism for me and pushed me to learn more about science which in turn cemented my disgust towards conservatives who want creationism in schools.

[kyndaris]

An Intimate Night

During the pandemic, there wasn't much opportunity to attend music concerts. After all, there was a virus going around. As countries reopen with COVID-19 relegated to the rear view mirror, there has been a return of nighttime entertainment in the last few years. Of note for this humble blogger has been the return of musicals. Be that 9-5, featuring the songs of our favourite country singer: Dolly Parton, to Six and the Rocky Horror Show.

In the city itself, there have been a few smaller candlelit concerts with music ranging from movies to anime. A Distant Worlds hasn't graced the shores of Australia since 2017. And while we had a Kingdom Hearts music concert in 2019, it has certainly been quite a few years since I've gotten to enjoy a proper orchestra playing my favourite songs from a couple of my favourite franchises live.

No longer!

Given advanced notice by Facebook, I co-opted my good friend, @bleachpanda into the proceedings. It helped that the New World concert fell very close to her birthday. But unlike previous New Worlds that had been held at Chatswood Concourse, this time round, the two of us would enjoy the music from Final Fantasy at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

A place that I'd been to in my youth. Back when I was still being graded for piano and hadn't visited in a very long time.

After picking up two Krispy Kreme donuts and getting overcharged (for some reason, they charged me the price of a 4-donut box and I didn't realise it until I checked my bank balance the next day), I picked up @bleachpanda at Wynyard train station in the heart of the CBD. From there, we headed eastwards towards the State Library.

Despite the fact that we had bought tickets for the 6PM showing, eschewing dinner (which we ended up grabbing later anyways), there were still plenty of people in attendance. @bleachpanda and I were not the only music starved Final Fantasy fans out there.

And what a riveting opening number that the smaller chamber orchestra started off with! As soon as I heard the first few notes, a grin split my face from ear to ear. After all, this was Valse di Fantastica!

What followed next were a mix of songs both old and new.

I won't be able to put them in exact order as I thought it rude to pull out my phone and start recording the names but barring two songs from Final Fantasy XIV, I managed to remember most of them. I do believe one of them MAY have been Insatiable from the Shadowbrings DLC. The other was a more jazzy piece that I cannot, for the life of me, recall the name of. Probably because I should have played more of Final Fantasy XIV, but I digress.

The other songs that caught my attention were Town Theme from the first Final Fantasy. Then we had Besaid from Final Fantasy X, which I immediately recognised, followed by Heaven's Tower from Final Fantasy XI.

Then we had a variety of different songs. Unfortunately for @bleachpanda, none of them proved capable of keeping her engaged. These included Lenna's Theme from Final Fantasy V, Atonement from Final Fantasy XIII, Dark World from Final Fantasy VI and Melancholia from Final Fantasy XV.

Finally, in order to keep my poor friend awake, the orchestra played Force Your Way from Final Fantasy VIII along with a piece from @bleachpanda's favourite Final Fantasy game: IX. Except of course, A Place to Call Home was rudely cut short with a Final Fantasy XIV song.

We even got to hear the conductor, Eric Roth, sing when Serah's theme was played. And in fact, Eric Roth was a very memorable conductor as he gallivanted around the stage. Well, gallivant isn't quite the word either. He...danced? Or rather, conducted with the entirety of his body. From stamping his feet to waving his arms around as a means to tell the orchestra to add more oomph to a piece or to keep it more quiet.

Before too long, the concert came to an end. As it did, we were treated with several classic: Zanarkand, One-winged Angel, Victory Fanfare and Chocobo Medley. And to justify the acoustic guitar that they brought in we also heard a guitar solo of the main theme from the first Final Fantasy.

While it was no Distant Worlds, it was certainly a night that brought back a flood of memories of attending these concerts in the past. And, if anything else, was a sign that things in the world were finally returning to a state of normalcy. Whether we were ready for it or not.

[alimak]

Youth Is Wasted On The Inside

MASTERLIST

The day I heard classes were suspended for almost a week brought relief for me back then. I spent those days with ease and thought, “Finally, a four-day rest!”. I was all smiley and delighted to have a break from school… not until that “four-day suspension” lasted for two years. While I was at the beginning of my youthful age when the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) started, I was rather locked and isolated instead of feeling the “I wish it could stay like this forever”. You know, being a teen forever, but instead, I had my overall well-being affected by the lockdown. I thought: Is this how I am going to spend my whole youth, locked inside my house?

Spending my teenage years to the fullest was one of my goals to ever achieve. Going to prom, going on a retreat trip and a field trip, and graduating junior high school with my former classmates were some enjoyable events that could add to my youthful years. I remember being excited for those days to come and I was planning ahead with my friends in school about what we’ll do when it happens. I wanted something memorable, just like those teen films. All I wanted was good times before I go to my senior year in high school and college.

As the pandemic came, I knew those moments would not occur, although there was a slight bit of hope remaining inside of me that everything would go back to normal when I enter the tenth grade. But, I was too gullible to think that such a disease would go away quickly and it made me depressed as time passed by. As I wait for the pandemic to end, I felt lost because everything changed, not in the way I wanted it to be. I thought waking up every 5 A.M. to go to school was the worst thing that I would go through, but coping in the midst of the pandemic beats it.

As I look back during the lockdown, I can’t help but think ways of how I can distract myself from boredom. I mean, we all had to and it was the hardest part for me because I am not consistent with hobbies–I also had limited resources to find one and my interest disperses because of it. I became more pressured rather than my school deadlines and exams. I have realized that this was probably the reason why I am too lazy to try new things out because I know I would give up too easily and I started to think if there was something wrong with me. Hence, it is also the reason why I spent most of my time on my phone–being online–all day and night.

At some point, doing all of these is a reassurance to myself that I don’t have to be like everyone else. I learned that I was pressured by social media to have a hobby because I saw everyone on TikTok working out, painting, sewing, reading, etc... I realized that I do not need to force myself to have a hobby–rather I need to focus on myself–what makes me enjoy life again. A way that It opened my mind in ways that taking care of myself was much better than anything else.

Eventually, my coping system was: I had to be outside. It is a way how I can handle my well-being over this whole phenomenon. I realized that I needed to be in a new environment every once in a while in order for my energy levels to heighten. I discovered that I like going to new places when my grandmother once told me to buy something from 7-11. I walked around for two hours around our area and I felt content when I got home that I had to write in my journal about the places I went to. Therefore, I figured that it is important for me to be in a place where it is not my house because I have been inside for too long and my mind wanted something new.

I believe that staying all the time at home can affect the mental health of people that it became an emotional trauma. Ever since COVID-19, everyone had no choice but to isolate in their own homes, which also restricted social interactions. Most of the people would only go outside for work or tasks to accomplish. It resulted to individuals increased percentages of depression and anxiety because of being only at home. According to BBC News, young ages were more affected from the impacts brought by the pandemic.

It came along with unwanted changes. Many teenagers have acquired social anxiety. It became hard for me to make friends because of being used to being alone at home and uneasiness builds up as face-to-face classes begin to initiate during this year. It is hard for me who is already shy, who become more shy because of isolation. In fact, it became a stress factor for socialize because it was something I was not used to do doing after being only at home. The changes were challenging.

Furthermore, a state of feeling lost is also a struggle for me. Many people think that time shifted during this pandemic. I did too, as I was mostly doing nothing all day; watching the time past by; study; and sleep. It was such a struggle to make something out of your time for the day, but to no avail it was also a struggle to do something. While for others, they had the luxury to keep themselves busy, but for me, it was challenging, especially when my enjoyments were outside of my home.

Being isolated at home brought unwanted circumstances and the challenge of feeling lost. It personally affected me in ways that it is hard to bring back the old me. I am not close to my old friends anymore and I started to become out of touch with my emotions.

With all of these occurrences, I can’t help rely on imaginations. I had to romanticize the remaining time of my teenage years because the pandemic robbed me from it. But, I do know that: You are trying. I am trying. We are all trying–to fill this emptiness in our supposed “most enjoyable” year of our lives.

As I went through this topic, I thought: healing the youth from the impacts brought by the pandemic can lessen the mental health issues that they face. There is acknowledgement to these issues, but a lack of action in it. This essay is a glimpse of the life of the youth in the midst of the pandemic and the struggle of coping in the “new normal”. I am calling out for schools and officials to provide free therapies and counseling for children. Mental health is a human right.

I conclude, to heal from emotional trauma caused by the pandemic should be included in the “new normal”.

BACK TO MASTERLIST

[bigheartsarehawt]

it’s been real fred finch ✌️… almost 5 years working with system-involved youth and families at this agency. first with a short-term, intensive, behavioral program and then with a longer term therapy program - all done in the community (homes, schools, parks, etc). it was through the last program i learned how much i loved (in-person) family therapy. so when looking for my next job move, i prioritized it, along with other serious criteria like less exhausting workweek hours & paperwork, more pay, benefits, and in-house training/support/sense of community. if you haven’t heard from me in awhile, it’s bc of this time-consuming transition, closing with families i’ve considered my own and deliberately casting my job search net wide to find the right fit. although i’ll be in a bougie group practice now (with middle-class folks 😬), my nervous system can hopefully get some relieve from long workweeks and crap pay (thx neoliberal and libertarian policies relentlessly gutting our social/economic welfare system supporting the needed services found within community mental heath). i know i may have complained about fred finch especially towards the end, but it has given me so many sweet clinical skills, lifelong compas, a path to licensure, and a secure employment home base soon after returning home from nyc and during the pandemic. will miss those sweet benefits, that gorgeous campus and views and located only a mile from my first home, and ofc my families 💜❤️‍🩹 #communitymentalhealth #fredfinch #nonprofitindustrialcomplex #transitionalobjects #warmhandoffs #oaklandbeauty #socialworkerpride #licensedtogetpaid #theBaybepricey #familytherapy #groupwork #healing #traumainformedcare #attachmentbasedtherapy #efft #hopetolearnifsnow (at Bay Area, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CobswsuOgSDHXaTtKq-6yytwv_Y-2BZYcTB9vI0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[mi6011dhanushkanth]

I've listened to nearly all of the Oxford Sparks podcasts, including "THE BIG QUESTIONS," and I've taken note of a few that caught my eye.

1.Why am I killing my house plants? So the way that I like to explain this is that we as humans, if we find ourselves in a big deluge like a swimming pool, we’re able to move and go to the top of the water for air. But plants aren’t able to do that. If they’re rooted, they’re stuck where they’re rooted. They can move between generations, but a certain generation can’t necessarily move. So the plant has to adapt the way it grows to cope with different amounts of water. So a tropical plant and a desert plant have evolved completely different ways of dealing with water and so if you underwater a tropical plant, it might wilt and die. But a desert plant, if you overwater, that might have the same effect.

2.Can we talk to bees? So, we know quite a lot about how honey bees communicate with each other. One of the ways that they do that is through something called the waggle dance, which is a special little dance routine that they do to tell other bees the exact directions to some sort of, you know, flower source. Something delicious to eat. So that’s one kind of communication that we know about. We know also that insects communicate using pheromones. But I’m specifically looking at bumblebees, which are the cute, fuzzy bees that we find in many places in the world. And in the UK, we have a bunch of different species, which is really exciting. And we don’t know as much about what bumblebee communication looks like or how they’re communicating with each other in the nest using vibrations or other kinds of audible sorts of signals.

3.Does banning smoking work? I think there could be and there has been some kind of modelling by the Department of Health that has said that with this policy of raising the age of sale year on year, that we could see very, very low numbers of children smoking or young people smoking by 2040. It’s unlikely to be completely eradicated while cigarettes are available in some form because not everybody goes into a shop and buys cigarettes. But the thing is, as well as just stopping people from buying cigarettes, what this policy will do is basically denormalise smoking. It means that less people will be smoking. It’s just seen as less of a normal thing in our society to smoke, which we’ve seen happen over the years, and this is one of the reasons why youth prevalence has dropped. But any policies like this are just going to make it seem more unusual to be smoking as a young person.

4.Would you want to meet an alien? Well, no, and it’s a bit of a sad story, isn’t it? But, you know, at some level, we’re not, are we? I mean, if you look at… Nature is red in tooth and claw for a reason. That statement, “Nature is red in tooth and claw,” that statement is a fact, and it’s red because of iron. It’s the iron in the blood that makes it red. It’s a very rare resource now in the environment, compared to how life kicked off with.

And I guess that other aliens would probably have gone through the same sort of pathway. They might want iron, and where’s the most iron around right now? It’s in you and me, it’s in organisms.

5.How do you convert CO2 into jet fuel? Okay. So CO2 is a very stable molecule. Very low activity. And it needs hydrogen to react with CO2. In theory, they can react. Like a boy and a girl that wants dating. In theory they can, but because they’re separated by a river you have to build a bridge for them to meet. So the catalyst is like a bridge and you must find the right catalyst for CO2 to react with hydrogen to make aviation fuel or other chemicals. So this catalyst is very similar to a bridge. You must find a very good catalyst for CO2 to be used.

6.How has life expectancy changed after the pandemic? If you take a long view for the last 200 years, the progress has just been remarkable. We can expect to live twice as long as our ancestors, which is really amazing when you think about it. But there have been some signs of trouble on the horizon, especially in the US in about the last 20 years, where life expectancy improvements had really slowed down and even gone a bit backwards in the US. From 2014 to 2017, they saw declines, which is really unusual.

You know, in the last couple hundred years, we’ve seen this steady march of improvements of life expectancy except for, you know, the 1918 flu and the two world wars. So to see this unexpected decline in the US just, kind of, come out of nowhere was really startling to a lot of people. And the UK is doing better in absolute terms than the US. 7.Is the metaverse doomed? Well, there are many metaverses that are cropping up, insofar as we can think of any 3D space as potentially being immersive. So, Fortnite is a classic example now, where people go, and they both will play videogames – you know, running around, shooting, and zapping, and whatever – but also engage in trade, engage in, like, go to even libraries. There are special events that will happen. Ariana Grande, for example, did a really big thing in the Fortnite metaverse.

Minecraft is an example of a metaverse, where people go and they build things in a whole bunch of different servers. The servers, kind of, link together, and if you were to walk around with a headset, you may think of it as a metaverse.

So, does Facebook have a stranglehold? Not in the slightest. What Facebook does have is a lot of clout, and has spent a lot of money on their metaverse, or horizon worlds, as well as the design of avatars and their considerations of things like what would make a place safe, as well as what might make it profitable.

8.What makes the human brain so special? It’s pure anatomy. So, in this case what the sequence is sensitive to is the movement of water through the brain. And the movement of water through the brain doesn’t go everywhere unconstrained, it is constrained by the myelin, which is sort of the fatty tissue, the fatty substance around your white matter pathways, and that helps the conduction speed.

So, in certain diseases where that fatty substance is degrading, like multiple sclerosis, the communication between different parts of the brain isn’t very good anymore, but it has the advantage for us that it also doesn’t allow water through.

So if we can just find a way to track the movement of water through the brain, we have a way to reconstruct these tracks.

9.What is green steel? I could start comparing materials, but just to give you an example, when you speak about any material, one of the properties that we use is Young’s modulus.

Young’s modulus is basically telling how much your material will deform if you put a certain stress, a certain pressure on that material. That number for steel is 210,000 megapascal. It doesn’t tell you anything at this stage, but if you take aluminium, for instance, just that number for aluminium is 70,000. That number for concrete is 30,000 and for timber, it’s 10,000.

So we’re not talking about small differences here. We’re talking about multiplication factors between materials. That is why steel is- well, that is one of the reasons why steel is so incredible and irreplaceable.

So green steel would mean steel that has been produced based mostly on green energy, such as green electricity, for instance. So taking a very simple example, green steel would be steel that is produced through the electric arc furnace and that electric arc furnace would be using green electricity.

So hydropower, the sun, et cetera. Obviously, in this case, the environmental impacts that are associated to production of that steel are very low.

10.How does a pandemic end? Unfortunately not. I think one thing which people will find unsettling is one of the common responses that we see at the end of epidemics in the past is people saying, “This is not the end,” and waiting for what they call the ‘next wave’.

At the end of the 1918 influenza epidemic, actually what we see is the most common response to the end of an epidemic is waiting for the next outbreak to happen. Of course, it’s only when, many years later, it doesn’t happen, then people finally, retrospectively, can conclude: “Okay, the epidemic actually ended.” Sometimes they even conclude: “Okay, the epidemic actually ended 100 years ago.”

Unfortunately, (Laughter) one of the problems with being a historian is you realise just how difficult it is to predict the future, but at the same time, I think, we should take some reassurance in knowing that the end process is meant to be messy and that we should also think about what that means in terms of having a lot of patience and tolerance for people who might have different understandings of the end process than we do.

11.Why do we develop bad habits? That’s a very good question, and one we’re trying to study. There are the habits as we think of them, which is the colloquial one, the one that we use in everyday life, which is just how everyone talks about a habit: you’re doing the same thing, over, and over, and over again. You’re not paying attention to it, and you don’t think about it.

In science, we try and define them as actions that you do all the time, when you’re not even thinking about what the action is causing. So, the food is in front of you. You keep eating, even though you’re full, because you’re having a conversation with someone. Or you open your phone and you look at your Messenger app, even though that wasn’t what you were planning on doing. That’s what a habit is. It’s when you stop paying attention to what comes next.

It’s not easy. Habits themselves aren’t really good or bad. It’s the consequences of the action that tells you whether or not it’s a good habit or bad habit. Sometimes, a lot of things can start as a good habit, like exercising regularly, and it can turn into a bad habit: you exercise even when you’ve got work to do, because it’s such a habit to get up and go.

In science we tend to focus on good habits rather than bad, but that’s just because it’s easier to do positive outcomes than negative outcomes, in an ethical sense. But any behaviour that’s happening over and over again is a habit, so whether it’s good or bad.

12.How do you tackle hate speech one emoji at a time? We stated research emoji-based hate back in January. But hate speech or abuse expressed in emoji really came to the forefront of public attention over the summer, and that was following the Euros 2020 Final.

And I don’t know how many listeners are football fans, but basically what happened is three members of England’s team, who missed their penalties in the final, were really subjected to this torrent of emoji-ed abuse. So, monkey emoji, banana emoji, watermelon emoji, were just some of the racist content reported by users on Instagram and Twitter.

But the real challenge here is understanding context. So, the same emoji can have wildly different implications, depending on how it’s used in a sentence. If you use the monkey in a tweet talking about your favourite animal at the zoo, then that’s perfectly legitimate content, there’s no problem with that.

But then if you use the same monkey emoji to racially abuse England’s football players, then that use of the emoji comes with this whole history of racial slurs, discrimination and lived depression.

So, that’s where the challenge really lies, is that there is really no such thing as a hateful emoji, in and of itself, it’s not that much of a black and white distinction. It’s really how the emoji is used in a sentence.

13.Can we build an eco-friendly aeroplane? So, we have to keep the temperature at a much lower value than the melting point of the metals, of course, because you want to have a high safety factor, right? You don’t want to reach the temperature or even go nearby that value. So, what we are trying to do is to develop advanced cooling technologies that basically use part of the air that is sucked upstream the engine and a part of that air is used to cool down the components, like the rotating blades.

So, we machine very small holes on the outer casing, but also on the blades of the turbine. This air that is cold, much colder than the air coming from the combustion chamber, is then spilled into these holes and the cold air is creating a film that is protecting the materials. So, imagine you have the hot stream coming from your combustion chamber that is, basically, instead of touching directly the surface of the blades, the surfaces are protected by a film of cold air that is spilled through the holes.

14.Are video games good for my mental health? Oh my God, no. So, we found that people who actually play more video games are more likely to say that they feel happy. It’s entirely possible that happier people or people who have been happier in the last two weeks, they just have more time in their lives to play ‘Animal Crossing’ and ‘Plants vs. Zombies’. It’s a correlation, and, you know, correlation does not equal causation here.

So, we’re doing the kinds of studies right now where we follow the same players over time and look at what happens when you increase or decrease your video gameplay, how that impacts changes in your health and wellbeing, but yes. No, we’re quite a far way away from me saying that we should prescribe video games or something silly like that.

15.How do you grow the perfect tomato? you can pick your tomatoes from seed or from transplants. And so in places with shorter growing seasons, it’s likely you would use a transplant, but obviously whenever you’re just picking a transplant or a seed, you have to pick the type of tomato you want, right?

And so you have to think if you want to do sauces or you’re thinking tomatoes for salad, maybe you’re drawing some tomatoes and also think of like what you look for in a tomato. Do you want something sweeter, something more acidic, more balanced? What colour tomato do you like?

There must be thousands of tomato varieties. And so the choice is yours.

[mariyekos]

Not anonymous. Most impactful book, song/album, and movie on you in terms of writing/creativity.

This one gets a bonus answer because I wrote down "most impactful book" and then got up, forgot there was supposed to be more to it, and started writing. I answer the writing variant after it.

Most impactful book in general: Just the other day I was thinking back to Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I read it in Spring 2019, so a year before the pandemic hit, which made it hit all the harder. Just thinking about it and some of the lines in that book gave me the chills. I need to re-read it. I don't want to spoil too much, but it's about time travel and the danger of a modern pandemic versus the danger of being trapped in the past. I named one of my fics after two lines from this book: you must return from that place whence you came, and thence again to heaven. What a book. Thinking of one character in particular is destroying me right now. Ahhhh.

Most impactful book in terms of writing/creativity: Right now, I'm going to go with the general Wheel of Time series. That series gets very, very detailed, to the point that sometimes even I just want the author to move on, but as someone who also wants to get more detailed with my writing, it's something that has propelled me forward a bit. I've never actually finished it though...got to book 6, went back for my last semester of college, and then never picked it back up. I want to get back to it once I finish the things on my current reading list. Which actually could bring me to all the ideas currently popping in my head from reading the Divine Comedy, but that's another matter...

Most impactful song/album for writing: Usually when I'm writing I'll put on some combination of songs that fit the mood, keeping 5-10 tabs open with songs that fit the current vibe and go from there. I can't really name one song that stands out above the rest as inspiring me to write, because there are just so many.

But to get a general idea, I listen to a lot of piano covers of thing, video game ambient music, etc. A friend recently introduced me to The Swans and I've been writing to the Live Versions of Blood Promise and The Sound lately. This specific cover of Wind Scene/600 AD from Chrono Trigger was my background music a day or two ago. I will frequently put on Purpleschala or Kyle Landry's channels too, both of which do piano covers of video game songs. Purpleschala has a fantastic selection of Fire Emblem tracks, though I'll listen to just about anything of hers. Though if I'm trying to think of an impactful song with lyrics, it would be Sweet Bird by Young Hunting. I feel like we've talked about this song before but I can't quite remember.

Now let's make one thing clear as crystal

Now let's make one thing clear as crystal The blood is on your hands The blood is on your hands And the blood will stain your hands And everything you touch And everything you love Oh sweet bird of my youth Where have you flown to? Now I cannot find you No I can't recognize you Sweet bird, sweet bird Now I don't want, I don't want you to leave But I don't know what else to do No I don't know what else to do

Most impactful movie in terms of creativity: I uh. Don't really watch movies... 😅 I will sometimes go a whole year without watching a movie, maybe more. So with my very small list of movies to choose from, I'll go with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Love high fantasy and the amazing scale of everything. I want to craft a rich story like that, full of interconnected threads, little plot lines going towards a central goal, and this sense of hope emerging through the terrible reality which threatens to swallow everything whole.

[anitosoul]

tripreport.045_griefutures

February 5, 2024

My lola (grandma) died on January 1st, 2024. On New Years Eve, I was already having a strange time, and a text from my mom that said that my lola went to the hospital sent me spiraling. The next day, I felt like something was off, and after pretty much lounging in bed all day, my mom called me and told me that she passed away around 5pm New York time. 

Since then, I’ve been processing a deeply complicated grief layered with family trauma and confusing emotions, grief for what could have been, grief for what should have been, grief for what wasn’t, grief for other peoples’ grief, grief for unjust systems, grief for the world. Grief for reality. This has been one of the longest months of my life.

What were the five stages of grief again? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I’ve felt all of these to varying degrees over the past month (and I’m writing this a month late, so for the past two months). Denial definitely hit first. I had a DJ gig lined up for that Friday at Red Pavilion which was poised to be one of the bigger crowds I’ve played to, and I threw myself into the preparation for that. It was to be a Lunar New Year celebration signifying the end of the Year of the Rabbit and ringing in the Year of the Dragon. I wanted so desperately to celebrate that potential prosperity, I was so excited about the event, pushing away the thoughts of my lola. How she probably didn’t even know I was a DJ, how she never seemed to care about me at all, how she never even seemed to love me, and now she truly never would. The maximalist, brutal Asian club sounds masked my pain. I even watched Millennium Mambo for inspiration, but the film’s undertones of malaise amidst a youthful party existence mirrored the feelings in my own life. 

I tried other ways of hiding, maintaining a sense of normalcy. I finally started trying to actively date again, which wasn’t very fruitful, probably something to do with the circumstances of me using it as a way to forget about my Lola’s death. I got my hair cut after nearly 2 years, harkening back to a pre-pandemic version of myself. Anything to feel normal. Anything to feel like this wasn’t my new reality, one where my lola and thousands of Palestinians were dead. I went to work, I went to shows, I went to the club, I went to birthday parties, I went to friends’ apartments, I DJ’d, I worked on my own music. Anything to feel normal. I started exercising again, I signed up for a half marathon. I was basically sober all month. Anything to feel normal.

Nothing felt normal.

The solace I found was in the future. It was in afrofuturism. I watched the Last Angel of History and it rewired my brain. I read The Parable of the Sower and it rewired my heart. I watched Robocop, I watched Ghost in the Shell. I listened to Carl Craig, Model 500, Drexciya, K-HAND, Jeff Mills, the Belleville Three, Urban Tribe, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, Moodymann, Lee Perry, Goldie, LTJ Bukem, A Guy Called Gerald. Synchronously, Kevin Saunderson was playing Nowadays Nonstop the morning after I watched The Last Angel of History, and the Sun Ra Arkestra was playing at TV Eye later that month. Their expressions of the future were real, they were raw. They weren’t trying to be normal. In fact, they were showing just how alien all of this existence is. I read the works of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Mark Fisher’s K-punk, Sadie Plant, Kodwo Eshun, Edward George. I was deeply inspired by the idea of the Data Thief, traveling through time to find the original black secret technology. I read about the alternate universe of the Drexciyans, a world untouched by colonialism, by capitalism, by religion, by whiteness. I read about the dystopian world promised in the Parables, in Earthseed. The realest it could get. 

All that you touch You change.

All that you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth is Change.

God is Change.

This message carried me throughout my grief. Octavia was telling it like it is. Lauren Olamina was telling it like it is. They were fully aware of the harsh realities of this world and they knew where things were headed. Their bravery, their persistence, despite the horrors, inspired me. Their acceptance—that deep, radical, empathetic acceptance—comforted me so deeply. All of it poured back in to my creative output near the end of the month, where I dumped all of those five stages of grief into one 30-minute moment. I was destroying myself working on my live set, BATAS NG GUBAT (LAW OF THE JUNGLE), an expression of revolution and resistance through sound that started before my Lola’s death and ended after my Lola’s death. It encompassed my Lola’s death. She was born in 1947. She lived through the First Quarter Storm, the EDSA Revolution, the Nakba. I don’t know where she stood in regards to any of it and I don’t think I ever will. I channeled my anger into the project—why did she care more about her religion than she cared about me? Why did she marry a man who abused my mom, and then marry a white man who abused her until nearly the end of her days? Why did she transfer so much trauma to my mom, who then transferred it to me and my sister?

After performing the project, I felt a sense of catharsis. Through the preparation for the project, through all the research and theory and watching documentaries and learning, so much learning, I was somewhere in between bargaining and acceptance. In a way, I had been romanticizing my ancestors. They were a vague concept, a God to me. Now, my lola was one of them, one of the few who I actually knew on this earth. Wherever she is now, I hope that she can see now why I am the way I am, and I hope that she can accept me. After all I’ve immersed myself in through this process, I’ve been working through relinquishing the blame I’ve put on her. I see her now as someone who was trying their best given the circumstances, someone who was suffering under these brutal systems like all of us are. And I forgive her for that.

The tail end of my Lola’s life was spent traveling, staying with my mom after we basically extracted her from her abusive relationship, and eventually going back to the Philippines where she got to spend time with my extended family before she passed away. My mom said that in one of the last conversations she had with my lola, she said she wasn’t ready to come back to the US. I don’t think she ever would have been. I think she realized, like I’ve seen happen to my dad and my other lola, that the West wasn’t made for us. She was home. And I’m so deeply grateful that she had that agency at the end of her life, the privilege to choose to die in her homeland. Despite the pain, I love her, and I wish her love. I hope she’s feeling it looking down on me now.

Tracklist

Intro: The Sun Ra Arkestra - Seductive Fantasy

A-Side

DJ Stingray - Lead from the Shadows

Tzusing - Balkanize

Anti Shift - Intertwine

Art of Noise - Dreaming (Colour Green)

Luzon - The Baguio Track (The Full Igorot Vocal Mix)

YASSCORP - If You Ever Cared

Boa - Duvet (ScummV - Virtual Self Edit) [LLFA Tech Overlay]

Object Blue, TSVI - Turing Machine

DJ Love & DJ Ron - Atchup Atchup

Kenta204 - Blessed by an Angel

Actress & London Contemporary Orchestra - LAGEOS

Carl Craig - Red Lights

Moodymann - Desire

Skee Mask - Panorama

The Other People Place - Moonlight Rendezvous

Model 500 - Starlight (Moritz Mix)

Cindy Lee - What’s Tonight to Eternity

Grouper - Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping

Fennesz & Ryuichi Sakamoto - Kokoro

Metá Metá - Obatalá

Intermission: Drexciya - Under Sea Disturbances

B-Side

Kenji Kawai - M02 Ghosthack

Non-Confined Space - A Pure Person

Baraka - I’ll Be There

Maara - Just Give Me Time

Artificial Red - The Oasis (ft. Voodoo)

Lee Gamble - Ghost

Splash - Babylon

Drexciya - Aqua Jujidsu

Mr. Fingers - Spy (Kode9 Remix)

Lola Lilac - Star Anise

Lynx and Omen - There’s Something (Omen Mix)

2 On a Tip - Rare Groove Jungle

Doctor Jay & DJ Rush Puppy - Respect

Anito Soul - MAKIBAKA

Rainy Miller & Space Afrika - 1-2-1

Dianna Lopez - yoho rodeo

Outro: Oh, Yoko - Seashore (Sprinkles’ Ambient Ballroom)

[lostinatrainofthoughts]

Girlies im here to update on my tinder adventures. i had my 2nd call with another tinder dude. It lasted two hours 😃

Hes okay! But maybe i am picky dear Allah please so help me but theres just something about him that gives me the ick. Well not ick but like eh... he might not be the one.

heavy smoker: wont smoke in front of me out of courtesy but doesnt believe the science that inhaling toxin can legit kill you all bcause his grandma whos also a heavy smoker died of something else and not cancer. Like he doesnt care about the consequences at all.

2. privileged af and so ignorant about it: hes travelled once for a month last dec and will be traveling again THRICE this yr and he thinks that going for umrah is not a vacation/“travelling” bc its a spiritual journey like do you hear yourself and how in your bubble you are. Anything thats going out of the country for something thats not work AND going for a peace of mind is VACATION. his mom shops for branded stuff and he gets bored waiting around and sitting inside the store. Like some of us wouldnt even dream of stepping in. and i told him honestly, do you know how privileged you sound (entitled actually) and he said what do you mean?? and I'm like most people don't get to experience going out like that. and he was like yeah I'm thankful, grateful. mmm......

3. mansplainer (biggest ICK): he said hed bring me outdoors and i told him i cant and i dont like it and he said that he will force me but will bring an umbrella. Then i told him i have eczema and he gaslit me saying IT CANT BE THAT BAD. HIS EX HAD IT WORSE IT WAS SEVERE And i was so pissed. And so i said. Well. I had been admitted three fucking times for it and was on 4 different medications for it and going to biweekly appointments and blood tests and so i said im SURE. CERTAIN that i have it MUCH WORSE than your ex. he did not spare me a breath and came up with his own conclusion. also he says that eczema HAS A CURE. HES CERTAIN OF IT. bc he's saw it in his ex. and I'm like ............................ i had it since i was a baby. the fuck you mean there's a cure. there are treatments for it okay but not cure. i hate when people who don't have eczema say nonsense like that.

Which brings me to point no. 3: religious. Nothing nothing NOTHING wrong with someone who’s religious, i am a practicing muslim. I pray 5 times a day and i value my relationship with god too. But what i dont like is how he pushes his personal religious values or agenda onto me like i dont know shit. Your relationship with god, and my relationship with god is no ones business, its your own so dont try to police how i do it with god. Like i told him i “had” to quickly pray before calling him. And he stopped me saying i shouldnt say “had to” bc that would mean being forced/its an obligation so i have to change that bc “context is everything”. Like its something to fix. i really HAD to make it quick or else i wouldnt know what time i'd be praying.

4. With that being said, he is also homo/phobic..................... well yes and no? i don't know. he said he doesn't want to talk about it bc its controversial and he is against t/rans ppl and its changing the essence of what god has created for you. i just don't like that argument because . if there's one thing you cant change about me, it's my morals.

5. hes so into himself that he was basically pitching himself like a project. but ok, its my fault, i asked. but was there any reciprocation? did he ask me back about me? not really. i found myself having to jump in and add in what i had to say. he would say things like, I've been through a lot, you have no idea. and I'm like don't we all??? you arent the only one whos experienced the lows of life. you arent the only one who had a hard time.

6. his approaching his 30s and he treats me like I'm a kid bc I'm 26? "oh huwaina you still so young. when the pandemic hit, it was like 3 fucking years of my youth taken away from me now I'm almost 30" and i jumped in and said like "yeah me too" and he was like "no, I've already reached 30, there's no more 20s for me but you do. you still have time to experience things and enjoy life. i was 21, 22, 23 when covid happened i felt like i didn't experience the life i was supposed to at my early 20s. also does life end at 30 ladies and gents? he keeps telling me how gen z i am, and I'm like okay????????????

7. HES NOT GOOD LOOKING IM SORRY I SWIPED BC HE SEEMED LIKE HE HAD PERSONALITY 🧎‍♀️🧎‍♀️🧎‍♀️

[amays-entr7015]

Week 13 Blog Post

Describe the biggest failure that you’ve encountered to date. What did you learn from that experience?

I am currently experiencing my biggest failure.

When I graduated from UC the first time in 2013, you could have never told me that I would be in the position I am in this moment. I began my career as a corps member in Teach for America (TFA), which eventually led me to a TFA-adjacent nonprofit charter school network, KIPP. I taught with KIPP's DC region for 6 school years, from 2016-2022. In those six years, I accomplished so much. I was named Teacher of the Year my first year there, I led the 8th grade team at my school for 5 years. I felt valued and respected.

Then, the pandemic began in 2020. And in 2022, my grandmother, who I had never even seen get a cold, was hospitalized after suffering a perforated ulcer. As the eldest child, grandchild, and great grandchild in my family, I felt compelled to return home to be closer to family. Additionally, I had always expected to end my career as the successor to my family's business, a nonprofit group home organization for youth in foster care in its 25th year of operation as of this year. The only barrier to this in the past had been my family's dynamic - pretty toxic for lack of a better word. Still, after weighing my options, I decided it was best to come home and give it a try.

A series of events since then have led to me having to abruptly quit my job making $100,000, use my 401k to support myself, and distance myself from my family as my grandmother died from cancer in less than a year. The past 5 months have by far been the lowest point of my life.

What I'm learning is the importance, and need, for grace and faith. I have been extremely disappointed in myself for leaving the successful life I'd built for myself for the mess I've come home to, but I had to try. And had I not, I would have missed the last year of my grandmother's life. I also would have always wondering "what if" when it came to working with my family. Now I know for sure that I want something different than what I had previously planned. This failure has also forced me to see what I'm really made of. I've had to face all of my biggest fears all at once, and I'm OK. In my lowest moments, the best parts of me have still shone through. I've been kind at my angriest, giving when I've had little, and loving to myself and others always.

My biggest failure has also been my first. I've been blessed to have led a mostly successful life so far, and the greatest lesson I've learned from failing is that "All contrast brings more clarity." Having experienced this period of failure, I will forever experience success differently. I'm much more grateful for all wins, big or small.

[tallmantall]

#JamesDonaldson On #MentalHealth - 10 Things To Know About How #SocialMedia Affects #Teens' Brains

Cory Turner Tracy J. Lee for NPR If you or someone you know may be considering #suicide, contact the #988Suicide&CrisisLifeline by dialing or texting 9-8-8. The statistics are sobering. Nearly 1 in 3 #teen #girls report having seriously considered #suicide in the past year. One in 5 #teens identifying as #LGBTQ+ say they attempted #suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, #depression rates doubled for all #teens. And that was before the #COVID-19 #pandemic. The question is: Why now? "Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia. ... Within the last 20 years, the advent of portable technology and #socialmedia platforms changing what took 60,000 years to evolve," Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the #AmericanPsychologicalAssociation (#APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. "We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development." #James Donaldson notes:Welcome to the “next chapter” of my life… being a voice and an advocate for #mentalhealthawarenessandsuicideprevention, especially pertaining to our younger generation of students and student-athletes.Getting men to speak up and reach out for help and assistance is one of my passions. Us men need to not suffer in silence or drown our sorrows in alcohol, hang out at bars and strip joints, or get involved with drug use.Having gone through a recent bout of #depression and #suicidalthoughts myself, I realize now, that I can make a huge difference in the lives of so many by sharing my story, and by sharing various resources I come across as I work in this space.  #http://bit.ly/JamesMentalHealthArticleFind out more about the work I do on my 501c3 non-profit foundationwebsite www.yourgiftoflife.org Order your copy of James Donaldson's latest book,#CelebratingYourGiftofLife: From The Verge of Suicide to a Life of Purpose and Joy www.celebratingyourgiftoflife.com Prinstein's 22-page testimony, along with dozens of useful footnotes, offers some much-needed clarity about the role #socialmedia may play in contributing to this teen #mentalhealthcrisis. For you busy #parents, #caregivers and educators out there, we've distilled it down to 10 useful takeaways: 1. Social interaction is key to every child's growth and development. Humans are social creatures, and we learn through social interaction. In fact, said Prinstein, "numerous studies have revealed that children's interactions with peers have enduring effects on their occupational status, salary, relationship success, emotional development, #mentalhealth, and even on physical health and mortality over 40 years later. These effects are stronger than the effects of children's IQ, socioeconomic status and educational attainment." This helps explain why #socialmedia platforms have grown so big in a relatively short period of time. But is the kind of social interaction they offer healthy? 2. #Socialmedia platforms often traffic in the wrong kind of social interaction. What's the right kind, you ask? According to Prinstein, it's interactions and relationship-building "characterized by support, emotional intimacy, disclosure, positive regard, reliable alliance (e.g., 'having each other's backs') and trust." The problem is, #socialmedia platforms often (though not always) emphasize metrics over the humans behind the "likes" and "followers," which can lead #teens to simply post things about themselves, true or not, that they hope will draw the most attention. And these cycles, Prinstein warned, "create the exact opposite qualities needed for successful and adaptive relationships (i.e., disingenuous, anonymous, depersonalized). In other words, #socialmedia offers the 'empty calories of social interaction,' that appear to help satiate our biological and psychological needs, but do not contain any of the healthy ingredients necessary to reap benefits." In fact, research has found that #socialmedia can actually make some #teens feel lonelier 3. It's not all bad. The APA's chief science officer also made clear that #socialmedia and the study of it are both too young to arrive at many conclusions with absolute certainty. In fact, when used properly, #socialmedia can feed teens' need for social connection in healthy ways. "Research suggests that young people form and maintain friendships online. These relationships often afford opportunities to interact with a more diverse peer group than offline, and the relationships are close and meaningful and provide important support to youth in times of #stress." What's more, Prinstein pointed out, for many marginalized #teens, "digital platforms provide an important space for self-discovery and expression" and can help them forge meaningful relationships that may buffer and protect them from the effects of #stress. 4. #Adolescence is a "developmentally vulnerable period" when #teens crave social rewards, but don't have the ability to restrain themselves. That's because, as #children enter puberty, the areas of the brain "associated with our craving for 'social rewards,' such as visibility, attention and positive feedback from peers" tend to develop well before the bits of the brain "involved in our ability to inhibit our #behavior, and resist temptations," Prinstein said. #Socialmedia platforms that reward #teens with "likes" and new "followers" can trigger and feed that craving. 5. "Likes" can make bad #behavior look good. Hollywood has long grappled with groups of #parents who worry that violent or overly sexualized movies can have a negative effect on #teen #behavior. Well, similar fears about #teens witnessing bad #behavior on #socialmedia might be well-founded. But it's complicated. Check this out: How to talk — and listen — to a #teen with #mentalhealthstruggles "Research examining #adolescents' brains while on a simulated #socialmedia site, for example, revealed that when exposed to illegal, dangerous imagery, activation of the prefrontal cortex was observed suggesting healthy inhibition towards maladaptive #behaviors," Prinstein told lawmakers. So, that's good. The prefrontal cortex helps us make smart (and safe) decisions. Hooray for the prefrontal cortex! Here's the problem. When teens viewed these same illegal and/or dangerous #behaviors on #socialmedia alongside icons suggesting the negative content had been "liked" by others, the part of the brain that keeps us safe stopped working as well, Prinstein said, "suggesting that the 'likes' may reduce youths' inhibition (i.e., perhaps increasing their proclivity) toward dangerous and illegal #behavior." In other words, bad #behavior feels bad — until other people start liking it. 6. #Socialmedia can also make "psychologically disordered #behavior" look good. Prinstein spoke specifically about websites or online accounts that promote disordered-eating #behaviors and nonsuicidal #self-injury, like #self-cutting. "Research indicates that this content has proliferated on #socialmedia sites, not only depicting these #behaviors, but teaching young people how to engage in , how to conceal these #behaviors from #adults, actively encouraging users to engage in these #behaviors, and socially sanctioning those who express a desire for less risky #behavior." 7. Extreme #socialmedia use can look a lot like addiction. "Regions of the brain activated by #socialmedia-use overlap considerably with the regions involved in addictions to illegal and dangerous substances," Prinstein told lawmakers. He cited a litany of research that says excessive #socialmedia use in #teens often manifests some of the same symptoms of more traditional addictions, in part because teen brains just don't have the kind of self-control toolbox that #adults do. 8. The threat of online #bullying is real. Prinstein warned lawmakers that "victimization, harassment, and discrimination against #racial, #ethnic, #gender and #sexualminorities is frequent online and often targeted at young people. #LGBTQ+ #youth experience a heightened level of #bullying, threats and #self-harm on #socialmedia." More LOLs, Fewer Zzzs: Teens May Be Losing #Sleep Over #SocialMedia And online #bullying can take a terrible physical toll, Prinstein said: "Brain scans of #adults and #youths reveal that online harassment activates the same regions of the brain that respond to physical pain and trigger a cascade of reactions that replicate physical assault and create physical and #mentalhealth damage." According to the #CentersforDiseaseControlandPrevention, "#youth who report any involvement with #bullying #behavior are more likely to report high levels of #suicide-related #behavior than #youth who do not report any involvement with #bullying #behavior." Earlier this month, a 14-year-old New Jersey #girl took her own life after she was attacked by fellow #students at #school and a video of the assault was posted on #socialmedia. 9. It's hard not to compare yourself to what you see in #socialmedia. Even #adults feel it. We go onto #socialmedia sites and compare ourselves to everyone else out there, from the sunsets in our vacation pics to our waistlines – but especially our waistlines and how we look, or feel we should look, based on who's getting "likes" and who's not. For #teens, the impacts of such comparisons can be amplified. "Psychological science demonstrates that exposure to this online content is associated with lower #self-image and distorted body perceptions among young people. This exposure creates strong risk factors for #eatingdisorders, unhealthy weight-management #behaviors, and #depression," Prinstein testified. 10. #Sleep is more important than those "likes." Research suggests more than half of #adolescents are on screens right before bedtime, and that can keep them from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor #mentalhealth symptoms, poor performance in #school and trouble regulating #stress, Prinstein said, but "inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in #adolescent years. In other words, youths' preoccupation with technology and #socialmedia may deleteriously affect the size of their brains." Read the full article

[kammartinez]

By Ali Francis

In 2014 Veronica Sent started dreaming about meat—every night. She’d turn the lights off, drift away, and then boom: “I was eating massive tins of tuna and hot dogs,” she says. And not just any hot dogs. These were würstels, blush pink German-style sausages typically made from pork and beef and cased in sheep’s intestine.

This was unusual. The 36-year-old dog groomer, who grew up in Venice, Italy, but now lives in San Francisco, had been a strict vegetarian for about 15 years before the hot dogs started haunting her dreams. She’d stopped eating meat for animal welfare reasons, but it seemed as if her subconscious self was “screaming” at her. So Sent reluctantly decided to reintroduce some meat and fish into her diet. 

Sent’s decision to eat meat after going so long without it might seem like an unrealistically hard pivot. But many like her—long-term vegetarians in the US—do eventually eat meat again. At just 5% by some estimates, plant-based eaters are already the vast minority in this country. In 2014 Faunalytics (formerly Humane Research Council), an organization that conducts research to support animal welfare, discovered that 84% of the 11,000 vegans and vegetarians in their study pretty quickly reverted back to their omnivorous ways. One third of participants lasted less than three months, and over half had started eating meat again within the first year.

Unlike those in the 2014 study, all of the 25 former vegetarians I interviewed had followed the diet for at least five years; these were no casual flings. Most stopped eating meat with intentions similar to Sent’s: They wanted to protest the ways animals were being raised and killed in the US and ease their impacts on the environment. Still, despite their motivations, they eventually ditched vegetarianism for various reasons they couldn’t anticipate—reasons that had as much to do with their communities and culture as they did with typically cited nutritional needs. 

It’s not as though the ethical concerns that first drive people to vegetarianism magically disappear when they decide, for whatever reason, to eat meat again. This kind of dissonance between our values and our actions can be super uncomfortable, and most of the people I spoke to often feel guilty about eating animals and polluting the environment, or struggle with the ick factor when they have to handle or cook meat. “When I stopped being vegetarian, I was very upset with myself and felt that I was betraying my values and the animals,” says Sent. “I spent at least a year eating meat, fish, and eggs in secret.”

My own relationship with meat is on and off, as if it’s a toxic ex I struggle to block. I don’t really eat animals. But I was a strict vegetarian for multiple years in my youth before eventually easing animal proteins back into my diet—and then quitting them again years later. Now I partake in what one vegetarian friend calls the “awkward occasion fish”—a.k.a., I’m vegetarian but will eat seafood to make life easier for stressed hosts. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still crave a burger here and there. So, what is it about meat that keeps us coming back?

I’ll get the most obvious answer out of the way first: Meat tastes really, really good. British journalist and formerly lifetime vegetarian, Huw Oliver, tried steak for the first time during the pandemic. “The pinkish muscle tastes deep, rich, and butter-smooth in the mouth,” he wrote for Time Out. “And cor, that smell. It’s juicy, hearty, butterflies-inducing communal food to take your time over, and I love it.” Author Rajesh Parameswaran, also vegetarian for his whole life up until then, had a similar experience trying molleja for the first time in Argentina. “It was incredibly delicate, airy and light; at the same time it was somehow rich and sort of creamy,” he wrote for Bon Appétit. 

Many interviewees felt the same intense, almost primal relationship with meat. It’s likely been a thing since our primate ancestors started accidentally eating worms who had burrowed into fruits about 65 million years ago, Marta Zaraska wrote in Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat. No matter how plentiful other foods may be, we’ve long shared a “craving for animal flesh.” Scientists have a name for the phenomenon: “meat hunger,” an evolutionary drive to secure protein-rich foods. 

That explains why, like Sent, we might literally dream about animal flesh over pumpkin seeds, purple cabbage, or plump bananas. And why, even having never tasted meat before, Oliver and Parameswaran felt its allure. Meat is full of protein, which our bodies are designed to “prioritize and actively seek out,” Zaraska wrote. (Does that mean we need to be piling our plates with steak, like the Atkins, keto, and paleo dieters? Not at all. Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of in the US, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.) 

While many former vegetarians do start eating meat again for health reasons, their desire for animal flesh often isn’t about individual nutrients at all. In the majority of my interviews, people mentioned social and emotional drivers, like missing the foods they grew up with, feeling estranged from their cultures, and not wanting to cook two different meals for themselves and their partners or children. And others became social omnivores who simply wanted to partake in shared meat dishes while dining out with friends. 

For Genevieve Yam, a 30-year-old food editor and Bon Appétit contributor living in Yonkers, New York, animal products reminded her of family when she needed it most. She’d been vegetarian for a decade before eating meat again during 2020. Her mom, who lives in Hong Kong, had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Yam was grief-stricken. “For a long time, she was what kept me rooted to my family and culture,” she tells me. “I was also just trying to hold on to as much of her as possible.” So Yam started learning how to make all her mom’s comforting Chinese meals, such as pork spareribs with taro and coconut milk, braised chicken and chestnuts, and bitter melon with beef.

Meanwhile, Daniela Molina, a 28-year-old creative director from Miami who went vegetarian in 2012, didn’t really realize she’d been missing the foods of her heritage until she tried them again in 2021. “I went to Ecuador to visit family, and it was the first time in years that I’d been there and not been vegan,” she tells me. “It’s customary to have a big pig roast. So, of course, I had some and it was so liberating and beautiful to be able to participate in cultural experiences like that once again.” 

For others, eating meat was also an essential part of developing a healthy relationship with food. Bridget Moynihan has long grappled with all-or-nothing attitudes towards animal products. A big part of that is because she experiences “somewhat significant weight loss” when she’s strictly vegetarian. “I’ve struggled with body image issues all my life,” says the 24-year-old engineering student. “Vegetarianism has certainly played a role in some unhealthy eating habits; it’s hard to see easy weight loss and not abuse that pattern.” 

Eating childhood foods such as bánh xèo, sizzling rice crepes typically stuffed with shrimp and pork, has been an important part of healing. “A lot of Vietnamese dishes are my go-to comfort foods, and it makes me feel good to eat them,” she says. “Restricting myself from all meat all the time was unsustainable.”

There is little quantitative evidence linking eating disorders and plant-based diets, and for most vegetarians, they’re not related. But clinicians are anecdotally reporting that more of their patients with anorexia nervosa are wanting to eschew animal products. Desiree Nielsen, RD, a plant-based dietician and multiple cookbook author based in Vancouver, Canada, doesn’t believe veganism or vegetarianism is inherently restrictive—after all, so many foods are still on the table. But she’s also seen patients use such preferences as masks for disordered eating. “It allows them to pull back from situations where they can’t control their intake,” she says.

When I was first vegetarian about 12 years ago, I was hiding an eating disorder. The diet, which had appealed to me for ethical reasons, also gave me a socially acceptable way to not eat in public. Until relatively recently, it was just too triggering to think about ditching animal products again. But lately, after giving myself permission to eat absolutely anything I wanted, I’ve noticed myself naturally veering away from meat. These days, I actually feel more joy when eating springy bowls of vegan ramen and vibrant salads.

Navigating the omnivore’s dilemma—ending animal lives to sustain our own—seems to make former vegetarians more conscious consumers than they perhaps would have been if they’d never tried to avoid meat in the first place. Gnawing meat off bones and cracking the shell of a lobster are visceral reminders that animals died for the food on their plates. It’s an inconvenient fact that motivated just about everyone I spoke to in finding ways to satisfy their beliefs as much as their cravings.

After ditching meat for environmental reasons, Caitlyn Davis, a 26-year-old event planner in Philadelphia, started following a new framework when she noticed how much meat was being thrown out after work functions. She began taking home—and eating––leftover London broil steaks, panko-crusted chicken breasts, and sesame tuna. Today, “I’ll buy meat from small and local farms over imitation meat products, but I’ll buy imitation meat over meat grown on factory farms,” she says. 

Yam, the food editor in New York City, never buys what she calls “single serving meat.” She’ll opt for a whole chicken over breasts; the bones become stock and the fat becomes schmaltz. And Sent prefers smaller portions of cold cuts over huge steaks, buys mainly grass-fed meats, and eats almost vegetarian during the week. “My husband and I eat [animal products] during weekends as a way to treat ourselves,” she says.

Americans eat more meat than people do in almost any other country on earth. While many clearly oppose its macabre realities and environmental impacts, tearing into animal flesh is as much a bonding ritual now as it ever was. And so many people I spoke to said they felt as if they were being welcomed back to a special club when they told friends and family they were finally eating meat again. “My family were quite happy and relieved of this diet switch,” says Sent. “I was the black sheep and the only vegetarian.” Culturally, meat still has such a strong hold over us. 

“Life is made so much harder for people who give up meat,” says Alicia Kennedy, a food and drink writer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bon Appétit contributor, and author of the forthcoming book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Many US restaurants, Kennedy says, have few vegetarian options on the menu—a reality I witnessed myself moving across the country recently—and the dominant way of cooking here still revolves around meat at the center of the plate. “It just becomes so much easier to default back to the culturally accepted style of eating,” she says.

Meat is an ethical conundrum for so many. It can also be hard to avoid eating it. So, where do we go from here? Probably as far away from “the hardcore dietary labeling” as we can get, says Kennedy. When you call yourself vegan or vegetarian, “and then you start to eat some meat or seafood again because you like it or you want it or for nutritional reasons, it’s treated like this big ideological shift when it’s really not,” she says. For the people I spoke to, they eventually realized they could both eat some meat and strongly oppose the way it’s produced. 

In fact, for many people, that mindset works better than ironclad commitments. There’s a failure complex associated with strict diets, says Zaraska. Breaking them, even for one meal, “can sometimes lead people to throw in the towel completely, and that’s not the best solution, either.” 

Seven years after their initial study revealed that the majority of people who cut out meat end up eating it again, the same Faunalytics researchers conducted another one. This time they flipped the coin, wanting to understand which factors help people stick to vegan and vegetarian diets long term. They surveyed 222 people for six months as they tried to ditch animal products, and found that patience (easing into it rather than going cold turkey) and flexibility (continuing to eat a small amount of animal products when it makes sense) were key to making less-meat diets work. 

It’s an approach that Nielsen, a vegan herself, often takes with clients who want to at least cut back on animal products. Despite the extreme attitudes so many Americans seem to have about food, “our health is not made or broken by eating a single meal,” she says. “Even for those of us who come at veganism or vegetarianism from an ethical perspective, one moment doesn’t ruin your mission. It’s just a plate of food.”

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Ali Francis

In 2014 Veronica Sent started dreaming about meat—every night. She’d turn the lights off, drift away, and then boom: “I was eating massive tins of tuna and hot dogs,” she says. And not just any hot dogs. These were würstels, blush pink German-style sausages typically made from pork and beef and cased in sheep’s intestine.

This was unusual. The 36-year-old dog groomer, who grew up in Venice, Italy, but now lives in San Francisco, had been a strict vegetarian for about 15 years before the hot dogs started haunting her dreams. She’d stopped eating meat for animal welfare reasons, but it seemed as if her subconscious self was “screaming” at her. So Sent reluctantly decided to reintroduce some meat and fish into her diet. 

Sent’s decision to eat meat after going so long without it might seem like an unrealistically hard pivot. But many like her—long-term vegetarians in the US—do eventually eat meat again. At just 5% by some estimates, plant-based eaters are already the vast minority in this country. In 2014 Faunalytics (formerly Humane Research Council), an organization that conducts research to support animal welfare, discovered that 84% of the 11,000 vegans and vegetarians in their study pretty quickly reverted back to their omnivorous ways. One third of participants lasted less than three months, and over half had started eating meat again within the first year.

Unlike those in the 2014 study, all of the 25 former vegetarians I interviewed had followed the diet for at least five years; these were no casual flings. Most stopped eating meat with intentions similar to Sent’s: They wanted to protest the ways animals were being raised and killed in the US and ease their impacts on the environment. Still, despite their motivations, they eventually ditched vegetarianism for various reasons they couldn’t anticipate—reasons that had as much to do with their communities and culture as they did with typically cited nutritional needs. 

It’s not as though the ethical concerns that first drive people to vegetarianism magically disappear when they decide, for whatever reason, to eat meat again. This kind of dissonance between our values and our actions can be super uncomfortable, and most of the people I spoke to often feel guilty about eating animals and polluting the environment, or struggle with the ick factor when they have to handle or cook meat. “When I stopped being vegetarian, I was very upset with myself and felt that I was betraying my values and the animals,” says Sent. “I spent at least a year eating meat, fish, and eggs in secret.”

My own relationship with meat is on and off, as if it’s a toxic ex I struggle to block. I don’t really eat animals. But I was a strict vegetarian for multiple years in my youth before eventually easing animal proteins back into my diet—and then quitting them again years later. Now I partake in what one vegetarian friend calls the “awkward occasion fish”—a.k.a., I’m vegetarian but will eat seafood to make life easier for stressed hosts. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still crave a burger here and there. So, what is it about meat that keeps us coming back?

I’ll get the most obvious answer out of the way first: Meat tastes really, really good. British journalist and formerly lifetime vegetarian, Huw Oliver, tried steak for the first time during the pandemic. “The pinkish muscle tastes deep, rich, and butter-smooth in the mouth,” he wrote for Time Out. “And cor, that smell. It’s juicy, hearty, butterflies-inducing communal food to take your time over, and I love it.” Author Rajesh Parameswaran, also vegetarian for his whole life up until then, had a similar experience trying molleja for the first time in Argentina. “It was incredibly delicate, airy and light; at the same time it was somehow rich and sort of creamy,” he wrote for Bon Appétit. 

Many interviewees felt the same intense, almost primal relationship with meat. It’s likely been a thing since our primate ancestors started accidentally eating worms who had burrowed into fruits about 65 million years ago, Marta Zaraska wrote in Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat. No matter how plentiful other foods may be, we’ve long shared a “craving for animal flesh.” Scientists have a name for the phenomenon: “meat hunger,” an evolutionary drive to secure protein-rich foods. 

That explains why, like Sent, we might literally dream about animal flesh over pumpkin seeds, purple cabbage, or plump bananas. And why, even having never tasted meat before, Oliver and Parameswaran felt its allure. Meat is full of protein, which our bodies are designed to “prioritize and actively seek out,” Zaraska wrote. (Does that mean we need to be piling our plates with steak, like the Atkins, keto, and paleo dieters? Not at all. Protein deficiency is virtually unheard of in the US, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.) 

While many former vegetarians do start eating meat again for health reasons, their desire for animal flesh often isn’t about individual nutrients at all. In the majority of my interviews, people mentioned social and emotional drivers, like missing the foods they grew up with, feeling estranged from their cultures, and not wanting to cook two different meals for themselves and their partners or children. And others became social omnivores who simply wanted to partake in shared meat dishes while dining out with friends. 

For Genevieve Yam, a 30-year-old food editor and Bon Appétit contributor living in Yonkers, New York, animal products reminded her of family when she needed it most. She’d been vegetarian for a decade before eating meat again during 2020. Her mom, who lives in Hong Kong, had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Yam was grief-stricken. “For a long time, she was what kept me rooted to my family and culture,” she tells me. “I was also just trying to hold on to as much of her as possible.” So Yam started learning how to make all her mom’s comforting Chinese meals, such as pork spareribs with taro and coconut milk, braised chicken and chestnuts, and bitter melon with beef.

Meanwhile, Daniela Molina, a 28-year-old creative director from Miami who went vegetarian in 2012, didn’t really realize she’d been missing the foods of her heritage until she tried them again in 2021. “I went to Ecuador to visit family, and it was the first time in years that I’d been there and not been vegan,” she tells me. “It’s customary to have a big pig roast. So, of course, I had some and it was so liberating and beautiful to be able to participate in cultural experiences like that once again.” 

For others, eating meat was also an essential part of developing a healthy relationship with food. Bridget Moynihan has long grappled with all-or-nothing attitudes towards animal products. A big part of that is because she experiences “somewhat significant weight loss” when she’s strictly vegetarian. “I’ve struggled with body image issues all my life,” says the 24-year-old engineering student. “Vegetarianism has certainly played a role in some unhealthy eating habits; it’s hard to see easy weight loss and not abuse that pattern.” 

Eating childhood foods such as bánh xèo, sizzling rice crepes typically stuffed with shrimp and pork, has been an important part of healing. “A lot of Vietnamese dishes are my go-to comfort foods, and it makes me feel good to eat them,” she says. “Restricting myself from all meat all the time was unsustainable.”

There is little quantitative evidence linking eating disorders and plant-based diets, and for most vegetarians, they’re not related. But clinicians are anecdotally reporting that more of their patients with anorexia nervosa are wanting to eschew animal products. Desiree Nielsen, RD, a plant-based dietician and multiple cookbook author based in Vancouver, Canada, doesn’t believe veganism or vegetarianism is inherently restrictive—after all, so many foods are still on the table. But she’s also seen patients use such preferences as masks for disordered eating. “It allows them to pull back from situations where they can’t control their intake,” she says.

When I was first vegetarian about 12 years ago, I was hiding an eating disorder. The diet, which had appealed to me for ethical reasons, also gave me a socially acceptable way to not eat in public. Until relatively recently, it was just too triggering to think about ditching animal products again. But lately, after giving myself permission to eat absolutely anything I wanted, I’ve noticed myself naturally veering away from meat. These days, I actually feel more joy when eating springy bowls of vegan ramen and vibrant salads.

Navigating the omnivore’s dilemma—ending animal lives to sustain our own—seems to make former vegetarians more conscious consumers than they perhaps would have been if they���d never tried to avoid meat in the first place. Gnawing meat off bones and cracking the shell of a lobster are visceral reminders that animals died for the food on their plates. It’s an inconvenient fact that motivated just about everyone I spoke to in finding ways to satisfy their beliefs as much as their cravings.

After ditching meat for environmental reasons, Caitlyn Davis, a 26-year-old event planner in Philadelphia, started following a new framework when she noticed how much meat was being thrown out after work functions. She began taking home—and eating––leftover London broil steaks, panko-crusted chicken breasts, and sesame tuna. Today, “I’ll buy meat from small and local farms over imitation meat products, but I’ll buy imitation meat over meat grown on factory farms,” she says. 

Yam, the food editor in New York City, never buys what she calls “single serving meat.” She’ll opt for a whole chicken over breasts; the bones become stock and the fat becomes schmaltz. And Sent prefers smaller portions of cold cuts over huge steaks, buys mainly grass-fed meats, and eats almost vegetarian during the week. “My husband and I eat [animal products] during weekends as a way to treat ourselves,” she says.

Americans eat more meat than people do in almost any other country on earth. While many clearly oppose its macabre realities and environmental impacts, tearing into animal flesh is as much a bonding ritual now as it ever was. And so many people I spoke to said they felt as if they were being welcomed back to a special club when they told friends and family they were finally eating meat again. “My family were quite happy and relieved of this diet switch,” says Sent. “I was the black sheep and the only vegetarian.” Culturally, meat still has such a strong hold over us. 

“Life is made so much harder for people who give up meat,” says Alicia Kennedy, a food and drink writer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bon Appétit contributor, and author of the forthcoming book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating. Many US restaurants, Kennedy says, have few vegetarian options on the menu—a reality I witnessed myself moving across the country recently—and the dominant way of cooking here still revolves around meat at the center of the plate. “It just becomes so much easier to default back to the culturally accepted style of eating,” she says.

Meat is an ethical conundrum for so many. It can also be hard to avoid eating it. So, where do we go from here? Probably as far away from “the hardcore dietary labeling” as we can get, says Kennedy. When you call yourself vegan or vegetarian, “and then you start to eat some meat or seafood again because you like it or you want it or for nutritional reasons, it’s treated like this big ideological shift when it’s really not,” she says. For the people I spoke to, they eventually realized they could both eat some meat and strongly oppose the way it’s produced. 

In fact, for many people, that mindset works better than ironclad commitments. There’s a failure complex associated with strict diets, says Zaraska. Breaking them, even for one meal, “can sometimes lead people to throw in the towel completely, and that’s not the best solution, either.” 

Seven years after their initial study revealed that the majority of people who cut out meat end up eating it again, the same Faunalytics researchers conducted another one. This time they flipped the coin, wanting to understand which factors help people stick to vegan and vegetarian diets long term. They surveyed 222 people for six months as they tried to ditch animal products, and found that patience (easing into it rather than going cold turkey) and flexibility (continuing to eat a small amount of animal products when it makes sense) were key to making less-meat diets work. 

It’s an approach that Nielsen, a vegan herself, often takes with clients who want to at least cut back on animal products. Despite the extreme attitudes so many Americans seem to have about food, “our health is not made or broken by eating a single meal,” she says. “Even for those of us who come at veganism or vegetarianism from an ethical perspective, one moment doesn’t ruin your mission. It’s just a plate of food.”

[oksana5319]

WP: The stork and the Grim Reaper discuss their work.

It is the end of another year - which means that the Head Stork and I must sit down to discuss the balance needed to keep the number of people in the world stable. Due to the increasing strain on resources on Earth, the Head Stork and I had to set up a global pandemic to try and bring the population down and more manageable. I had had a very busy 4 years, and the Head Stork stayed at a consistent pace where for the first time in a while, the population of Earth had stayed relatively the same.

I walked into our meeting room in Purgatory. This is the only place where he and I can meet, not in his world that the humans have deemed Paradise or Heaven, and not in my world, that has been associated with fire, brimstone, and a little man with red horns. Purgatory is blank - an empty, white space that can be molded by our thoughts into whatever is required of us.

The meeting room that we had both agreed to was a simple four walls with a large table, two large chairs, and a single file cabinet that was endless, perfect to store all of the records. The top drawer belonged to the souls that were to be born - these files appear, and sometimes they come with the parents’ names attached. Other times, we may get a file that is needs to be decided on. The second file drawer deals with files of souls that are currently living their lives on Earth. The third file drawer is full of files of souls that have passed. Some of these souls roam Purgatory in hopes of getting their final wishes conveyed through us. Sometimes, these souls ask for another chance and get reincarnated. Most souls accept that their time is up go to their own version of paradise or punishment - depending on how they felt they led their lives, with the exception of some particularly cruel actions.

I sat down in my chair, and waited. A very frazzled bird burst through the only door leaving a trail of long white feather in her wake. The Head Stork, Clarissa, took her seat across from me. “Sorry I’m late, Morte. I had like 2,000 difficult deliveries in the last 5 minutes alone, and I had to make sure I delegated them to do this. I know we can’t postpone this as it is the most important aspect of our jobs.”

Although I know that she can’t see it, I grinned under my hood. She is always working, as am I. I am hoping that my employees can also handle this - but in the millennia that I have had to attend this conference, I have yet to have a major disaster.

“What’s first on the docket, Morte?”

“I have a grandmother that is desperate to see her first grandchild finally reach earth. She died before she could meet them, unfortunately, but if possible, here is her file,” I stated, handing Clarissa the file.

Inside the Manila folder, there was a picture of an elderly, African-American woman that wore thick, wire-framed glasses. She wore a tight bun on top of her head. Her face looked stern because she hardly smiled, but her eyes in the photo danced with a youth that never faded. Under her picture, there are papers stating who her parents were, her spouse/ significant other [if applicable], every location that she visited, any immediate family, and final wishes. She passed before her husband, and they only had one child - their daughter, Niyah.

Clarissa studied the file, then opened her laptop.

[wordvomitgenerator]

Top 5 places you've been

🤩🤩 ahh yay this one’s fun! Thank you for asking!!

5. Hawaii: I have family in Hawaii so the times I have gone have been family trips so of course it’s a beautiful place and I had fun but since I’ve only been with family I didn’t get to just explore on my own or create formative memories like some other places. It’s so pretty and a lovely place to be.

4. Portland, Or: I went to collage in Portland so I got to live there for a while so it’s dear to my heart. First time living in my own in a city I loved it so much. I had to leave because of the pandemic and I havent been back since I miss it.

3. Croatia: I had the opportunity to go to Croatia for two weeks on a trip with one of my dear friends in high school, her youth group type organization was going and she invited me as a guest. It was beautiful and I had so much fun it was a bunch of people my age and even tho I was the only one who could only speak English it was a blast. Core memory and it was a beautiful place.

2. Germany: I got to do an exchange program in high school so we went to many different cities in Germany briefly, and I became great friends with my assigned partner (she’s the friend from above), so I went back again the following year and got to explore more of just her small home town and have fun. I made a dear friend and got to really enjoy life in Germany for a brief time.

1. Paris, France: last March I was able to go to Paris with my best friend and our original plan was to see the friend from Germany, we were only supposed to be in Paris for a few days but my friend got sick so we ended up being there for 2 weeks. It was so much fun I was an adult this time and I was with just my best friend, it was so much fun and I’d love to go back. I had great food and I got to just wonder around and explore on my own and there were so many happenstances that made it the best trip. I enjoyed Paris very much.