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etherealsomething · 2 years ago

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3/8/23

The profundities of existence

God, how I hate the complexities of life. I hate how the value of modern human existence is reduced to the amount of work and productivity one can produce. I feel like my body is aching for the moment when I can speak out and bask in the beauty of the world, free of any capitalistic desires. I probably sound like some pretentious leftist liberal arts student right now. I could honestly care less about politics. As a trans woman, I probably should. But I struggle enough with remembering what clothes I have in my closet—working memory and ADHD or what chronically online people call ‘object permanence’–let alone what people are signing into law in Washington DC. But that's really not what I want to talk about right now…

I wish my body could just melt away. I feel so stressed all the time and I don't even know why. I carry an invisible weight on my shoulders. My neck strains and yearns for release. My back aches from lurching over a computer screen, flashing with the lights of pseudo-educational nothingness. My calves are sore at the end of every day from holding a tension I didn't even know existed.

Im constantly looking for a way out. A way to fall away into the void of relaxation.

I want to run away and fall into a field of pink and blue flowers. I want honeybees to brush my cheek as I lie there. Basking in it. Taking in the complete lack of stimulus.

Maybe that's what this is all about.

Forced overstimulation. The modern world–fucking society–is built upon this desire for stimulation in all forms. Everything is moving faster. Social media is full of horrific examples of this. Like explosive cows locked in a cattle car, the internet has become this effective mental sabotage of stimulation. Tik tok, youtube, instagram, snapchat, twitter. They're all littered with videos meant only to ensnare you, draw you in, and trap you with their pretty colors and empty promises of entertainment. And it ruined my brain. Fried it.

I like to say that the internet casts spells.

You open up an app like running your finger against an inscribed glyph and you bear witness to tongues spoken only in these electronic tomes. And they trap you. Influencers are witches. The internet is a coven.

God, I sound schizophrenic. C’est la vie.

I think I believe in a god. Call it the universe. Call it a higher power. I don't care. I like the term ‘God’. It feels good to give it a name. And ‘God’ has such power behind it. It's riddled with over two thousand years of history. People have died for ‘God’. People have devoted their life to ‘God’. I don't think that proves its existence but it sure as hell proves its power.

People seem to have an issue with this God. People seem to take issue when I say I believe in God. I think it’s because they think it's tied to the Judeo-Christian God; this “holy father” who created the universe and gave life to the first humans. To be fair, the God of the Old Testament is fucked up. That guy was crazy. Ruthless even. He sent fires and floods and angels that melted the minds of powerful men. He asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. He wanted to test his creation. Punish humanity for their power. But New Testament God is a little bit nicer. He got Mary pregnant (not necessarily very nice) with the messiah. Jesus was born to take the brunt of all of humanity's sins. He was sacrificed in place of all of mankind. So that was nice I guess. But I don't know how much I believe in this god. This antithetical, all-powerful being. I think my God is much smaller than that. It's more intertwined in existence. I see it in how snowflakes fall so peacefully. I see it in the roots of trees when they pop out of the ground. I see it in my friend’s smile. I see it in myself. I think my idea of god is more connected to the beautifully chaotic randomness of the universe. I believe in beauty. That is my god.

I've been wearing a rosary as of late. The last couple of months I think–since the start of this year at least (it’s the beginning of March as I write this). I think it's tied me more to this idea of divinity. It consumes me. I feel it in my heart. When I get anxious or when I don’t know what to do with my hands ill grab the crucifix hanging from my neck. I already stated that I don't really believe in the Judeo-Christian god but I find the imagery compelling. I see Jesus as this iconographic figure of divinity in humanity. Proof that my idea of God is part of every human being. Jesus acts almost as this symbol, not for the repentance of my sins, but for the little piece of divinity found in each and every one of us. The idea of the crucifix fascinates me. It draws me near. This idea that one's belief in divinity could lead to such torturous violence and that Christianity worships this sacrifice. I'm not saying I don't find his martyrdom honorable, I just think it’s a bizarre figure to make the poignant logo of your belief.

I feel the need to explain my relationship with god to its fullest extent. My beliefs. My doctrine.

I believe in God. A god of beauty. A god of humanity. An energy so powerful that it penetrates everything. God is the detail you find when you look at something–anything. Not just see it but look at it. God is the emotion you feel deep in your stomach whenever you bear witness to something beautiful. I think this God rules everything, embuing it with divinity. It's what makes life worthwhile: searching for the divine. It's there, I promise you. And once you look for it, you'll start to feel it. This godly energy, the holy being that embodies the world around you. The beauty of it all must be purposeful and that’s why I think God exists. The universe needs this ‘higher power’ to imbue itself into the fibers of existence.

This idea of God comes out in everything I do. A divine purpose that makes my life meaningful. This god has given me the ability to see the beauty of the world, to make beautiful things, and to bask in it all. When I sit and read my tarot cards I feel its power, not in the divination of the cards or in the magic of it, but in the very act of doing anything. Because what is divinity if not the power to experience existence? I charge my crystals at night because it's a beautiful thing to do. I sage my room because it gives it a beautiful scent. I walk in the rain because it’s a beautiful experience. I bask in academia and study because that knowledge is beautiful. Everything I do is an act of god. Because it’s beautiful.

#manuscript #writing #my writing #female writers #diary #god #goddess #divinity #spirituality #love #beauty

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planetdream · 2 years ago

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ran thru ur entire seungmin tag like a freight train and now i'm thinking abt him learning how to be a brat tamer? (ft. chan lol)

say, for example, you're wheeling (toronto slang for talking stage) with seungmin, right? this is a very quiet, observant guy who likes to gather and sort information to satisfy that chronic itch in the back of his brain. he notices things abt ppl he likes- therefore, he notices things about you. your tells; like the way you talk when you're agitated, how you reposition yourself anytime you're flustered or (his personal favourite) the acidic lilt in your voice that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up- seungmin takes mental note of all of these things and more while he gets to know you.

he concludes that you're a brat at some point once things between you start getting serious. he's read about the trope and watched enough BDSM videos to put two-and-two together. but obviously it's too soon into the relationship to do anything serious abt it. so he defaults to a quiet, stern stare when you get too giddy off teasing him- that seems to do the trick most of the time. he can tell that you like the sudden authoritative reaction. better yet, ~that look~ paired with a very harsh quip of your name and a flick to your thigh will garner the sweetest submissive response from you, and you settle right back down where he can engage with you normally.

seungmin isn't opposed to being a caretaker OR a tamer, he just doesn't really know HOW outside of the little things he does to keep you in line. so he turns to the best role model he knows and watches his hyung carefully- seungmin even falls back on occasion and allows you and his friend to interact with each-other on your own time just to observe and jot down what makes you tick and reel.

eye contact [direct, unwavering, dark]

physical touch [varies on your actions. preferably striking- or, firm and calculated]

name calling [degrading makes you a little sulky, stick to saccharine titles with a condescending tone]

patience + delayed reaction [chan has very little patience and is too eager, that makes you bored and will prolong the attitude]

discipline via punishment [withhold reactions and rewards, let them become incentives]

seungmin catches on quickly, and within a month he's got himself a self-written guidebook on how to make your eyes glaze over with yearning, no trouble. throughout the winding path of your budding relationship, you find yourself leaning into seungmin more based off the little things he does that makes your bratty brain buzz with excitement! for example: he swats your bum when you tease him now. it's fleeting but it makes you squeak and stutter in stride sometimes. you have no idea why it causes you to sink into his side the way you do, but HE knows. additionally, he'll tower over you, hold your gaze and say your name like he's disappointed in you, then lean in and nip at your neck.

gradually you build a dynamic, thanks to his silent testing and your visceral responses, it's an easy system to follow and god is it a pleasure to finally find someone who studies you down to the bone the way he does. coz that's essentially what you want, right? someone who takes the time to figure out how to handle you so the tables can finally flip and you can be the desperate, needy baby you are.

GOD BLESS U AND UR GORGEOUS MIND BBY WOW

idk what i did to deserve you sending me this masterpiece but oh my god—fighting for my life after reading this i want this so bad!!!

its all so so so fitting for seungmin. he’s more of a silent type and pretty analytical so ofc he’s gonna take his time learning about what makes you tick and also about what puts you in your place and has you back to being the sweetest sub he knows you can be. wholeheartedly think he loves it all though—especially the potential challenge of a bratty s/o. its all so new for him, but he tries his best and learns fairly quickly.

actually sobbing rn this is gonna be on my mind forever PLS

#seungmin brainrot hours? seungmin brainrot hours.#💌 — mail time #💌 — revv9ine #✰˚. !! dream.hardhours #☁️ — daydream.skz #seungmin smut #seungmin hard thoughts

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honeypirate · 3 years ago

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In Madness lies Sanity

Ushijima Wakatoshi x Reader - College AU

Based off the bit by Allan Watts. I read the transcript and I thought— Ushijima in love with his best friend listening to this talk about love in one of his classes and realizing that he needs to tell them the truth. Allan watts bit is in blue, the fic is in white.

Ushijima wasn’t one to dwell too long on trivial matters. He works through them and then forgets them. He focuses on what is important and what will bring him closer to his desired future. He isn’t one who is sucked into madness and drama, he has a strong level head and it’s something he takes pride in. So he’s trying to apply his ideas to how he handles his feelings for you, is it trivial? Is it important to tell you? He was struggling before he walked into class Monday morning and had his eyes opened by the video played during lecture.

- I’m going to talk to you about a particularly virulent and dangerous form of divine madness which is called falling in love. Which is, from a practical point of view, one of the most insane things you can do, or that can happen to you. Because in the eyes of a given woman or a given man, an opposite who go to the eyes of everybody else a perfectly plain and ordinary person can appear to be God or Goddess incarnate .... And this is an extraordinary disruptive experience a subversive experience in the conduct of human affairs

You were never a plain and ordinary person to him and he believes that’s where it got confused. He always has and always will see you as an extraordinary individual, regardless of things that may be seen as flaws or imperfections, regardless of your mistakes. You didn’t transform from one thing to the next, you were the same angel he knew, so when his heart flipped from friendship to love, he wasn’t paying attention.

- Because you never know when it will strike off for what reason. It’s something like contracting a very chronic disease once you get into it

If anyone asked Ushijima who his best friend is his first thought is you. His first thought thought is always you. His constant. His true best friend who is there for him through anything. He’ll open his mouth and say “y/n is my best friend” and when people would point out just how close they are he just shrugged, weren’t friends supposed to be close?

When he thinks back now, now that his feelings are obvious, he realizes that it was just a matter of time until he fell in love with you. He can pinpoint every moment along his life where love was obvious, every joke and hug that at the time he thought was just nice, when he loaned you his sweatshirt and then didn’t wash it because it smelled like you. When he would spend all his valuable and limited free time with you just because he liked the way you would smile as he walked you home. He thinks back to all of his dates in high school and college, of the dating app conversations he’s had or blind dates his friends had set up, and they all failed because of one simple reason- none of them were you.

- I would like to make some reflections on this particular form of madness, and to raise again a very disturbing question. And this disturbing question is as follows: Is it only when you are in love with another person that you see them as they really are? And in the ordinary way, when you are not in love with people you see only a fragmented version of that being.

He’s spent hours turned to days to weeks as he keeps thinking about whether or not he loves you or if he just thinks he could because of how close you already are. He’s lost track of time connecting different dots and making different lists and theories, replaying you’re entire friendship back in his head. He’s thought about the times he saw you drunk in college and puking on his shoes as he helps you home, when you decided you wanted to try and longboard and turfed it so bad your arm was gashed from wrist to elbow and he had carried you to the urgent care. all your reckless and crazy ideas you dragged him along with, you were almost as bad as tendou but he just wanted to take care of you as best as he could. He can feel the desire in his bones to make sure you were always taken care of, a feeling he knows he’ll have until he dies.

He thinks about when you had dated Oikawa and for the entire three months he had an ulcer but didn’t know why. He thought it was because of his pain relievers and quit them the week you broke up with him, not realizing the connection. When he’d get acid in his throat when you talked about dating someone else, he thought he just needed some milk. How blind he had been.

-Because when you are in love with someone you do indeed see them as a divine being. And suppose that’s what they are truly. And your eyes have by your beloved been opened in which case your beloved is serving to you as a kind of guru. An initiator. And that is why there is a form of sexual yoga, based on the idea that man and woman are to each other as mutual guru and student. And through a tremendous outpouring of psychic energy in total devotion and worship to this other person who is respectively the goddess of the god.

Being someone’s best and closest friend consisted of seeing their entirety and choosing to stay and love them anyway. To care for them. He can’t say for certain where he crossed over into love, into wanting to hug you and kiss you, wanting to be the only one you think about, but there’s not much he can do about it now and he doesn’t want to.

Ushijima sees you. He sees your good and your bad and everything in between, he sees you for you. Your ordinary mundane ways of life that he can’t help but want to share with you. Grocery shopping, library trips, post office runs, he wants them all to be done with you. He truly cannot imagine anyone else taking that spot in his heart.

Wanting to show you what he sees. What he knows to be true about you. he wants to scream from the rooftops how amazing you are and he’s not a very loud person. He sees the way you care for your friends selflessly and give and give all you have just so that others can be happy and you never complain. You do what you can when you can and still have time to take care of yourself he never knew how you did it so effortlessly, even when you’d vent to him you never regretted helping others.

He sees the way you lift up those around you. How you leave everyone a little more positive than before you talked to them. He doesn’t know how you do it. He’s convinced you’re an angel and he’s dying to show you just how amazing he knows you are. But he doesn’t want to ruin your friendship. He sees your entirety, your full book instead of just the cover, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He wanted to give you this energy and receive it in turn and he’s never been so absolutely terrified.

-You realize by total fusion and contact with the other organism. You go down to the divine center in them and it bounces back and you discover your own or you could put it in this way which is another aspect of it that by falling in love and regarding falling in love not just as a sort of sexual infatuation, because it’s always more than that, isn’t it. I mean you can have a great sexual enjoyment with a pleasant friend, you know. But you may do so simply because he or she appeals to your aesthetic senses. But when you fall in love, it’s a much more serious involvement, you just cannot forget this person. You feel miserable when not in their presence, you’re always yearning, that’s get to see more of each other let’s get together that’s we’re completely entangled and then you see you’ve actually kind of out what I would call spiritual element has been introduced. And the Hindus were sensible enough to realize that this was a means of awakening, enlightenment, and therefore it was. Surrounded. With a sort of rigid religious ritual meditative art, with a form of sexual yoga that is designed to allow the feeling of mutual love to the extent of grand passion to have an extremely fitting fulfillment and expression.

Ushijima has always thought you were beautiful. Any human with eyes would think that. But your beauty and attraction went far deeper than that. Sure he’s had fleeting thoughts about how good you looked in a dress but he never let them linger. It felt wrong to think of you like that. But now that he’s an adult, a grown man and not a teenager anymore, he wants to kiss you, to hold your hand, maybe more but it wasn’t about that. It was about the intimacy, the closeness, the vulnerability.

Awakening. Enlightenment. Two words that before he didn’t really think about. But now he feels changed. Now that he’s realized how much he loves you has lifted his spirits, made him dream of the passion and happiness you could have together. He feels himself slipping into the joy of being in love with his best friend and imagining all the ways that love could grow. He feels only half of himself when he’s without you, always needing to see you or be around you, but you never made him feel clingy or bad. You met him in kind, telling him how much you wanted to be around him too.

At first he thought that this love was a trivial thing, something he could push from his mind, but after his weeks of thought he knows this is a lot more serious than he’s experienced before.

-Falling in love is a thing that strikes like lightning and is therefore extremely analogous to the mystical vision. We don’t know. No how really people attain the mystical vision. There is not as yet a very clear rationale as to how it happens because we do know that it is opened to many people who never did anything to look for it. And many people especially in adolescence have had the mystical vision all of a sudden without the slightest warning and with no previous interest in that kind of thing

He remembers what he was doing when it dawned on him that he was in love, when he felt the air leave his lungs and his eyes widen softly when he realized how nice it would be to kiss your temple and he couldn’t even finish the thought as the feeling ran from his head to his toes.

He was standing in your kitchen as you finished making your lunch for the following day and you made a joke that made yourself laugh, he didn’t think it was a very funny joke but you didn’t care. You giggled to yourself and he couldn’t help but wish he could witness that forever. It hit him like a brick that he would, in almost an instant, give his entirety to you. It terrified him when he imagines you and him ending like his parents. But behind the terror, the fear of divorce, was a softer and quieter emotion that he tried to focus on harder than the insanity of his anxiety. A softer, lovelier, hopeful feeling that he usually gets every time you smile at him. That was the feeling he was searching for, everything else was irrelevant for a few glorious moments.

-But as yet we are not clear as to why it comes about and if there is any method of attaining it the best one is probably to give up the whole idea of getting it…. you see it is completely unpredictable and so it is in that way like falling in love, capricious and therefore crazy. But if you should be so fortunate as to encounter either of these experiences. It seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it. And what we therefore have to. Admit in our society is so that we can contain this kind of madness.

He called Tendou that evening, telling him that he thinks he loves you, and Tendou about had a conniption. He was in Paris as his best friend fell in love for the first time. He talked him through it, told him how good it can be. That yes it was going to be work but the reward would be worth it. To not sell himself short out of his own fears. He deserves much more than that. Tendou’s last phrase is what sunk in deep “I know it was unpredictable, that it feels so fickle, but that’s what love is like buddy! You can’t deny it Ushi, you can’t run from it or hide from it, it will only hurt you in the long run”

- You see, in this way we can think about and structure the necessary stable social institution of family sometime without it being constantly threatened of foundering on the rocks of love. Now you see this then means that when when people marry they take any vows at all to each other instead of saying that they will always be true to each other in the sense of meaning I Will Always Love YoU, It means I will be true to you in the sense of I will always be truthful to. I will not pretend that my feelings towards you ARE other than what they are. Because I marry you, because I think that you are a reasonable person to live with and therefore I want you to be you I want you to be someone else I want to be a rubber stamp of me–how boring that would be?! an arrangement in which people set each other free and make an alliance to cooperate with each other in certain ways. Now if it should so occur that they are of immense sexual attraction to each other, so much the better? That this should not be a primary factor in entering into marriage. Admittedly, you must be to a certain extent attractive to each other otherwise there will be no progeny. But this is this is seems to me to be a sensible and reasonable view and just because it is sensible and reasonable it can accommodate what is not sensible and reasonable which is falling in love.

Ushijima is terrified. He’s terrified because the instant immediate joy he felt when he realized he loved you was almost overtaken by worries and stress. He loves you! Now what? He loves structure in his life and he values stability but he knows how rocky relationships can be and how they can ultimately end. He knows he won’t deny it, he won’t back away because of his fear but he needs a plan. A plan to take to you and talk about it, he knows you’ll have the right thing to say but he doesn’t even know what he’ll even say to you yet. He loves that you are so carefree and goofy, a breath of fresh air to his stoicism. You’ve even gently worked your way so deep into his soul that you feel like his other half, his complete other in every way, someone who wasn’t like him at all and how wonderful that is.

Once in his life he thought that arranged marriages were smarter, you did it out of logic and bloodline and family, nothing messy to deal with. But that structure, that boring empty rocky foundation that an arrangement might bring made his mouth taste bad, although at the time he convinced himself it was because it would be more like another job that takes up his time (away from you)

Sensible and reasonable was right up his alley, he thought how nice it would be to have a mini him but he couldn’t think about having that with anyone. He couldn’t think of another half of dna that baby would share that would make it worth it. Not until he saw a picture of you holding your nephew, now whenever he thinks of his babies they share your genes. He thinks of a chunky baby with your eyes and his hair color, a mix of your personality and he’d share volleyball with them. He’s never wanted kids as much as he does when he thinks about sharing them with you. And that’s the part that feels senseless, the love part, the part where you give your entirety to someone and trust that they will care and keep you, no matter what happens, save its not infidelity or other deal breakers of yours he already knows.

Ushijima’s theorizing and thoughts about you over the course of time went from being about understanding why he feels like this to imagining fake scenarios where he wants to take you abroad to travel together, to be together every day and share the hard times and good times, babies or not, marriage or not. He just wants to make you happy for the rest of his life no matter what and he can’t go on much longer without knowing he has a chance to do so

- Well now really when we go back then to falling in love. And say it’s crazy falling. You see we don’t say rising into love. There is in it the idea of the fall. And it is goes back as a matter of fact two extremely fundamental things that there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk, is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble

And so here he was. Sitting on a bench outside of your dorm, feet bouncing as he stared at the small patch of grass growing in between the sidewalk crack. It’s been a while since that class and he’s been thinking about this constantly.

He knows the risk, feels it in his heart every time he meets up separately with his parents since their divorce. He sees it every time he remembers his childhood and the messy separation. That mess he never wants to repeat. The fall that comes with this love is like that class video had told him, ghastly. He doesn’t know if this could ruin it all, if he takes the leap of faith and it all comes crumbling down years later he’ll be just another divorce. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to end up like his parents and have a child who feels the same. But when he imagines his life he doesn’t think he could be haply without you by his side.

- the moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith, because you don’t really know that the floors not going to give in to your feet. The moment you take a journey what an act of faith. The moment you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship what an act of faith you see you’ve given yourself up. But this is the most powerful thing that can be done surrender see and love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me, do anything you like with me. So, that’s quite mad because you see it’s letting things get out of control all sensible people keep things in control.

You know something is up the moment you open the doors and see his back on the bench. You were going to his place since he wasn’t answering his phone, you freeze at the doors at watch him for a moment as your anxiety spikes in your stomach. His shoulders are tense as he leans forward, elbows on his thighs and hands clasped together as he looks down between his bouncing feet. Before you really think about it, you follow the urge to comfort him, to talk to him and make sure it’s all okay. Your feet carry you quickly to his side and you sit down, pulling him into a side hug and wrapping your arms around him.

He gasps when you sit and as you’re wrapping your arms around him he furrows his brows and hugs you back. His heart racing As his fears take the back burner. He didn’t expect you to find him but he also didn’t know how long he’s been sitting here. He buries his face into your neck as he you hold each other in the cool spring evening.

“What’s wrong?” You ask as you hold him and feels his walls break down, his arms tighten around you

“I’m scared” he says quietly and his voice cracks

“Of what Toshi? You can always talk to me” Your fingers run through his hair softly and it soothes his nerves.

He pulls back and cups your cheeks, his eyebrows were still furrowed and his stoic expression was broken by his eyes that were swimming with worry and insecurity.

You saw everything in his eyes and you met him with your determination and steady unwavering love he finds in your eyes. God he feels so mad. So incredibly and undeniably mad and insane and like he isn’t in control. He needs to tell you. Needs the words to come out of his throat so he can calm his heart and soothe his ulcer. The anxiety felt like it was immeasurable and his breathing was starting to get faster until you placed your hands on his cheeks, smothering the bad feelings completely “it’s okay Wakatoshi, I’m right here”

Ushijima feels the exact moment his heart relaxes into the faith, the surrender into love trusting that the floor isn’t going to collapse under his feet, the moment he gives his whole self, body and soul, to the fall, and that moment was when your lips touched his for the first time. Then he let go, the madness left his body and was replaced with a calm assurance that yes, yes this was it, what he’s been waiting for, what he’s been yearning for.

- for all the cost and wisdom what is really sensible is to let go that is to commit oneself to give oneself up and that’s quite mad,

-so we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.

#ushijima wakatoshi x you #ushijima wakatoshi x reader #ushijima #ushijima x y/n #ushijima x reader #ushijima x you #haikyuu xreader #haikyuu x you #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu ushiwaka #haikyuu ushijima #haikyuu wakatoshi #wakatoshi fluff #ushijima fluff #ushijima fanfic #haikyuu fanfiction

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chippyskylark · 4 years ago

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get to know: chippington ‘chip’ skylark the third.

chip skylark finds himself the third of his name. his grandmother lifts the small child into her arms, cooing that she loves her little chippy to the moon and back. she’s the first in the family to call him chip, and the name sticks better than junior or chippington does. he knows his grandfather and father wish he’d just ride out chippington like they did, but honestly it gets too confusing and chip has always felt way more like him. only his grandma and mom can call him chippy though, and he blushes every time.

he comes from a line of musically inclined men. his grandfather, the first chippington skylark, found himself the frontman of a joropo band back in his home of venezuela. chippington skylark and the noah’s arkestra found themselves playing any bar or party that would allow them, and soon they rose to popularity in caracas, and even went on to play shows in the second home of joropa (colombia) and other countries and cities in the region. chippington the second would expand on his father’s budding fame, finding himself popular on the latin charts for adopting the sounds of salsa as that became popular. chip falls in love with the music of his grandfather, finds comfort in the strum of the guitar and the folk tales he weaves with his lyrics. chip is even more amazed by his father, the master performer. he’s inspired by the way a band of horns and percussion can fill the room with such lively music, as his father sings songs of love and lust all while looking charming as ever in the process. it’s decided before chip can even properly learn how to form his own sentences that he would be a man of the music as well.

chip doesn’t mind that his life was laid out for him already, not really. he loves music, finds himself beating the timbale and shaking a pandeiro anytime he accompanies his dad to work. chip’s only real concern is what path would he follow? his grandfather and father had already accomplished so much, who could he possibly be if not stuck in their shadow? in his younger years, he had no real answer for this question. just knows that he loves the stage.

chip primarily stayed with his mother in new jersey. she thought it best to keep him from the hectic lifestyle his father lead, urging that he should be allowed a normal life and childhood. chip, however, had other plans. he was only eight years old when he first hit the stage. it was a local talent show and he’d begged and pleaded with his mother to let him sing; she finally gave in and he performed ahora te puedes marchar. along with singing the upbeat luis miguel song, chip had also done his best to choreograph a little dance to go along with his performance. the audience loved him, eating up his floppy hair and bright smile almost as much as they were awed by his talent.

chip’s life became nonstop performing since that moment. entering any talent showcase he could find, hoping to continue to impress crowds and make everyone dance and fall in love with him and the music he sang. his father couldn’t be more pleased with how well every audience received his son’s gifts. if you dig on the internet enough you can find a few videos of a little chip joining his father onstage to sing and dance his father’s famed music with him. don’t play it in front of him though, he’ll look away and blush the second you start going ‘awwwww’.

chip begins to incorporate more american pop songs in his showcase entries. it makes sense, it’s the music everyone around him listens to and as much as audiences love watching him dance bachata and salsa they seem to connect with his performances better when it’s in a language they can understand. he has no negative feelings about it, even to this day. he has no negative feelings about most things, his words and thoughts drowning in positivity and optimism because he prefers to look at the brighter side of all things.

he’s thirteen when he gets discovered by a label executive. the initial meeting for the board of executives of his future label was the most nerve wracking experience of chip’s life at that point. chip knows he can wow an audience, it’s the one thing he knows for sure he’s good at. but something about this initial meeting deciding his fate makes his stomach turn. he’s sure he’s going to be sick before it, afraid that he’s going to puke the entire time he rides up to the top floor in the elevator. chip gets through it though, showing off every skill in his arsenal: he’s singing, he’s dancing, he’s playing guitar, he’s interacting with faces in the room, he’s switching between languages easily, and he’s working that smile.

it goes without saying that the label is impressed and chip gets signed almost immediately. everything else from then on moves pretty quickly for him. he focuses almost all his energy on recording an album as quickly as he can. songs are presented to him daily, and he’s given a team focused with constructing an image for him. he never strays from what’s put before him, even if he’d want to sing a different song than the one he learned the day before, or if he’s not sure he wants to do this particular piece of choreography. chip is honestly just so happy for the opportunity he hardly bats an eye.

his rise to fame is just as fast and hard to wrap his head around. he would never call himself an overnight sensation, too many years of long hard work went into it, but that’s what the news anchors call him. his first single debuts on the bubbling under of the hot 100, but after significant radio push and some televised appearances it skyrockets to the top ten of the billboard charts. seemingly out of nowhere he’s music’s newest obsession and he couldn’t be more excited. he goes from singing at neighbor’s birthday parties to mall tours and sold out venues. his parents pull him out of school and set him up with a tutor, and well, the rest of his childhood dies right along with that decision.

he’s a pop phenomenon and he, at first, couldn’t be happier. his first album goes multi platinum and he performs at almost every award show you could think of. hell, there’s even people walking around wearing the same stupid red hat and hoodie combo his team made his signature look. but the being followed by paparazzi and chased by fans starts to become a little too much to handle a little too soon. he won’t complain though, he’s doing what he loves.

chip still loves performing and singing, but his label has complete control of every aspect of his image and sound. and while that was cool when he was a teen, he’s desperate for some more control and creative (and financial) freedom.

he’s not mad at the teeny bopper image he’s cultivated. where most people would try to distance themselves from the type of music he made early in his career he never openly rips on it, even in his adulthood. while it’s not the music he’d want to make now, he knows that music is important to his fans. just because something isn’t his favorite doesn’t mean he’s going to ruin it for someone else, he’d never disappoint someone like that.

chronic people pleaser!!!! he literally can not function or cope with the knowledge that something he did could be upsetting someone else. even if the task you give him comes at great personal sacrifice to him, he’ll do it with a smile. He just wants everyone to be happy, even if right now, he’s not the happiest.

Now that he’s a grown man he’s struggling with what’s his next move musically. He’s already done something no one else with the skylark name has been able to do: break american radio, and his grandfather and father couldn’t be more proud of his success. but he finds himself yearning for the freedom and maturity their music possesses. he’s certain he still wants to make pop music at this point, he’s just struggling with how to make it more adult and what new things he can experiment with.

Re-released his first and second album with some of the more popular songs stripped down and sung in spanish. it’s his labels idea of compromising on the fact that he wanted to make music that represented all parts of who he is as a person. also has like one or two latin pop songs that crushed the charts worldwide, the success of those songs made his label discuss the validity of him doing a full latin album like he’d been requesting for years. that album never came.

practically scandal-less. He’s dated his fair share of pop stars and models, but those break ups always end amicably and none of his former partners have ever had anything negative to say about him. the media wanted so badly to run a “bad boy” thing with him but they just can’t, he’s such a good boy.

when he was fourteen he did a campaign for those stupid singing tooth brushes. my shiny teeth and me follows him everywhere now, and you know what, he’s not even mad about it, he sometimes jokes that song is more popular than a lot of his actual serious music. go king! teach the youth proper dental hygiene!

his concerts are always so much fun. Again, so inspired by his dad as a performer so he always goes all out. He gives 110% every time no matter what. Is he tired? Of course. Does he need a nap? Definitely. Has he gone on stage ten minutes after puking his guts out because of a flu? Yeah….it was still a good show though, you couldn’t even really tell he was sick!

struggling HARD with anxiety. large crowds of people around him start to freak him out, and even though most would think he should be used to it, he’s been mobbed by too many groups of fans to ever be used to it. he’s no stranger to hiding out in the back of an empty store for a second to get away. he’s always embarrassed when his management has to kick everyone else out the store and lock the doors for his sake, but if it helps...it helps.

WANTED CONNECTIONS.

help him w his anxiety? so mayhaps a friend, a confidante? also an actual therapist yep.

chip’s big struggle is how to move forward without disappointing his fans so maybe a fan that he becomes friendly with that can yanno remind him that most of them will love him no matter what. or at least serve as a reminder of why he does this.

if y’all got characters that wanna roast the shiny teeth guy i won’t be opposed. he’s also so nice he probably wouldn’t be too bothered so that’s frustrating and fun

fellow musicians always

friends who either have no clue who he is or don’t care would be real nice

anything at all. also always down for angst as always.

#🎤 i don't need nobody tellin me just what i'm gonna do about my destiny. (about.)

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alwaysbewoke · 5 years ago

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"You know, he's only mean to you because he likes you!"

Cast your mind back to the playground. Aaron and the other boys are playing tag, and he won't let you join in. The louder he insists, the harder you try to insert yourself, the situation escalating until Aaron sticks his leg out and you go flying. If he was trying especially hard to embody a cliche, he might even pull your pigtails. So far, so normal. Kids are cruel and weird. As a kid yourself, you're doing a pretty weird/normal job of processing the exclusionary nastiness ... until you hear from Mom that sometimes being treated badly is actually a good thing. "You know, he only does that because he likes you!" she says, spinning the meanness as a compliment.

Even worse, you're at that age when you can detect that "He likes you" means something different here, even if you're not quite sure what. There's an implicit idea -- perhaps in part because you don't understand -- that it's a special condition of feeling. As such, it entitles its "feeler" to a whole different criteria for good and bad behavior.

Mom is trying to prepare you for something she knows you won't understand, that soon boys are going to start acting strangely, that you're about to spend the rest of your life misinterpreting each others' motives. But "He's mean because he likes you" is such a tragic and bizarre introduction to the idea. It's like having your driving instructor begin the first lesson with "Remember, sometimes pedestrians scream because they're happy!"

Even if it seems harmless on the playground, wait until high school, the workplace, cohabiting relationships, and marriage, hoo boy. He's calling every three minutes because he loves me. He hits me because I drive him to it, his passion overflowing as violence. Even if it's true that the boy on the playground acts badly because he has a crush and this is his weird preteen way of processing it, that doesn't need any reinforcing.

"Why don't you have the party here? I'll pick up some snacks!"

You're somewhere between 13 and 18 and you are going to have A Party. It's been weeks in the planning stages. Someone's big sister has been coerced into doing the booze run. Someone's parents have been stupid enough to OK a get-together and leave their house at your collective mercy. The stars have aligned, the fates are in your favor, and this is the most excited you've probably ever been. A whole evening of unsupervised, uncomfortable, elated nonsense!

The prospect has practically had your teeth chattering. What do you wear? He'll be there. Which song will be playing when your sparkly hair clips convince him to kiss you instead of Charlotte? What is the right ratio of soda to vodka?

Of course, hearing your mom's cheerful "Why don't you have the party here?" is nothing compared to the obviously life-ruining "You're going to that party over my dead body" or even "Be home by 11." But therein lies its stealthy power. You could justify a teenage tantrum over your attendance being vetoed altogether, or even a curfew, but how to rebuff the thinly veiled bid to oversee proceedings disguised as an innocent offer to host? You are suddenly playing a subtle, deadly game.

How to articulate that any amount of meddling would crash the imaginary ecosystem of this social event, where everyone likes your shoes and laughs at your jokes? Or that you're both too old andtoo young for the kind of party where snacks play even a supporting role? How to refuse categorically without letting on that homey safety is kryptonite to a Successful Evening? You wriggle quickly and smilingly away. "Oh, Lila's parents will be home. They've already taken care of everything." Now you can only pray that she doesn't call to verify this.

"I'll leave you lovebirds to it!"

This one is said when a young girl is about to be left alone with a young boy, regardless of relationship or circumstances. Maybe he's the weird son of Mom's friend from work. No! Don't leave us to it! He breathes through his mouth!

At that age, it seems incredible that she can't pick up on how much you don't want this to happen. The intensity with which adolescent feelings are felt (I've never hated anyone as much as I hated my math teacher) would lead you to believe that they can be felt by anyone in their orbit. A teenager in love is one thing, and should be as legible as Times New Roman to anyone paying attention. A teenager seething with disgust, though, is strong as a poltergeist. How can she not know?

So while you can't believe that your mother would think you're enjoying the way her boyfriend's nephew is eyeballing your braces, she's only thinking of you when she suggests the two of you take a joint trip to the corner shop. You walk as far away from him as the pavement will permit. You shudder when the heavy breathing intensifies after bumping into each other, fumbling by the till. This will happen again and again. "Oh, here's the offspring of my roommate from college. When's the wedding, amirite?" How to break it to her that you're more interested in his sister?

"You know you can always talk to me about your sex life! I remember when your father and I first got together ..."

This invitation to spill your beans probably crops up before you even have any to spill. Sure, there's a whiff of something. Maybe she's caught you gazing at a classmate at school pickup. Maybe you tell too many stories about Amy's brother when you come back from her house. "Amy's brother doesn't listen to that band." "Amy's brother said he liked my jeans." "Amy's brother, Amy's brother, Amy's brother Amy's- brother, Amy's brother."

Anyway, someone told your mother that it's important to be open about these things. She wouldn't want you to develop a complex, would she? What better way to ease your discomfort than "I remember when your father and I first got together." WELL I REMEMBER WHEN I DIDN'T HAVE TO PICTURE MY PARENTS HAVING SEX.

"You can always talk to me about your sex life" just serves to highlight your lack of one, which is especially bruising when sex is all you think about -- tinging the corners of your heavy-breathing dreams, chronically manifest in your peripheral vision, but just out of reach. Knowing too much about it will recontextualize innocent fantasy into something scary and dirty. Hey, you've seen people making out in films. That lingerie ad. Then there was that video clip Paul sent round the class. You got through 12 seconds before switching it off like a scary movie.

Of course, these scraps and gaps have generated so many questions that it's hard to know where to start. And your mother would be more than happy to explain "why people make those noises" and that no, you don't "stand on your head to stop getting pregnant." But you will refuse these invaluable pointers. The final nail in your pre-adolescent coffin would be to hear that your parents were at it more than you are (not hard, but still unfair). Sex isn't sex yet, but what it is belongs to people your age -- fumbling, yearning, et al.

You'll get over this, but it's a hard pill to swallow that is offered A) when it is most crucially needed and B) when you couldn't be less receptive to it. Give it ten years, and you'll be calling her after every bad date.

"Are you sure you're happy? By the time I was your age ..."

You're cleaning up together -- look how responsible you are! -- after a family dinner. Back in the home you grew up in, and moved out of, just for the evening, or maybe the weekend. Either way, this is you as a proto-adult: feckless as ever, but somehow funding a life beyond the cocoon. Conversations like this are sprung when handwork is available. You don't have to look at each other, there's a time limit imposed by the activity, and silences can be filled with industrious scrubbing, etc. Variations include "How's the novel coming along?" and "Why don't you call Childhood-Friend-With-Whom-Your-Relationship-Ruptured-Very-Painfully-Somewhere-Along-The-Way?"

"Are you happy?" is the killer, though. Amidst a lifetime (or at least an adolescence) of cringing every time your poor mother tries to join in or make your life easier, this is the splinter beneath a thin nail built from half-truths and self-trickery. The end of that WMD of sentences is some version of "by the time I was your age, I had you and your sister," "I'd met your father," or "I'd already started working at [place she'll be working at until retirement]."

She asks because she worries about you, but that just means that managing her worries is another thing you've failed at. Answering in a way that will ease her fears isn't easy when the truth is you're not single out of some concerted effort to make peace with yourself before launching into a relationship, or renting because you "like the flexibility." That you are, in reality, lonely and poor.

On the one hand, maybe Mom doesn't know what a digital marketing account manager is. On the other hand, maybe that is not a job anyone sensible wants in any sincere way. Maybe she just doesn't recognize how, even though your boyfriend is always hungover at family lunch and doesn't pick up when you call on a long weekend, he's actually really artistic and authentically himself. Maybe your latest diet looks like an eating disorder, your latest phase a personal crisis -- and then again, maybe it is. God, Mom, you've sent me down a spiral! "I'm doing fine!" you'll say. And some day, you'll probably get that same answer from your own kid.

ladies, thoughts?

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your-dietician · 3 years ago

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Giving Birth During the Pandemic, Calif. Wildfire Evacuation

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/giving-birth-during-the-pandemic-calif-wildfire-evacuation/

Giving Birth During the Pandemic, Calif. Wildfire Evacuation

Illustration: by Lucy Jones

Smoke plumes over the parched hillside as we load up our two cars for our first wildfire evacuation: passports and a few bags, one neurotic pit bull and six very disgruntled barn cats. At the last minute, we toss in some baby essentials (car seat, co-sleeper) �� but surely, surely we’ll be back home before we need them. Nearby, two wild turkeys peck at the new fire break, unperturbed by the human frenzy, the gathering of domestic animals, the churning of fields.

It’s August 2020. And I am 36 weeks pregnant.

A week earlier, we’d been counting our blessings — the sort of feel-good California nonsense that ran contrary to every fiber of my jaded New Yorker soul. But on that deceptively bright afternoon, I’d indulged. First on the list was our home: my husband’s family ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains where we’d moved from Brooklyn three years before.

Like so many “classic” journeys West, ours had begun in a quixotic vein. On paper, it was a job offer for my then-boyfriend, now-husband, but the impulse ran deeper than that. We were both fed up with New York for the reasons 30-something artists often are: a growing disillusionment with our respective industries; the churn of yuppification driving our friends from the neighborhoods they themselves had gentrified not long ago; the pervasive sense that there’s always someone younger than you dying to do the same thing for less. And so, we wanted to embark on a new adventure together, something utterly different — and what could be more different than trading cramped city living for bucolic rolling hills? The ranch itself held an almost mythic status for my husband. It was the childhood kingdom where he once visited his uncle and grandmother and played out his Tolkien fantasies; the steady rock of home after his parents got divorced.

But, it turns out, we’d come to California in the end times. The apocalypse grew starker the farther west we drove. When we passed through Montana, the big sky clogged with smoke as fields burned alongside the highway. As we wound down the Oregon coast, the heat sizzled. We reached the ranch on the hottest day in San Francisco history. We drove down to the beach to escape the heat—only to find a small brush fire blocking our path. The Bay Area of my husband’s childhood was in its death throes. Destroyed by tech bros and venture capitalists and, most irrevocably, by climate change. Since our arrival, the Golden State has seen its population decline for the first time on record.

Living out in all that damn nature — a 25-minute drive from just about anything — felt claustrophobic. I missed home. I yearned to hop on the subway. Trade gossip with the self-proclaimed mayor of my block. Stumble home and stop, shame-faced, at the corner bodega for a bag of expired Goldfish crackers. Engage with that pulsing, beating, bleating hum of humanity that is New York City.

But there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you see the value of wide-open spaces. To find the beauty in sunburnt grasses. To see the hills dotted with live oaks not as yellow but as gold. To watch the fog unfurl like dragon smoke and think — this, perhaps this can be enough.

The second blessing we’d been fool enough to name was my “easy” pregnancy. I’d been 15 weeks pregnant when COVID-19 shut down the state. My in-person appointments migrated to video. I purchased a scale and a blood-pressure cuff; I dutifully reported the results every month. By and large, I felt pretty good. Healthy. But this fiction, too, was about to go up in flames. The temperatures soared, the barn cats’ fur crackled, my feet ballooned.

The morning of our evacuation, I have my first in-person OB/GYN appointment in months. By this point, I’m accustomed to the realities of a pandemic pregnancy. The strange disconnect when I talk to anyone who gave birth before COVID-19, who never worried if their partner would be allowed into the delivery room, or Googled “will the hospital separate me from my newborn if I test positive for COVID?” In the empty waiting room, the “don’t sit here” printouts have vanished along with the chairs that accompanied them. The pandemic has dragged on for five months, and the furniture has adjusted itself accordingly.

The doctor gives me bad news — the baby is in breech. The hard, round protrusion jutting beneath my rib cage is, indeed, the baby’s head, not his rump as I’ve been trying to convince myself for weeks. We schedule a version— a procedure where a doctor tries to turn the baby right-side down — for the following Friday.

Who was I to think that my body wouldn’t betray me?

There’s something else, too. My blood pressure clocks in at 151 over 97. The chatty nurse grows quiet. She looks at me, then back at the reading. She asks if I was rushing to get here. If I suffer from white-coat syndrome. With the cocky self-assurance of a person young enough and lucky enough to believe that their body won’t betray them, I tell the nurse I’m stressed. We’re under evacuation warning. By the time she straps the cuff back on after the appointment, my blood pressure has returned to normal.

Preeclampsia, the dangerous and maddeningly enigmatic condition that my high blood pressure augurs, has plagued (wo)mankind since the dawn of history. Back in the fifth century B.C.E., Hippocrates blamed it, along with so many other lady ailments, on the wandering womb. In the intervening two and a half millennia, doctors haven’t figured out the cause. The prevailing theory is that the problem starts in the placenta, the organ that nurtures the fetus in the womb: In women with preeclampsia, the blood vessels that form to deliver oxygen to the placenta are too narrow. In its efforts to feed the growing baby, the body kicks into overdrive. Your blood pressure skyrockets; your kidneys falter; your liver might fail. In the worst cases, the “pre” vanishes and you “progress” to eclampsia — seizures which can be deadly to both mom and baby.

Preeclampsia is characterized by a list of associations that often border on patient-shaming: risk factors include poor diet, obesity, diabetes, and chronic hypertension. For complex reasons that likely involve structural racism, unconscious bias, and biological weathering, Black women in America develop and die from preeclampsia at significantly higher rates than white women do.

Returning, then, to my certainty that I am perfectly well, high blood pressure or no, thankyouverymuch. We could call it denial. We could also call it a particular cocktail of white, able-bodied, and socioeconomic privilege. After all, none of those risk factors applied to me.

Days later, as another nurse lines my hospital bed with bumper pads to protect me in case of seizure, I’ll wonder at my arrogance. Just two years earlier, my older sister dropped dead at 35. Who was I to think that my body wouldn’t betray me?

Almost exactly nine months after we first arrived in California, my sister Julia died, both suddenly and predictably. She was 35 and, by most outward metrics, in good health. But, as hard as she fought, she’d been gripped by both depression and alcoholism for over a decade.

In the months after Julia dies, wildfires flame up and down the state. Eight-five people perish as Paradise is razed to the ground. I try to work on my new novel, a cli-fi dystopia that offers little escape. I spend a lot of time sitting in a large wooden crate, socializing a litter of barn kittens. Sometimes, I meet Julia’s college roommate, Casey, in San Francisco. We go to coffee shops that are both like and unlike the ones I missed in Brooklyn. Places where using the bathroom requires an app and a QR code. The world is literally on fire, and this is what Silicon Valley innovation has to offer: the monetization of what should be public goods. Over burritos and tears, Casey tells me stories about her toddler son. Funny words that he’d string together, and how when she says they can’t go outside, he knows to respond: “Too smoky?”

The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today. From a global perspective, having a child in a developed nation is among the most environmentally unsound decisions you can make — a baby born in the United States adds another 58.6 tons of carbon to the atmosphere per year. (That wipes out the net positives of my 25 years of vegetarianism in roughly three months). On the individual level, as fires rage and hurricanes form, as water grows scarce and fields lie fallow, it’s hard not to wonder: What kind of future can we offer a child?

And yet. On some level we still believe that a baby, our baby, will bring the world, our world, so much more than his carbon footprint. On another, we believe, like so many before us, that a baby can be the only balm after a loss. That it will transform me from a bereaved sister to something new and alien: a mother.

The day we evacuate, in that now-annual tradition among Western states, Gavin Newsom declares a state of emergency. The fire that we’re fleeing is the smaller of two mammoth blazes threatening the state. A CalFire spokeswoman on TV advises that all citizens should be “ready to go” in case of wildfires. “Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly.”

We joke about how absurd it is that every single Californian should be living in a perpetual state of emergency preparedness. It isn’t funny.

The truth is that we’re the lucky ones. We won’t be sleeping in our cars outside Half Moon Bay High School, hoping that the Red Cross can find us a hotel room. We have a safe place to go that will accept us and our veritable menagerie in the middle of a pandemic. My in-laws live an hour’s drive away. And for once we’re grateful they’re on the far side of Santa Cruz.

On the individual level, as fires rage and hurricanes form, as water grows scarce and fields lie fallow, it’s hard not to wonder: What kind of future can we offer a child?

So we settle into our cushy evacuation digs. I check Twitter for updates on the fire lines. I lie upside down on a propped-up ironing board to encourage the baby to flip. I dutifully record my blood pressure twice a day. When I go into a local lab on Monday, I pass a woman around my age. Her hair mussed; her clothes rumpled. I overhear her tell the security guard that she is evacuated from Boulder Creek. Her house has already burned down.

The call comes late that afternoon. We’ve gone for a walk on the beach to distract ourselves. A brisk ocean breeze keeps the smoke at bay.

The OB tells me that I need to go to the hospital in two days and that I should be prepared to deliver. Depending on whether they can flip the baby, they will either induce labor or perform a C-section.

I press my hand against my stomach, cupping what I now know is my son’s head. I dig my heels into the sand. I know with every fiber of my being that this child is not ready to be born. He has literally put his foot down. Wildfire evacuations? Smoke-clogged skies over the Bay? A global pandemic? Nah, thanks, Ma. I’ll stay inside.

Something primal stirs. A desperate need to protect this child — from the world, from the climate, from the overreach of litigation-fearing American doctors. This baby, I am convinced, does not want to come out. He needs a few more weeks inside. My lab work hasn’t even come back yet. Two high blood pressure readings? From a person evacuated from wildfires during a pandemic? And I feel fine.

So, for the first time in my life, I argue with a doctor, first patiently, then furiously. I tell her that I cannot possibly give birth in two days. That we’re evacuated. That we might not have a home to return to. That, as freelancers, we both lost a lot of work during the pandemic. That my husband, whose industry has been completely upended, has an enormous gig with a new client. That I can’t imagine waiting until Friday can make any difference. The doctor takes out the cudgel: “You need to stop worrying about money and start worrying about your baby.”

It is the first time anyone has pulled the “bad mother” card on me, though I’m sure it won’t be the last. I sputter. I am livid. I tell her we’ll be there.

Things at the hospital go well until they don’t. The baby flips; the cheerful dry-erase board is decorated with a beaming sun, the names of the on-duty nurse and physician, and the words “Preeclampsia: Mild.” The next morning, my blood pressure soars, and “mild” is replaced with “severe.” The blood-pressure cuff is now accompanied by a catheter and an IV that pumps me up with magnesium to reduce the risk of seizure. The bumper pads are up now, too.

The hospital, the beeping machines monitoring my vital signs, the proliferating IVs, it all reminds me too much of Julia. The three days I sat at her hospital bed — holding her hand, reading Redwall to her, so sure that she could hear me, that the stories we shared in childhood might somehow draw her back. So sure that she would pull out of her coma, that one day we would make macabre jokes about her hospital stay. That she wouldn’t die. That our story couldn’t end that way.

But here, in this hospital, the wool has lifted from my eyes. I now know how these stories end. And I am sure that one of us isn’t going to survive. It takes the last bit of my resolve not to tell my husband, in a fit of melodrama, to save the baby if the doctors have to choose. (In later, clearer moments, I realize that medicine doesn’t work that way. But in the throes of magnesium-laced labor, the brain latches to the cinematic.)

So much of what could go wrong does: The baby crowns but every time I push his heart rate drops. We try three more times with a suction cup fused to his head, the pediatrician’s eyes glued to the heart monitor, periodically shouting for me to stop pushing so a nurse can press the baby back inside and massage his heart rate up again. At some point, a switch is flipped, alarms blare: an emergency C-section. I’m rushed down the corridors amid flashing lights to the operating table. My husband abandoned in a delivery room awash in blood. Someone shouts back, “We’ll come back for you if we can.”

My son is wrenched from my seizing uterus — weak from the magnesium and letting out only the smallest cry. He is rushed to the NICU for oxygen and observation. But he lives. We live. And, in the end, we get to go home.

The night that Jude is born, our evacuation order is lifted. The fires that burn parts of Bonny Doon and Boulder Creek never reach the ranch. We are so very lucky. Even though I doubt that luck can last.

Although that future still terrifies me and part of me wants to disengage, to say “Let it burn” and “Fuck you” to all that, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury.

After the dust has settled, my father — my somehow still optimistic, boomer father — keeps talking about how crazy it will be for Jude to learn about the day he was born, in a pandemic while evacuated for wildfires. And all I can think is how much I wish Jude might grow up in a world where the summer of 2020 sounds aberrational. I suspect he won’t. As I write this, fires descend on Lake Tahoe, defying all efforts of containment, and Hurricane Ida has devastated the Gulf Coast. Headlines blare about “extreme” weather, and I wonder when the newspapers will lose the word “extreme.”

I know that the world in which Jude grows up will be plagued by more and more environmental disasters. That cataclysmic changes to the climate will exacerbate the other inequities we face as a nation and a planet. That we are living in a real way on borrowed time, under the shadow of carbon that’s already been released as more fossil fuel continues to burn and burn and burn.

Although that future still terrifies me and part of me wants to disengage, to say “Let it burn” and “Fuck you” to all that, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury. I have no choice but to believe that the future — troubled as it will be, stripped as it will be of my biting, brilliant sister — is still worth living in and fighting for. To believe not just in destruction, not just in accruing loss after loss after loss, but in counting blessings. Finding those small moments of joy. The smile on Jude’s face as he bashes his mouth into my cheek. “Boop,” I say as I tap his nose. The same sound Julia used to make when I tapped hers.

This isn’t the ending that I’m looking for. And it isn’t just an ending either. It’s a beginning, too. An often frightening one. And, for now, that has to be good enough.

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theseadagiodays · 5 years ago

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March 24, 2020

Adagio - an exquisitely slow musical tempo.

IE. Barber, Adagio; Albinoni, Adagio; Mozart, Clarinet Concerto in A - 2ndmovement; Rodrigo, Concierto de Aranjuez - 2ndmovement; Beethoven, Pathetique Sonata - 2ndmovement.

As we adjust to different rhythms of being, and to this socially distant space that we now occupy, art seems to be a vital thread that continues to tether people to one another, through meaning-making and story. Countless times, in these past days, I have been moved by instances of art bringing joy and solace as we navigate this unfamiliar territory together. So, I want to use this space to share music, poetry, dance and more, offered virtually by artists all over the world in an effort to connect and soothe us through this experience.

I recognize that many of us, at this moment, are currently facing real loss, challenge and fear. But I also believe this can be a time for great healing if we let it. Our busy lives have been yearning for slowness. A new rhythm that can bring the fresh perspective that only space can provide. A tempo perhaps best reflected by the exquisitely slow pace of an Adagio.

Since being dramatically forced to alter my own rhythms, six years ago, when a chronic injury caused me to surrender my lifelong flute performance career, I began a relentless pursuit to find another expressive voice. Subsequently, creative writing eventually enabled me to transform my pain into art. And consequently, my now completed novel, What Lies Between, was born.

Here, I explore the “what ifs”of a character with a similar experience to mine, but who lacks some of the resiliencies that allowed me to eventually thrive again. The cellist protagonist Adele suffers a neurological disease that, too, makes her unable to play any longer, and her razor-sharp mind becomes fractured. Subsequently, she develops early-onset memory-loss and finds herself in a care home at just 67. However, when Curtis, a charming but wounded child prodigy, comes to play for her weekly, his intuitive gift causes her memories to flood back in startling waves, while her deep listening helps him deal with school bullies, and gives him keys to unlock his mother’s deep sorrows.

Only recently have I finally mustered the courage to begin seeking publication for this work. And early responses have been surprisingly encouraging. This is why I finally feel brave enough to share even the briefest passage publicly. Before now, not even my husband has read a word. However, I now feel that Adele’s story is more resonant than ever, with all of us relating to the experience of having to live without certain passions, and of being confined to a limited space. So, here is the excerpt I’d like to share.

Adagios soar with sadness. Samuel Barber knew this when he set the middle movement of his String Quartet to this most melancholy of tempos. Humans yearn for melancholy, for recollected heartbreak. But sometimes the edges of what has been lost are fuzzy. A reminiscence of something essential that is missing yet not precisely identifiable. A state so profoundly understood by the Portugese they created a word for it. Saudade.

There had been more than a year, before she gave up listening to music altogether, when she could bear no other music but Barber’s Adagio. Its soulful longing, its unhurried, aspirant rising tones. Anything else seemed too cognitively dissonant with her very being.

On her darkest days, there is a way in which Sudbury Willows serves her, an environment so closed and tuneless its power is too innocuous to invoke her pain. But the boy has reminded her she is now stuck in a suspension of a different nature. Since he left, Adele has laid her head to rest each night and wished for soothing Adagio dreams. But somehow, every morning, she still wakes to the Largo monotony of her new reality.

And now I will leave you with a musical postcard recorded by Yo-yo Ma, just last week, (#songsofcomfort), and a poem that, for me, captures the essence of this unique time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBOkHfvNSY

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because (Fate’s) note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry

March 25, 2020

Today I collaborated on an art project with a friend in Colombia.

Last night I read bedtime stories to my friend’s children (virtually).

Sunday I watched a duck catch a wave, and an ant move dirt for what felt like hours.

Saturday night we enjoyed the BC Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet, with a friend on FaceTime, complete with prosecco and ballgowns.

Friday I led 1000+ professionals through a guided mediation online.

So many opportunities to connect in new ways...

How might we fill this space?

Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

So, do you wanna dance? DNice has been spinning tunes for hours-long virtual dance parties. Even Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders have joined in. Stay posted on his Instagram page for future LIVE parties: https://www.instagram.com/dnice/

March 26, 2020

When I started this blog, I originally marked each date with a count of our days in self-isolation. However, I’ve since deleted those markers, inspired by my childhood friend Nancy’s daughter, Maya, who sent me this wise reminder this morning.

As I attempt to infuse these adagio days with similar small moments of inspiration for those willing to follow this page, I do not want to discount the very real struggles that so many people face at this time. I realize that I tend towards a need to uplift in difficult times. (Perhaps I cannot help myself as the daughter of a former high school cheerleading and football captain). But in doing so, I also never mean to seem tone deaf to genuine pain. And I want to acknowledge that I also experience daily lows as I navigate our current reality. However, I have become aware of how useful these injections of positivity can be for me (whether from a friend’s text, Facebook post, or phone call). So, I am hopeful the same is true for you.

I am continually struck by humans’ need for connection. And in my musical community, there have been so many beautiful efforts (if not also technologically sophisticated) to do this. Janna Sailor is a Vancouver conductor with whom I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate. In a nimble move, during only our first week of physical distancing, she managed to lead a group of Calgary Philharmonic and Edmonton Symphony musicians to collectively record this touching Zoom performance of Elgar’s Nimrod Variation #9.

https://www.facebook.com/donovan.seidle/videos/10103852773248345/UzpfSTUwMzA0NjgyMTozMDYwNjExMjk0OTk0MTQ6MTA6MDoxNTg1NzI0Mzk5OjY4Mjc2MTYxNjAwNTMyMzQwODU/

I must add, though, that not all efforts to foster remote musical collaborations have gone so elegantly. And, because I could not possibly say it better, I’ll leave it to New York Times reviewer, Jon Caramanica, to best describe what went so terribly wrong when several celebrities tried to record their version of John Lennon’s Imagine, last week.

“In this clusterclump of hyperfamous people with five seconds’ too much time on their hands, “Imagine” may have met its match. By the end, it has been pummeled and stabbed, disaggregated, stripped for parts and left for trash collection by the side of the highway. It is proof that even if no one meets up in person, horribleness can spread.”

For a good laugh, and at the risk of sounding like a classical music snob, here’s their eternally key-changing version of the song. I dare you to sing along!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQK32bwvRuI

March 27, 2020

Apparently, when people have more time on their hands, a preponderance of puns emerge. I have come across no shortage of quarantine-related word play, these days. And here are just a few that have cropped up in my community.

For those looking to meld their voices with others, tune in every Sunday, at 3 pm EST, for Choir Choir Toronto’s new virtual Sing-a-Long: Choirintine: https://www.facebook.com/events/2798475520243342/

But, if you’re more of a sit back and listen kind of person, Vancouver’s Locals Lounge will be hosting regular live-streamed concerts through their new series, Quarantunes: https://sidedooraccess.com/shows/TgDGz6rA6SKtjj4dbE86?fbclid=IwAR1Fih0oYqsOrhR-AlCygFBX6FBeIX3XXXiYxpxwzJzxnjJGP0-UI0C7Z-s

And finally, if all this screen time has you as exhausted like most of us, it’s probably time to turn off all your devices and help yourself to a good, stiff Quarantini, using any of one these new recipes: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/drinks/g31900654/quarantini-cocktail-recipes/

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teachanarchy · 7 years ago

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As we live in an increasingly technology-focussed, socially disconnected world, we're touching each other much less than before. But what does an absence of touch do to a person?

In Peter Collins' short film, Fly in the Ointment, he narrates yearning for human touch—his wife's caress—while a fly flickers monochromatically in a lidded jar. "I felt her soft finger tracing a line along my back as she whispered loving words to me... I dreamt of being held, touched and loved."

One of Canada's longest-serving prisoners, Collins spent long stretches in solitary confinement since his incarceration in 1984 for first-degree murder. Fly in the Ointment recounts his experience of being confined alone in a six by nine foot cell, deprived of human contact, intimacy, or touch.

For the estimated 80,000 Americans currently held in some form of isolated confinement, the thought of being touched with care by another human being is an impossible dream. But people outside of the prison population—otherwise well-connected, sociable people—can also powerfully long for human touch.

What some psychologists term "skin hunger" (also known as touch hunger) is a need for physical human contact. Although many people sate their skin hunger through sex, skin hunger isn't exactly a sexual need. Satisfying your skin hunger requires you to have meaningful physical contact with another person, and failing to observe your need for human touch can have profound emotional, even physical, consequences.

Scientists began investigating skin hunger shortly after the Second World War. In controversial experiments run by American psychologist Harry Harlow, infant rhesus macaques were separated from their birth mothers and given the option of two inanimate surrogates: one made out of wire and wood, and another covered in cloth. The baby monkeys overwhelmingly favored the embrace of the cloth surrogate, even when the wire mother was the only surrogate that held a bottle of milk.

Read more: 'Regret, Panic, and Loneliness': The Women Battling Post-Adoption Depression

From this, Harlow deduced infant macaques needed more than nourishment from their mothers to stay alive. He termed it "contact comfort." As a result of Harlow's research, we now know that human beings need touch, particularly in childhood, almost as powerfully as they need basic necessities like food and water.

Researchers have shown that touch can communicate a range of emotions, serving as an important social tool, and even the act of hugging can reduce your levels of the stress hormone cortisol. A study from the Touch Research Institute, part of the University of Miami, found that Parisian teenagers hanging out in McDonald's restaurants (France is deemed a "high contact" culture) overwhelmingly touched each other more than their American peers, and were less likely to exhibit symptoms of aggression.

"Touching each other keeps the peace," explains Dr Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute. A pioneer in the field of skin hunger, Field has long advocated for touch to be reintroduced into educational systems, where fears about sexual abuse and possible litigation have led some US schools to implement no-touch policies. "Touch facilitates intimacy, and most people you touch won't respond with aggression."

It's possible to be touch hungry and not even know it—or even to mistake your symptoms for poor mental health. "People who are touch hungry usually present as being depressed individuals," Field says. "They're withdrawn; their voice intonation contour is flat." She adds that people suffering from clinical depression may also often suffer from touch hunger—and this can be seen in an area of the brain called the vagus. "When you massage these people, their depression levels go down and their vagal activity goes up."

Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychologist and author who has spent decades testifying as an expert witness on behalf of those in solitary confinement, has seen the effects of skin hunger firsthand. "Physical contact is a requirement of being human," says Kupers. "There's something healing about it. It [touch] is not just correlated with being human—it is being human."

Kupers is allowed to shake prisoners' hands when examining them in the state of Mississippi, where he often testifies. "When I touch a prisoner at the Mississippi isolation unit, they tell me, 'You're the first person I've touched except for officers putting handcuffs on me. Aside from that, nobody has touched me in all the years I've been in solitary confinement.'"

He describes the psychiatric literature showing that solitary confinement causes lasting mental health problems as "voluminous." As the mental health issues that plague prisoners in solitary confinement are so vast, it's difficult to isolate an absence of touch as a major contributing factor, but neuroscientist Huda Akil identifies a lack of touch—alongside other factors—as potential factors that might lead the brain to rewire itself and cause psychological problems. The testimony of prisoners such Peter Collins and Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning highlights how an absence of touch exacerbates the experience of solitary confinement: Writing in the Guardian, Chelsea Manning describes it as "'no-touch' torture."

Besides prisoners in solitary confinement, there is another demographic that illustrates the debilitating effects of skin hunger: the elderly. Being extremely lonely can amount to a chronic medical condition, and it's one that is more likely to surface in later life as friends and family members die off. One study found that lonely people aged 50 and over were twice as likely to die as their non-lonely peers. In comments reported in USA Today, psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser argues that the elderly need prolonged physical contact more than younger generations: "The older you are, the more fragile you are physically, so contact becomes increasingly important for good health."

Research shows that people in Western societies overwhelmingly feel lonelier. According to the National Science Foundation's 2014 General Social Study, a quarter of Americans feel they have no one they can talk to about their problems. One study from British relationship charity Relate finds almost ten percent of people have no close friendships at all, and 20 percent of those in relationships rarely feel "loved." Concurrently, we're spending more time online than ever before: British adults average 21.6 hours a week, according to recent statistics.

Conventional wisdom holds that technology is turning us into maladroit loners, even if it should, in theory, make us more connected. If you took a paper and pencil and stencilled the outline of the average person's online presence—like a modern day Vitruvian man—you could sketch out a web of stretching connections, too numerous to count. Millions of fibre optic cables connect us to our social networks: friends, followers, email acquaintances, even lurkers. So why do we feel more isolated than ever before? Could it have something to do with the fact that none of these connections involve human touch?

"The ease with which we communicate now is probably the biggest change of the last twenty years," explains Professor Kory Floyd of the University of Arizona, an expert in the communication of affection in close relationships. "In some instances, it encourages us to be less thoughtful of what we say—but it doesn't have to."

Having studied affection for nearly two decades, however, Floyd believes verbal or written communication is no substitute for physical touch. "There's an immediacy to touch that words don't have. And there are certain health benefits that seem to be more pronounced when affection is expressed through tactile ways."

Like a pair of binoculars flipped the wrong way, the Internet can have the effect of making us closer together or further apart—depending on how you look at it. No movement illustrates this more powerfully than the Free Hugs initiative, which began in June 2004.

For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Most of us have seen someone at a music festival wandering around with a "Free Hugs" sign before, but few realize one individual—a Sydney resident who goes by the pseudonym Juan Mann—was behind it. Unlike cuddle parties where you'll pay $45 to be spooned by a stranger ineptly concealing his boner, Mann wanted to bring free affection to the masses.

"I started giving out Free Hugs mostly because at the time I had nobody around. No-one hugged me or socialized with me," he explains over email. "Then out of nowhere this young woman came up to me at a party and hugged me. For the first time in months I felt alive. It got me thinking about all the other lonely people out there in the world who might need or want a hug."

A musician by the name of Shimon Moore spotted Mann handing out hugs in a Sydney mall and thought it was a neat idea. He returned to the mall and filmed Mann, eventually using the footage for his band's music video. The video went viral (it currently has 77 million views) and Mann's project became known all over the world, much to his surprise.

"Did I ever expect this? Not in this lifetime or the next," Mann tells me. "I expected to just be that lone quirky guy in one city, in one corner of the world, hugging complete strangers. But to see that there are so many people around the world willing to take a stand for love and humanity is empowering."

As Trump's demagoguery shows, the most popular narratives are the ones simplest to understand. Immigration is the reason you don't have a job; Islamic extremism is because Muslims are terrorists; technology is disconnecting us all from each other. But the Free Hugs movement teaches us that the simplest narratives aren't always correct. If it wasn't for the internet, Mann would just be a loner in a mall with a cheesy sign.

Technology isn't to blame for the fact we're leading increasingly touch-free lives: we are. But electronic gestures of love and support sent via text message or instant chat are not a substitute for a loving embrace. The solution? Not to banish technology, but to use it as an aid: to reconnect with all the lonely people out there who might desperately need a hug.

#health #relationships

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shawnallenblog · 8 years ago

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The Boys of Fall

This could be a bitter pill to swallow, so buckle up.

I want to shake you, I want you to think -- just give me two minutes of your time after this video. This video is going to stir up some tremendously deep and fond memories for many, some old emotions, feelings and memories of youth, yearning of days gone by -- herein lies part of the problem, we want those same things for our kids. We have made this game part of the American way, part of our families and lives --but, is it worth it ? Only you can decide, but, should it really be your decision?

When I feel that chill, smell that fresh cut grass I'm back in my helmet, cleats, and shoulder pads Standing in the huddle, listening to the call Fans going crazy for the boys of fall. They didn't let just anybody in that club Took every ounce of heart and sweat and blood To get to wear those game-day jerseys down the hall The kings of the school, man, we're the boys of fall. -Kenny Chesney

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Do you like to take risks ? How about high percentage risks ? What about high percentage risks with a part of your body that you cannot fix ? No, I am not talking about taking up juggling chainsaws or free soloing the 2500 foot shear cliff face of El Sendero Luminoso. What if I asked you if you are willing to take on those high percentage risks, with a part of the body that one cannot fix, and put that part on your child?

Here is the problem -- I see things. On a weekly basis I would bet, I see people come in with actual physical problems that strongly appear to be related to a minimal traumatic brain injury weeks, months, years and sometimes decades ago. This sadly sometimes includes poor kids who clearly had a minor head injury in the past few weeks. I see things, I see sad things, preventable things. Mind you, not all things are preventable, we must move on through life and things happen in life that are out of our control, but we can at the very least control these higher percentage risks in our children. However, the question that haunts me, the one I do not understand is, why are some taking on these known higher percentage risks -- with their kids. I am not judging, I just do not understand.

I think some of this story is about denial, a sort of cognitive dissonance. Let me share a story from Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" to explain this phenomenon a bit clearer.

"consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking is found to be highest, concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst."

I believe this denial is a little of what is going on today when it comes to head injuries in our children, in a day and age where we know more, we know better, we understand the tremendous risks. This is hard stuff to take in, it somehow rattles and challenges us because it puts cracks in the foundations of our life, in our memories, in our feelings and emotions of our youth -- the same good stuff we want for our children. Humans make excuses for the choices that serve us best. It's human nature to dodge the hard painful things that once defined us

So lets get down to some facts.

From the Nauman Purdue football study: “The worst hit we’ve seen was almost 300 Gs,” Nauman said in reference to the G- forces of a football tackle. A soccer player “heading” a ball experiences an impact of about 20 Gs.“ So, how many Gs would 20 headers create ? How about 30 sub-maximal football tackles, in a week of game and practice? You can do the math, the numbers are there. How large do these numbers get through a week of games and practice? What are they over a whole season? The latest facts of the matter are that it is no longer about a single event, it is about the constantly rising odometer of impacts such as the Purdue Football Study found. And, I will show you information in a moment that reveals that it doesn't even need to be head impacts to up the odometer.

Concussions have been now shown to cause abnormalities in brain and motor functioning. These issues can last long after perceived clinical recovery. "Recent work suggests subtle deficits in neurocognition may impair neuromuscular control and thus potentially increase risk of lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after concussion.” This is just the tip of the iceberg. How about the more serious stuff, the seizures, inability to sleep, memory loss, difficulty thinking, dizziness, vision problems, vomiting, depression, headaches, anxiety, speech problems, coordination problems, and then what about the big one, CTE. CTE stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease that some studies suggest begins ramping up about 10 years down the road if enough cumulative trauma has occurred. The problem lies with our inability to know how much, or how little, one needs to sustain to begin this terrifying brain degenerative disease.

Some of our current society continues to ignore the immense long lasting effects of head injuries, even minimal ones. We continue to allow young developing brains to partake in football, soccer, and other jarring sports. Yes, we cannot live in a vacuum, but we can live in awareness and wise choices.

Facts: The 2 year Purdue Study of high school football players suggested that concussions are likely caused by many hits over time and not from a single blow to the head, as previously believed. “Over the two seasons we had six concussed players, but 17 of the players showed brain changes even though they did not have concussions,” Talavage said. “The most important implication of the new findings is the suggestion that a concussion is not just the result of a single blow, but it’s really the totality of blows that took place over the season,” said Eric Nauman. “Most clinicians would say that if you don’t have any concussion symptoms you have no problems,” said Larry Leverenz, an expert in athletic training and a clinical professor of health and kinesiology. “However, we are finding that there is actually a lot of change, even when you don’t have symptoms.”

“New research into the effects of repeated head impacts on high school football players has shown changes in brain chemistry and metabolism even in players who have not been diagnosed with concussions and suggest the brain may not fully heal during the offseason.” stated Emil Venere. “We are finding that the more hits you take the more you change your brain chemistry, the more you change your brain’s ability to move blood to the right locations,” Nauman said. By now there are those of you reading this with heavily sweating palms. You played football or hockey, soccer or lacrosse, or had a sport-unrelated concussion, maybe several. You remember it, kind of, or the many -- sort of. You sweat now, wondering what your future will hold for you. Will you be as statistic ? How many more years do you have before that first "apparent senior moment"? Will everything be alright ? Is it CTE or am I just getting older? One has to wonder, and that is no way to go through life. This is the chainsaw juggling act again, do we need to take on such risks ? Why do we knowingly welcome our children into this potentially life changing brethren? Why must we offer them that same wonderment and worry as their years go by ? No longer can we remain in denial and lean on cognitive dissonance as acceptable reasons for our avoidance to act and protect our children. Our answer to our children cannot be, " sorry son, we didn't know any better" -- because now, we do.

- Shawn

These head injuries are complicated cases which I cannot take on yet, I am not smart enough yet, this is too complicated a problem. I refer these cases out to my tribe of neuro specialists from The Carrick Institute who specialize in putting these brains back together. Watch this video, my mentors, my teachers. As a parent or patient, you do have options.

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Biomechanical Correlates of Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Neurophysiological Impairment in High School Football Evan L. Breedlove, BS1,Thomas M. Talavage, PhD2,3,Meghan Robinson, BS2, Katherine E. Morigaki, MS ATC4,Umit Yoruk, BS3, Larry J. Leverenz, PhD ATC4 , Jeffrey W. Gilger, PhD5, Eric A. Nauman, PhD1,2,6

'Deviant brain metabolism' found in high school football players

Frequent soccer ball 'heading' may lead to brain injury. Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University

#football #head injuries #concussions #boys of fall #carrick institute #purdue study #children #society

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