#the video ending also has her in sort of wrench around body position

[an-apple-a-day-or2]

(i love the TTY but the video cutting off over 1/4 of a turn short with her head being close to the vault height concerns me for knees reasons)

I do however think this shows that regardless Rebe's amanar is probs on LOCK right now

[majorshatterandhare]

[ID: Three digital drawings of the Mechanisms. The first two are black on white sketches and the last is colored with black line art on white. The style is cartoon-y.

Image One: From left to right, Nastya Rasputina, Raphaella la Cognizi, and Marius von Raum are all pictured with cat ears and tails.

Nastya is thin, her hair is pulled back into a low ponytail, she has half-frame glasses and wears earrings. She is wearing a long black coat that reaches about knee height, vertically striped leggings, and black boots. Her tail is visible curling behind her legs. Her hands are in her coat pockets.

Raphaella is standing with arms raised and hands limp, like cat paws, and one leg raised, body open to the viewer but also facing Nastya. The pose is similar to the dance move from the Thriller music video. She has long curly hair and her mouth is in a sideways Arabic numeral three shape, like a cat’s mouth. She is wearing a cropped blouse with a Peter Pan collar with a vertically striped, cropped sweater vest over. On her legs she wears a pair of shorts over leggings which have been scribbled in, she also wears knee high boots. Her tail reaches over to Marius and is curled next to him.

Marius is a tad shorter than the other two. He has short curly hair, a beard and mustache, his eyebrows are down in the middle in a typically angry position, his eyes are closed and follow the same V shape, and his mouth is in a similar position to Raphaella’s. Marius is standing with wide legs and his hands raised above his head, triumphantly. He is wearing a shirt with curved horizontal lines of some sort, stripes or chains perhaps, under a waistcoat and a jacket with fancy buttons on the lapels. He has black pants and boots.

Image Two: Nastya is pictured on the left side of the image with her elbow rested on Jonny d'Ville's shoulder; he is on the right side of the picture.

Nastya has her arm up a bit high to rest on Jonny's shoulder; her other hand is holding a wrench; her body is facing the camera with a wide stance. She wears half-frame, oval glasses and has hair that is past her shoulders and pulled into a low ponytail; her nose is triangular; she is looking down at Jonny. Nastya wears a black, long sleeve, turtle neck shirt under a horizontally striped short sleeve shirt, which is in turn under a pair of overalls. Around her waist a string of some kind holds two more wrenches of smaller sizes. Her overalls cutoff at the calf and show laced white boots.

Jonny has his head pulled really low, with his shoulders raised high, although still facing forward, and has his arms crossed over his chest. He has dark receding hair that sticks up in many places, as well as a mustache and chinstrap beard. His nose is shaped like a V and he is looking up at Nastya. He is wearing a puffy winter coat with a fur lined hood, and a vertically striped scarf. His shirt and pants are nondescript except for the knees of the pants which have a small scribble on them indicating they are worn or stained, they suddenly either cut off at the calf or become much tighter. This then shows his boots which are also white and laced have fur coming out of the top.

Image Three: A colored drawing of Raphaella.

She is standing facing toward the camera with one hand on her thigh and the other closer to her hip, her weight mostly on one leg and the other knee is bent a bit. Raphaella is a light skinned woman with long curly blonde hair, green eyes, and a small nose. She wears yellow collapsing wings on her back. She has on a cropped, long sleeve, white, Peter Pan collar blouse with a cropped yellow sweater vest on top. Her midriff is showing. She wears red shorts with navy tights, the waist band of which can be seen above that of the shorts. Her boots are almost knee high, black, and have a scalloped top edge.

End ID.]

art this week has been mostly doodling during classes and when im not napping so. heres some beans

[desdemonafictional]

Chicken Soup, Approximately

a zadr fic

rated G for everyone

On Ao3

The moment that everything went wrong was when Dib climbed into that giant robot.

At the time, Zim was sitting in a pile of fairly comfortable trash on the street side, temporarily vanquished. For a second there he’d assumed that the day was over, so he’d just been biding his time, waiting for his PAK recovery sequence to rearrange his tissues into their correct positions. The giant robot had been slumped, powered down after its defeat, with Dib at its heels poking around in the wiring to satisfy his curiosity. And then some neighborhood mud monkey had leaned over their fence and shouted at Dib, “Hey, boy!”

 Dib looked up.

The mud monkey, slumping over the fence and waving some kind of recreation beverage, said, “You got your--your damn robot all over my lawn! Lookit Marge’s petunias, they’re, uh, flat! You done smashed ‘em! You big headed little hooligan!”

Dib looked down, at some sort of foliage flattened underneath his boots as well as Zim’s giant robot. They’d started fighting at one end of Zim’s neighborhood and ended up on the other side, and they had taken out a fair amount of lawns with the big metal feet in the struggle as Dib tried to uncouple the power cells from the inside. The neighbor on the other side was missing a chunk of roof tile.

“Oh,” he said, “sorry? It wasn’t really my fault, but sorry anyhow.”

“You better get your car off my lawn boy!” the human said, jabbing his bottle at the robot. 

“Okay, okay,” Dib said, “I will, jeeze. Give me a second, I’m trying to figure out where the power lifting mechanism connects to the joint--”

The human neighbor squinted one of his bulging eyes. “I know you,” he said, “you’re Membrane’s wacky little nutjob kid. Hey, hey, how did that worm taste? I saw you hack it up on the tv.”

Dib flipped up his collar, covering his neck. “I wasn’t--I had been poisoned, I didn’t eat it because I wanted to.”

“I saws you,” the human insisted, rattling his mostly empty bottle. “I saws you eat that worm good. You a bug eater, boy?”

Dib turned to Zim, making helpless gestures at the human on the fence. “Tell him,” Dib said, “tell him you poisoned me!”

 Zim gave the situation a shrewd once-over. While he was still immensely proud of himself for poisoning the Dib Human with that swamp worm, as he was of everything he did, he was also wary of agreeing to anything the Dib asked him in front of other people. “Zim has no recollection of this,” he said, kicking his feet against the trash bag.

“Zim!” Dib shouted. “It was just last week! You put the worm in my milkshake straw! You called me on the phone while I was on my dad’s show just to tell me about it! I had to induce vomiting or I would have died!”

“Are you sure?” Zim said, inspecting his gloves for damage. “This dirt monkey says you’re a bug eater. Maybe you just like eating bugs.”

“I do not like eating bugs!”

The human at the fence took a swig of his beverage. “You throw up bugs on purpose, boy? That’s some sick, that’s, man, that’s some crazy stuff.”

“Because it was poisonous!” Dib shouted.

“Hey Marge!” the human shouted, waving back at his house, “Marge, come laugh at the crazy bug eating boy!”

A distant voice shouted, “From the TV?”

Dib buried his nails in his scalp. “I’m not crazy! It was a rational--”

The neighbor human’s mate appeared at the fence, hair stacked precariously with curlers.  She pointed one of her claws at Dib, opened up her jaw, and erupted into caws of corvid laughter.

“Would you listen--”

A small child appeared at the fence as well, also pointing its finger at Dib and spewing laughter. More neighbors began to surface, curious about the epicenter of the amusement, and quickly joined in the ridicule. Public shaming was an activity that never failed to bring a group of earthlings together.

Zim watched with interest as Dib twitched visibly, in the middle of the garden, his whole body spasming. And then, rather than shouting and stamping and making a speech as he usually did when large groups of humans began to ridicule him publically, Dib simply turned on his heel and walked back to the robot.  He scaled the robot’s leg with a series of deft pulls, climbed into the dark cockpit, and then--quite matter of factly--punched the big red activate button. 

The arm cannons blazed to life.

“Who’s laughing now!” Dib howled, throwing his whole weight against the steering levers. The mecha rattled and roared, one enormous step heavy enough to rattle Zim’s teeth in his mouth. Black smoke poured off the auxiliary engines. Dib scream-cackled, his eyes huge and wild, as the mecha bore down clumsy and utterly unstoppable. He wrenched a knob and a hail of fire exploded the concrete all around them, chunks of it sailing up into the air as time seemed to slow down, and Zim-–in the middle of the smoke and shrapnel and wailing humans-–just stood there.

Watching.

He watched Dib, up there in that 20 ton deathbot, losing his Irk-forsaken mind, and Zim’s insides gave a horrible, perfect heave. It was like he was going to be sick, only, if he puked now there would just be little cartoon hearts all across his boots.

Wow, he thought. Look at the Dib Monkey go.

–

That wasn’t the first time that Dib had taken the invader’s breath away; it was only the first time he noticed it. There had been other moments, forgotten now—an aerial battle where their ships had been locked into a mirrored freefall, cockpit dome pressed to cockpit dome—an impromptu team-up, as Dib threw himself out the window of a building rigged to explode below him—a field trip in the park where Dib had casually handed Zim an ice cream cone, barely noticing what he had done in the midst of monologuing—

Zim’s attention was not entirely on the task of mixing radioactive isotopes into concrete solution. He turned the mixer with half a mind on the day before, turning over the memory of Dib’s nervous breakdown backlit against the yellow sky, the light glinting off the mecha around him—it was the most focused he had been on anything in a very long time, although he didn’t take any note of that change in himself. He was preoccupied with others.

Scowling, Zim thumped himself on the side of his head. “Be silent, brain meats,” he muttered, thumping himself harder. “Obey Zim.”

Across the laboratory, perched on a biohazard canister, GIR giggled and imitated him. “This is funnnn,” he said, clanking with each tap.

“It must be my brain meats,” Zim muttered. “Blasted wetware. Obey your master!”

“Maybe it’s your cute lil backpack!”

“Impossible,” Zim said. “My PAK is a state of the art piece of advanced computational brilliance. It is flawless! The error must be organic.”

GIR oooo’ed at nothing in particular. Zim gave up on his work and tossed the mixer into the vat, stalking across the lab as the isotopes quickly swallowed the mixer whole. He pulled his goggles from his head and threw them over his shoulder. The memory of Dib, sunlit and gloriously mad in his tons of deadly metal, had been troubling Zim for hours now, distracting him from even the simplest of his nefarious doings. It was like a tumor. A tumor obstructing the beautiful correct function of his intelligence interface. And if it was a tumor, well then, Zim would just have to remove it forcibly.

“GIR,” he shouted, “prep the medical lab for surgery!”

As the tiny robot went screaming ahead of him, Zim stripped off his hazmat gloves and grabbed a box of medical ones from a passing shelf. As he stepped into the irritatingly bright medical lab, the computer chimed in with, “REMINDER! Invader Zim is four solar orbits overdue for medical evaluation!”

“Ignore,” Zim said.

“REMINDER! Invader Zim is four solar orbits overdue for—”

“Ignore!” Zim shrieked. “Ignore all!”

“Acknowledged,” the computer muttered.

Zim took an uneasy seat on the edge of the operation table and pulled one of several extendable arms from the ceiling apparatus. He unfolded the square at the end and lined its edges up with his forehead, flipping down a series of lenses until the magnification on the video feed was sufficient for his purposes.

“Engage hard light scalpel,” he ordered. Heat immediately flared to life against his skin. “Incision area one by four by four.”

In a sizzle and pop, the surgical droid severed a square of skull and plucked it from the opened site. Zim squinted at the image projected across the wall in front of him.

“What have you hidden, Dib?” he said to himself, guiding the video probe deeper into his frontal cortex. There was a strange feeling as it passed into him, a fuzziness across his tongue and a static hum in his belly, but the pain receptors were neatly turned off by the PAK interface. After a minute or two of poking around in his own insides, Zim started losing patience.

“Where is it?” he snarled, poking hard enough at his brain matter that his left arm gave a spasm and knocked a spanner off the side table. “Computer! Scan for irregularities!”

“Beep,” the computer said. “Boop.”

Zim crossed his arms and tapped his heel impatiently while the program did an exhaustive malware scan. Finally, the monitor flashed in large letters: HORMONES.

“Hooooormones?” Zim read, “You mean the Dib introduced foreign chemicals into my Zim Veins?”

The screen flashed snow and then returned with the words corrected to: IRKEN HORMONES

“Computer!” Zim snapped, “Explain this!”

The computer hummed. “You appear be exhibiting primitive BONDING HORMONES, resulting in ATTRACTION and HAPPINESS.”

“The Dib did this?” Zim said. “How dare he make Zim happy against his will!”

“Uh,” the computer said.

GIR spit out a mouth full of broken syringes. “Sounds like Looove.”

“Preposterous,” Zim said. “Zim is a hardened combat veteran, not to mention an elite invader! It’s just some kind of… slow acting poison. Kinda thing. Computer, initiate blood draining protocols!”

“No toxins have been detected in the blood of Invader Zim.”

“Well drain it anyway!” Zim shouted. “I want it out of me! Right now!”

“The hormones are being produced by several of your key glands,” the computer said, sounding a little reproachful. “The source is too complex to be removed with traditional surgical procedures.”

Zim sighed and dug a scalpel out of his supplies. “Zim must do everything around here,” he said, examining the joint of his arm where he knew there to be at least one major hormone producing gland. There was also a major artery but, eh, he’d cross that bridge when he burned it.

“The source of the hormone production starter enzyme is located in the organic brain,” the computer continued. “Even if you removed the glands, once they regenerated, the enzyme would only order production to resume.”

“Curses!” Zim said. He lobbed the scalpel across the room, where it stuck in a secondary monitor with an electric fizzle and a puff of smoke. After a moment, he smoothed a hand over his uniform and righted himself.

“No matter,” he said. “I will simply have to hack my fleshware.”

He stalked over to the monitor and pulled down a keyboard from the suspended apparatus. 

“I have researched this ‘love’,” Zim said, making quote-y marks with his claws, “before. I recognize the symptoms. If I have contracted this 'emotion’ then the Dib has certainly infected me with his primitive disease in order to take me out of the game. How cunning. Not!”

Zim swung back around to the keyboard, inputting a search for “rmoance” which he belatedly, after cursing at the error404 screen for a few moments, corrected to “romance”.

“Foolish worm baby,” he muttered, “for I am Zim! Master of all research and HOLY QUIZNACK what is that?”

GIR toddled up behind him and took a look at the screen. “Pogo stick,” he said. “Weeeee-hoo, lookit em go.”

Zim had already smashed the escape key. “Okay,” he said, “never mind that. I don’t need to research romance specifically, I can just research earth diseases. COMPUTER, search the 'inter webs’ for information on curing this disGUSTING affliction.”

The computer buzzed with static for a moment, and then popped open a neatly formatted Gadzooks Answers page across the screen

The computer announced, “Mommy blogger 92 says to feed a fever, starve a cold.”

“Hmm. HMMMM.” Zim peeled back one glove and pressed it against his forehead. “But I am neither hot nor cold! Useless!”

GIR piped up, “Try thinkin about smoochies!”

“Ugh,” Zim said. “No way. There will be no swapping of the spit for this invader. The Dib would have to beg me, beg me on his weak little human knees, crawl through the mud on his hands and knees and then PERHAPS in my beneficent glory I would allow him to kiss… the mighty boots of… Zim…” He paused. A terrible expression passed over his face.

“GIR!” he shouted, “Get the thermometer!”

Two minutes later Zim threw the thermometer across the room, splattering mercury over the far wall.

“FINE!” he shouted. “Fine! The illness is a fever! How does one feed a fever?”

GIR listed a number of items, most of which were not edible. When he got as far as soap, Zim let out a heavy groan and threw himself into the spinning chair.

“Sources say,” the computer interrupted, “chicken noodle soup will DESTROY YOUR FEVER.”

“But it’s…. all meaty… and full of water,” Zim said, barely holding in a gag. He tapped his claws on the arm rest for a moment, considering. “Noodles seem harmless enough,” he decided at last. He levered himself up from the chair and marched off towards the elevator, hands clasped behind his back.

“Come along GIR,” he called, “I’m sure we have some extra soda around here somewhere….”

–

When Zim took his seat for homeroom the next morning, Dib was already at the blackboard trying to explain something to a blank-faced and uninterested audience. He was covered in white dust, practically vibrating in place, and jabbing a piece of chalk at a rudimentary graph of some footprint. He paused in mid jab as Zim walked into the room.

“…What on earth are you holding?” he said.

Zim looked down at his bowl of soup. Then he looked up at Dib. “None of your beeswax, Dibberton.”

“That’s… not my name,” Dib said.

“Hey,” a kid in the front row said, “lay off him, Dibberton.”

“That’s not my–ugh.” Dib turned back to Zim, who had neatly perched himself in a seat toward the back. “That looks like noodles in grape juice.”

Zim shoved a tangy purple noodle into his mouth. “That’s because it is, Dibberton.”

Haha! From the look on the monkey’s face, Zim has thwarted him indeed! The flavor of sucess is sweet! And also, a little carbonated.

[study-with-nina]

[taken from my blog]

I'm an avid reader. There's nothing I love more than diving into a new novel, whether it be nonfiction about a recent scientific discovery or a centuries-old classic. In 2018 alone, I read 46 books, and started three more that I will finish in the new year. Since making a commitment for my New Year's resolution to read 40 books in 2018, I have read some astonishingly good novels. Here are ten of my favorites, in no particular order.

[in the interest of transparency, I will note that any books purchased through the links provided will provide you with a discount as well as give me a small commission (:]

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This book was actually the first book I read this year, and it still has a special place in my heart. The Book Thief is a story about a young German girl growing up during the Holocaust, and her love of reading that pits her against Hitler's regime. It was refreshingly somber to see the Holocaust era from a new view -- not that of a Jewish person, nor a soldier, but a civilian child growing up surrounded by hate speech and propaganda. Liesel's actions and her love for her little family tugged at my heartstrings many times, and this book is one of the few that makes it onto my "reread someday" list. (P.S., the movie is incredible as well, and is one of the few that seems to follow the book as accurately as possible.)

2. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I actually finished this book in record time -- I just could not put it down. The Hate U Give is a gritty, realistic view into what it's like to grow up black in America, and the unique set of challenges that black people face in regards to police brutality and everyday racism -- from friends as well as foes. After 17-year-old Starr witnesses her friend's death at the hands of a cop, she must decide whether to keep her mouth shut or risk bringing attention -- mostly negative -- to herself. Who will believe her, anyway? This book was so profoundly impactful while being written in the voice of a teenage girl, conflicted and alone. Definitely one of my top books of all time.

3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Honestly, I didn't have high expectations coming into this book. I had seen posters for the movie, and assumed it was just another 3-star read with a profitable idea to make into a movie. I am glad to say that I was wrong. This book, set in the year 2045, follows the adventures of teenager Wade Watts as he navigates the world of the OASIS, an online utopia in which citizens live out their lives, in search of a formidable prize hidden someone in the OASIS's thousands of worlds. Wade is a lower-income resident, and the OASIS is all he has -- so he's willing to risk it all for the chance to win the prize and discover the secret of the online universe's creator. This novel is fast-paced and well-written, and is a must-read for anyone who loves anything 80s, as the challenge is focused around 80s culture. (Call Ferris Bueller -- we're going on one heck of an adventure.)

4. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Despite the books listed previously, I typically tend to read nonfiction or classic literature, and don't often branch out into contemporary fiction. But I had heard rave reviews of Little Fires Everywhere, so I decided to check it out, and it quickly became a favorite of mine. The narrative reminds me of that of East of Eden by John Steinbeck, my favorite novel of all time, in the way that it follows the struggles and interconnectedness of a family, somehow without having an explicitly describable plot ("I don't know, they just...exist") but still managing to pull you in just as deep. Like East of Eden, Little Fires Everywhere follows the story of two very different families: the Richardsons, a large, wealthy family with multiple strong, conflicting personalities; and the Warrens, a small, close-knit mother and daughter duo who never lay roots in any one place. The story has a sort of coming-of-age feel to it, as the lives of the Richardson and Warren teens and their age-appropriate struggles are discussed, but also a hint of mystery as Mrs. Richardson attempts to track down the origins of the mysterious Mia Warren. This book made me laugh, cry, and everything in between, and I was so obsessed that I finished the 11-and-a-half-hour-long audiobook in the span of five days (despite the fact that I worked double shifts most of those days). Again, this book is definitely one of my favorites of all time, and one of the rare stories whose characters you still wonder about long after the book is over.

5. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

I have never taken an economics course (though I have dabbled in Crash Course videos here and there) and economics is not an important component of either of my majors (Biological Sciences and Political Science). However, this book was so intriguing that I promptly forgot both of those points. Misbehaving is an excellent introduction to behavioral economics, written simply enough that someone with little to no background knowledge in economics (such as myself) can comprehend, but still intricate enough that the material couldn't fit in a ten-minute Youtube video. Thaler, one of the earliest behavioral economists, describes how the subject came into importance among other economic and business-related topics, as well as how its marriage of economic and financial principles and behavioral psychology lend important insights to businesses as well as individuals. The difficulty of the content is offset with plenty of easy-to-understand examples, and the book reads like a history driven by discovery, with reviews of behavioral economics principles along the way. Though the subject of economics is not one that interests me as much as, say, politics or medicine, I still thoroughly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it as an interesting read that serves as a light workout for your brain.

6. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women” by Kate Moore

I'd be lying if I said this book didn't make me cry multiple times. The Radium Girls is a true story of America's dial painters, the hundreds of young women who painted radium onto watches during the First World War, and the consequences of their position on their health and livelihood. In the days of World War I, jobs for women were few and far between, and becoming a dial painter was the most coveted position among women in their late teens and early twenties, unmarried and looking for some pocket money to buy the latest trends. This narrative follows the story of these dial-painters and how their distinct, omnipresent glow of radium dust went from being wondrous to becoming deadly. As the poisonous radium attacked these young women's bodies, causing them to rapidly and irreparably decay, the radium girls fought for the right to be heard, and to stop the radium industry from pulling any more girls into its vehement trap. This book was deeply heart-wrenching, following the lives of a few bright-eyed young dial painters to their young graves, and a valuable insight into the suppression of women's voices in the early 20th century.

7. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This novel was another popular book that I didn't expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a biography of the life of fictitious movie star Evelyn Hugo, as told to the young and relatively unknown reporter Monique Grant. Evelyn unfurls her story, from escaping poverty to begin her acting career in her late teens, and the myriad of men that came into and left her life across the span of her career and its aftermath. I won't spoil the big twist (or two) that the novel provides, but it most certainly wasn't the "straight bullsh*t" I was expecting based on its title. It is an intense, poignant life of a woman who dared to obtain what she wanted by any means possible, only to discover that her heart lied elsewhere.

8. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

This book was a humorous yet momentous glance into the life of a woman named Eleanor Oliphant, who is perfectly fine, thank you very much. Eleanor doesn't really fit in at the office; her harsh realism and her inability to understand social cues make that quite difficult. But that's fine, because Eleanor has it all planned out. Every week, she follows the same plan, never deviating from her schedule of Wednesday night calls with Mummy, Friday night frozen pizzas, and sleeping off a vodka hangover every Saturday morning. However, when Eleanor and her coworker Raymond save the life of an elderly gentleman who fell near them on their way to work one day, Eleanor's life begins to change in profound ways, and she realizes that maybe "fine" isn't the best way to be, after all. Eleanor's story was touching yet hilarious, and was yet another novel that I could not put down. For anyone looking for a novel starring an out-of-the-ordinary heroine and lacking a predictable romance component, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the novel for you.

9. The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

This fast-paced, gritty novel breaks the wall between the life of a president and the nation, and introduces us to the world of Washington politics and the counterterrorism approach. The President is Missing follows President Duncan, a tenacious war veteran, as he attempts to circumvent impeachment trials brought forth by members of the opposite party while maintaining the secret of a massive, nation-decimating cyber threat from the citizens of the U.S. This narrative is fast-paced, with twists and turns at every stop, and kept me guessing until the end what the outcome would be. The novel reads like a classic James Patterson thriller with the added expertise of a former president to reveal the intricacies of American politics and the battles of the elites.

10. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

My final novel is one that I finished a mere four days prior to writing this post, but one that already has a special place in my heart. Quiet explores the world of introverts, from their underrepresentation in U.S. culture and their hidden talents unique from extroverts. Though I identify as an ambivert (both extroverted and introverted), I felt this was an incredible analysis into the powers of introverts, and why American society should stop trying to force the extrovert ideal on those that are not born to be extroverted. I particularly enjoyed how Cain drew in principles of biology, psychology, and business, and described not only how introverts are wired differently from birth, but their benefits to jobs that are even as high-stakes and fast-paced as the stock market. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who struggles with introversion (if you dread speaking in front of a class, this is probably you) or anyone interested in the biological basis of personality and behavior.

Out of the 46 books I read in 2018, those are the ones that have stood out to me the most, and I would certainly recommend each and every one of them. If you would like more book recommendations, feel free to ask -- I'm always reading something new! Happy new year!

[gr-ey-luh]

Happiness?

If you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Maybe the problem these days is people are just trying too hard. Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you’re raging pissed and throwing a socket wrench at the neighbor’s kids, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, “Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?” No, you’re out for blood. You inhabit and live the anger. You are the anger. And then it’s gone. Just as a confident man doesn’t wonder if he’s confident, a happy man does not wonder if he’s happy. He simply is. What this implies is that finding happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. This gets mixed up a lot, especially since happiness is marketed so much these days as a goal in and of itself. Buy X and be happy. Learn Y and be happy. But you can’t buy happiness and you can’t achieve happiness. It just is. And it is once you get other parts of your life in order. Happiness is not the same as pleasure Finding happiness: Tony Montana didn't seem too happy. Tony Montana didn’t seem too happy. When most people seek happiness, they are actually seeking pleasure: good food, more sex, more time for TV and movies, a new car, parties with friends, full body massages, losing 10 pounds, becoming more popular, and so on. But while pleasure is great, it’s not the same as happiness. Pleasure is correlated with happiness but does not cause it. Ask any drug addict how their pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how happy pursuing pleasure made him feel. Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable and less happy in the long-run. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest. Pleasure is what’s marketed to us. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. There’s something more. Finding Happiness does not require lowering one’s expectations A popular narrative lately is that people are becoming unhappier because we’re all narcissistic and grew up being told that we’re special unique snowflakes who are going to change the world and we have Facebook constantly telling us how amazing everyone else’s lives are, but not our own, so we all feel like crap and wonder where it all went wrong. Oh, and all of this happens by the of age 23. Sorry, but no. Give people a bit more credit than that. For instance, a friend of mine recently started a high-risk business venture. He dried up most of his savings trying to make it work and failed. Today, he’s happier than ever for his experience. It taught him many lessons about what he wanted and didn’t want in life and it eventually led him to his current job, which he loves. He’s able to look back and be proud that he went for it because otherwise, he would have always wondered “what if?” and that would have made him unhappier than any failure would have. The failure to meet our own expectations is not antithetical to happiness, and I’d actually argue that the ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is actually a fundamental building block for happiness. If you thought you were going to make £100,000 and drive a Porsche immediately out of uni, then your standards of success were skewed and superficial, you confused your pleasure for happiness, and the painful smack of reality hitting you in the face will be one of the best lessons life ever gives you. The “lower expectations” argument falls victim to the same old mindset: that happiness is derived from without. The joy of life is not having a £100,000 salary. It’s working to reach a £100,000 salary, and then working for a £200,000 salary, and so on. So, I say raise your expectations. Elongate your process. Lay on your death bed with a to-do list a mile long and smile at the infinite opportunity granted to you. Create ridiculous standards for yourself and then savor the inevitable failure. Learn from it. Live it. Let the ground crack and rocks crumble around you because that’s how something amazing grows, through the cracks. Happiness is not the same as positivity The key to finding happiness: not a fake smileChances are you know someone who always appears to be insanely happy regardless of the circumstances or situation. Chances are this is actually one of the most dysfunctional people you know. Denying negative emotions leads to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and emotional dysfunction. It’s a simple reality: shit happens. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made and negative emotions arise. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are necessary and healthy for maintaining a stable baseline happiness in one’s life. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way which aligns with your values. Simple example: A value of mine is to pursue non-violence. Therefore, when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also make a point to not punch them in the face. Radical idea, I know. (But I absolutely will throw a socket wrench at the neighbor’s kids. Try me.) There’s a lot of people out there who subscribe to “always be positive” ideology. These people should be avoided just as much as someone who thinks the world is an endless pile of shit. If your standard of happiness is that you’re always happy, no matter what, then you’ve been watching way too much Leave It To Beaver and need a reality check (but don’t worry, I promise not to punch you in the face). I think part of the allure of obsessive positivity is the way in which we’re marketed to. I think part of it is being subjected to happy, smiley people on television constantly. I think part of it is that some people in the self-help industry want you to feel like there’s something wrong with you all the time. Or maybe it’s just that we’re lazy, and like anything else, we want the result without actually having to do the hard work for it. Which brings me to what actually drives happiness…. Happiness is the process of becoming your ideal self Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying a new computer. And the funny thing is that all three of the activities above are exceedingly unpleasant and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of our lives. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair, yet once we’ve done them we look back and get misty-eyed about them. Why? Because it’s these sort of activities which allow us to become our ideal selves. It’s the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. This is why some people are happy in war and others are sad at weddings. It’s why some are excited to work and others hate parties. The traits they’re inhabiting don’t align with their ideal selves. The end results don’t define our ideal selves. It’s not finishing the marathon that makes us happy, it’s achieving a difficult long-term goal that does. It’s not having an awesome kid to show off that makes us happy, but knowing that you gave yourself up to the growth of another human being that is special. It’s not the prestige and money from the new business that makes you happy, it’s the process of overcoming all odds with people you care about. And this is the reason that trying to be happy inevitably will make you unhappy. Because to try to be happy implies that you are not already inhabiting your ideal self, you are not aligned with the qualities of who you wish to be. After all, if you were acting out your ideal self, then you wouldn’t feel the need to try to be happy. Cue statements about “finding happiness within,” and “knowing that you’re enough.” It’s not that happiness itself is in you, it’s that happiness occurs when you decide to pursue what’s in you. And this is why happiness is so fleeting. Anyone who has set out major life goals for themselves only to achieve them and realize that they feel the same relative amounts of happiness/unhappiness knows that happiness always feels like it’s around the corner, just waiting for you to show up. No matter where you are in life, there will always be that one more thing you need to do to be extra-especially happy. And that’s because our ideal self is always just around that corner, always three steps ahead of us. We dream of being a musician and when we’re a musician, we dream of writing a film score and when write a film score, we dream of writing a screenplay. And what matters isn’t that we achieve each of these plateaus of success, but that we’re consistently moving towards them, day after day, month after month, year after year. The plateaus will come and go, and we’ll continue following our ideal self down the path of our lives. And with that, with regards to fingind happiness, it seems the best advice is also the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and then step towards it. Dream big and then do something. Anything. The simple act of moving at all will change how you feel about the entire process and serve to inspire you further. Let go of the imagined result — it’s not necessary. The fantasy and the dream are merely tools to get you off your ass. It doesn’t matter if they come true or not. Live, man. Just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be.

[kootenaygoon]

So,

Ryan was wielding his wrench like a weapon.

I’d known him for over a year by this point, and become acquainted with his peculiarities — just shy of an autism diagnosis, he had a propensity to rage monologue and exactly zero tolerance for small talk. He was a hulking blond metalwork artist struggling to keep a steady job, and he lived with his girlfriend Kate and his grandmother in a ramshackle house down in Lower Fairview. I’d seen him have a number of  but I’d never seen him worked up like this. The dude was literally vibrating.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Kate said some shit went down with Snapper?”

Ryan ran his grease-covered fingers through his hair, blinked at the sky, then spent some time sucking back air through his nostrils. Before I pulled up he’d been working on his latest project: a giant truck he’d salvaged from a Blewett junkyard that he was planning to spend the next few years restoring. A stripe of black ran through his right eyebrow.

“Let’s just say I haven’t murdered anyone yet. Kate should probably tell you the rest. You wanna smoke a joint inside?”

Once we passed through the entranceway I was happily greeted by Ryan’s grandmother, a white-haired Argenta woman fond of gabbing. She held us up for a moment with small-talk before we headed back to his bedroom, where Kate was sitting cross-legged on the bed rolling joints while watching some obscure British television series I’d never heard of. Ryan quickly gathered some laundry off a nearby computer chair so I could sit down, and Kate jumped up to give me a hug. We’d originally met through Paisley’s burlesque class and she’d quickly become one of my closest confidantes, a trusted ally I could go to when things got stressful at work or shitty at home.

“I was just over at Niles’ dispensary, and I heard some shit went down with Snapper? Like you got him fired or something?”

Kate laughed. “That dude’s lucky he’s not in jail. I had to physically restrain Ryan earlier.”

“What happened?”

If there was anyone who liked telling a story as much as I did, it was Kate. Her burlesque name was Lola Lane, and she was known for having a fiery and unapologetic personality. She was curvier than some of her contemporaries, passionate about body positivity, and was currently working at a high-end bra store on Baker Street. She put aside her rolling for a moment so she could fully engage, sweeping her hands through the air as she took me through the play-by-play.  

“So we’ve been going to Niles’ dispensary since it opened, as you know, and we’ve always been really good customers. But the thing is, you know, they just can’t compete with Phil’s prices.”

“Right, so?”

“Well, I guess I was talking about that, telling people that if they wanted to save money they should head across the street, and somebody must’ve told Snapper that I was disrespecting the business or whatever bullshit, so he messaged me and started saying all this crazy shit.”

“Snapper messaged you? What, like on Facebook?”

“I should show you. I can show you what he said, word for word. It was so unnecessarily aggressive.”

Ryan snorted in the corner, staring at his computer screen, but didn’t say anything. Kate lit one of the joints, taking a few exploratory hoots, then passed it my way. Her rolling skills were exemplary, and I held it up for a moment to admire its firm, bat-like construction.

“So what did you do?”

“I called their head office in Vancouver, and talked to the president of the company.”

I laughed. “Are you shitting me? The president?”

She smiled, pleased with herself. “Believe me, when I told her the things Snapper was saying she was absolutely shocked. She promised me that he would be fired immediately. She said they couldn’t be associated with that sort of behaviour, especially while they’re in this grey area legal zone.”

“Okay, seriously: what did he say?”

She pulled out her phone, scrolled through her messages for a moment, then handed it to me. There was a pretty tame back and forth as he accused her of bad-mouthing the dispensary and told her to stop, but then things escalated. He started calling her “cunt” and wrote “better watch yourself”. My eyes widened, and I looked up at her in alarm.

“That’s a straight up threat. You should report that to the police.”

“Oh, I did. Showed them my phone and everything. They said they’re looking into the matter, but that’s not all. He also texted Ryan.”

I looked over to where Ryan was puffing on the joint, still typing away at the computer. He was frowning like he was in pain, like he was holding something back, and when I asked him what Snapper said he just shook his head like he couldn’t even acknowledge it without blowing over. Kate walked over and picked up his phone, showed it to me.

Nice grandma you got there. Does she need help with sweeping?

I was confused. “What does that mean? I don’t get it.”

“Ryan’s grandma was sweeping outside earlier today. This fucker was outside our house, watching us. Like he literally came over here.”

“He’s lucky I didn’t see him,” said Ryan. “I would have disemboweled him on the spot, decapitated him with a butter knife and fucked the bloody neck hole. That piece of human excrement threatened an old fucking woman. That shit doesn’t fly in Nelson.”

“Snapper’s done,” Kate concluded.

“I always heard he was a piece of shit, mostly from Blayne. But he gets away with a lot because he’s related to Niles.”

Ryan scoffed. “He’s not untouchable. The guy has no idea how easily he could be disappeared. Call up a couple of my friends, get some black masks and it’s bye-bye time.”

“Plus he’s got his trial coming up.”

I was holding in a big toke, and released it. “Trial, for what?”

“Blayne didn’t tell you? He’s going on trial for rape. Remember that girl Marijke? That one you met last Halloween? She’s taking him to court for full-out sexual assault.”

“Holy shit.”

Kate continued rolling, laughing to herself. “I can’t wait til that asshole is in jail. He’s been getting away with this shit for too long. I mean, good for Marijke fucking holding him accountable like that because I guarantee you she’s not the first. He’s always perving on the young chicks, cruising around. I think one of his girlfriends was even underage.”

We chatted for another half an hour, eventually playing some YouTube videos and moving on to other subjects. We smoked a second joint together, then Kate brought us bowls of corn chips. Ryan was finally acting relaxed again, getting caught up in discussing fictional characters and comparing favourite movies. Eventually I stood up to head home, but before leaving I stopped in the doorway. The news about Snapper had jarred me a little bit, and I was picturing all the times he’d been in close proximity to Paisley. I knew he was a shady character, but rape was next level.

“Hey Ryan, you know that posse you mentioned? The black masks and everything?” I asked, standing in the doorway. He looked up and shrugged, a questioning look on his face.

“Count me in.”

The Kootenay Goon