#without being TOO jewish or hard to pronounce

[masochistikitty]

oh my god i think i found my name

[fairest]

Killing Child at Zoo

There’s little hope. Although I heard Eileen Myles writes a big novel. I often return to them in moments of world fury. In the opening essay from The Importance of Being Iceland, Myles talks about how music can “circulate melancholy” more effectively than writing. When I was 25, Jeff Tweedy told me I wanted

a good life with a nose for things fresh wind and bright sky to enjoy my suffering

so that’s what I aimed for. And that’s what I got.

I keep seeing religious people. The Amish on a casino bus. The Sunday suits in the Naf Naf Grill. A man stops me outside Buffalo Exchange and asks, “are you Jewish?” I used to think, I’m only culturally Jewish? Now I think, I’m Jewish ungenosideickally?? There’s this billboard on I-55 that says, Cultural Jews got sent to the gas chambers, too. La-dee-da.

Outside the police station, a huddle of migrants. Casualties of Operation Lone Star. The older kids compare scooters, the babies wear candy cane jammies a month early. The parishioners cook the food. The lines get longer. The mayor has to do something. With good works, without weapons, Chicago fights the war brought to us by Catholic Charities of San Antonio.

A tart espresso from a suburban coffee bar. The Persian and/or Israeli girls I lusted over in the Best Buy walk out with a TV on a dolly. I stood behind Chromebooks to get a better view of their outstretched necks, gold earrings, furry purses, the heavy sweats tucked into Uggs. The daughters of Zion are haughty, the prophet Isaiah wrote, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. The scribes probably got hard every time they recopied those words. I know I do.

Out here in Niles, all is mall. I could start 200,000 wars. The local businesses shed hours, raise prices, clean Uggs. The diner says OPEN on its curbside sign, as if to remind customers and also the staff. Niles reminds me of “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” the opening track on Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, and this Hopperesque lyric of Karly Hartzman’s:

neon sign at the nail salon turned off and the streetlights turned on.

I get back in the car singing a different song. The song that drove her crazy in 8th grade.

At the playground, I’m thinking about Billy Woods and his kid, the last verse on Maps. Woods sings, of his child, “Anything at all could happen to him.” There’s another Woods verse, in this warm vein, on the new Armand Hammer:

I write when my baby's asleep I sit in the room in the dark I listen to him breathe I walk 'em to school, then the park Hold they little hands when we cross the street I think about my brothers that's long gone and this was all they ever dreamed People I lost to COVID-19 but it ain't do a thing to the fiends.

I chat with a Dad whose wife is boring, and he’s also boring, and I don’t remember their names but I remember his wife’s extreme bob. What did the children do before they had these leaves to roll around in? I’m only good with the names of people I love. One day I’ll forget those, too. If I learned how to pronounce Fyodor Dostoevsky, I can learn how to pronounce…

In Washington D.C., residents are stealing toilet paper. This is the closest drugstore to the Catholic University of America, where this week, at the Novitate conference, intellectuals fulfill their contractual desire to discuss René Girard. The bill says, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the title of the new Armand Hammer. I wonder if any of the Novitate participants will end up at this black CVS and scurry back to the white light of Catholic University plenaries, to speak coldly about desire.

Our D.C. hosts, like most petite Romans we know, work for the bomb makers. They tell us this neighborhood is killing trees to build townhouses that start in the low $800s. The death of the trees fucks with the runoff from the storms, Kate says, giving us grape leaves, and the storms worsen every year. Kate’s into trees. Her cheeks the color of the Japanese maples that stretch over our courtyards back home. Because of the Israel-Hamas war, Kate isn’t quite speaking to her parents. Or her sisters. Or maybe even herself. Betsy and Kate met on Birthright. I like to think they kissed the same Egyptian dragster.

In the Naf Naf Grill, Diana tells me all the “stuff in the Middle East” made her want to watch Schindler’s List. The “stuff in the Middle East,” I say, picking sumac onions out of my falafel bowl, makes me want to watch Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Particularly the scene when Charlotte Gainsbourg wraps herself in Saran to stop masturbating. When I see Netanyahu, well, at first, he looks exactly like Putin. At first, he looks like Patrick Bateman, when he kills the child at the zoo, because Bateman, like Netanyahu, is “unable to maintain a credible public persona.” At first, he looks like Charlotte Gainsbourg masturbating herself out of plastic. At first, he looks like Yul Brynner’s hardened heart. At first, he looks like the toilet paper when it’s still got a little bit of shit on it. At first, he looks like Biden’s unwaxed floss with little bits of hot dog in it. I watch The Godfather. Find a shrink-wrapped copy at Rattleback Records, the Coppola restoration. Biden and his cronies are like Don Zaluchi in the meeting of the five families. They want to “control war as a business. Keep it respectable. We would keep the [drug] traffic,” Zaluchi says, “in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”

A date with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. I photograph Betsy and Leo in front of a spray of pink and purple balloons. I say, three separate drink cups. I say, the popcorn already has butter on it. I’m cold because I’m still sick. Unproductive coughs.

In the theater, Leo whispers in my ear, “Is Taylor Swift still alive?” How easy it would be to take my child’s life. How quickly he would disappear. Taylor Swift, though, will not disappear. Then again she’s a woman. Anything could happen to her. She’s one of Bob Dylan’s “six-time losers” hanging around Matthew Gasda’s theater. She’s Gasda’s “Big five novelist with a forthcoming debut (typically less daring than her conversation).” Or, as Swift herself puts that, “the jokes weren’t funny I took the money.” Even at this late date, running across the stage. A goddess of forms and surfaces. Like the star in Ariana Reines’s poem, “Mistral”:

Don’t you see That between the people who want To be machines and the machines That want to be people women Are still, still at this late date Running?

On the plane back from D.C., I’ll read Sam Kriss’s laborious (in the sense of, “requiring considerable effort and time”) article about René Girard. I like to read Harper’s on planes because the altitude makes me dumb. I’m a frequent flyer. I’m a lifelong subscriber.

To Harper’s, Christian Lorentzen posts a letter from Rome. He informs us, “Nothing matters.” Another Catskills Gaza one-liner. On the ground, I read his pitchy (in the Myles sense that “writing for pay is a little ‘pitchy’”) piece on Don DeLillo. The Bookforum pages, soaked in Canh Chua Tom broth, lay flat on our kitchen island. What is the systems novel? Is it polytheism? “The war over the appropriation of Jerusalem is today’s world war,” wrote the prophet Derrida. “It is taking place everywhere, it is the world, it is the singular figure of the world’s ‘out of joint’-ness today. The three messianic religions embroiled in rivalry are directly or indirectly mobilizing all the powers in the world and the entire world order for the ruthless war they are waging against one another.” Leo sees the picture of Don DeLillo in a pink button-down and asks, “Daddy, is that’s you?”

In the intro to Pathetic Literature, Myles writes that art is something with “secondary meaning.” We locate that meaning at the National Gallery, when I open the roof patio door and Betsy spots Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock. How could she miss this ginormous blue chicken. It reminds her of her father, who died suddenly. She breaks down for what feels like an hour. Enough time for me to run out of cold breath making sure Leo doesn’t break anything by Robert Indiana. Katharina Fritsch couldn’t have known her chicken would offer my wife the release she’d been searching for all morning. In the art game, you can’t distribute “secondary meaning” evenly, and every player rolls for broke.

Walking in Bowmanville, at an unemployed hour of afternoon, the child’s dress reminds me of some modern wing painter. The blues could be Kandinsky, the powdery reds Belle and Sebastian. The child gathers orange and gold leaves in a silver kitchen colander. The grandmother says, “Hello.” The thought enters my head that I can steal this child, murder this grandmother, kill the child, too, bury it by the Metra tracks. Nobody’ll find me. Circulate melancholy. It’s genre fiction baby killers get caught.

“Killing Child at Zoo” comes later in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman, “unable to maintain a credible public persona,” is sleeping in “twenty-minute intervals” after eating one of his impossible foods, a salad with “foie gras vinegar.” He heads to the Central Park zoo. The surrounding buildings, like Trump Plaza and the AT&T building, “heighten its unnaturalness.” After calling a bathroom attendant the n-word, Bateman sees a mother breastfeeding, which “awakens something awful in me.”

He perks up when he spots the child. Offers him a cookie. “But before the child can answer, my sudden lack of care crests into a massive wave of fury and I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him quickly, in the neck.” When the child’s mother, “homely, Jewish-looking, overweight,” finds her dying son, she makes a sound Bateman, if not Ellis, “cannot describe,” and this monotheistic sound is the sound in my head as I spare the grandmother and child.

Bateman reasons it away, typical for him, in one of American Psycho’s Victorian moments of accountability.

Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I’m suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child’s life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It’s so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child’s would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy.

In The Missing of the Somme, Geoff Dyer and chums do a car tour of the Western Front. They eat. Drink. Make jokes about Wilfred Owen poems. It rains. It’s cold. In Ypres, they stay in an “expensive cheap hotel” with “towels the size of napkins, burn marks on the dresser.” Dyer quotes the writer Stephen Graham, writing about the post-war Ypres of the 1920s, when “death and the ruins completely outweighed the living. It is easy to imagine someone who had no insoluble ties killing himself here, drawn to the lodestone of death. There is a pull from the other world, a drag on the heart and spirit.”

I could kill myself in Gaza. Are there reasonable flights? At first, Netanyahu kills comedy, like Kramer saying the n-word umpteen times. There were many words that you could not stand to hear,” Hemingway wrote of World War I, “and finally only the names of places had dignity.” To native English speakers, who rarely suffer but protest much, Gaza is a graffiti-sounding word, like Even or Once or demise stylized as Dmise. I saw Dmise above a Chinatown garbage can. At least we can pronounce Gaza, unlike Ypres.

No matter what Leo hits, I let him run the bases, get his home run. Then I get my chance at bat. But when I run around the bases, Leo just stands at 3rd base, waiting for me to come home. Before I can, he tags me out.

“I think my strategy is better than yours,” he says on the walk home. This is the first time I hear him use the word strategy and one of my thoughts is, post your child’s revelations online, like Don DeLillo wearing his pink shirt.

I press Leo on his strategy. “Well, Daddy, your strategy is just, chase me. But you never catch up. My strategy is, stand and wait to get you out. My strategy is better than yours.” So my child does understand war.

Suddenly Zionist friends who moved to Townhouse, California. When will the suffering cease? The husband and I saw Father John Misty once. When Misty sang “Total Entertainment Forever,” which begins

bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift after mister and the missus finish dinner and the dishes,

in Milwaukee, I felt the absence of the horns that play on the studio album. My friend didn’t. Not all of us circulate the same melancholy. Still, I miss him. I miss those abandoned futures.

[jewish-privilege]

...We reached out to black Jews (...) to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us.

...April Baskin is a diversity consultant and racial justice director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable.

Personally in terms of my energy right now, I’m just exhausted. Just seeing all the suffering particularly in light of the people going out into the streets without a plan or adequate protections in place (friends, march marshalls, legal aid contact info, etc.), the poignancy of people whose politics otherwise have them mostly sheltering in place during the worst pandemic we’ve seen in over a hundred years, that they are compelled to take action — at their and our own peril. But it seems their thought is, “How can we not stand up?” As a Jewish social justice leader, I have a visceral, fundamental concern for people’s well-being in this moment — that people are very triggered and that this is all in the context of pre-existing heightened anxiety and stress because of the pandemic. And for black folks, whether it’s conscious or not, the sense of terror we feel for when is the shoe going to drop for someone we know, someone in our town, for us?

I am experiencing more white Jews sending me private messages. A lot of them are saying “What can we do?” and in time I hope we can advance our collective knowledge and education enough so it can become more of “I’ve been proactively learning from people of color and here is what I am doing,” or “These are the things I’m considering. I’m mostly leaning towards this one, does that sound like it’s in alignment with your vision?”

That said, it’s a step forward and it’s good, but it’s asking more of us as Jews of color to not only figure out how to maintain our jobs and do additional leadership and activism in this moment, but then also being asked to support and manage white Jews’ work during a time in which many of us are traumatized and heartbroken. But this is progress, and I would rather people reach out, however they best know how, than apathy and not doing anything or paralysis from fear.

...Yitz Jordan is the founder of

TribeHerald

, a publication for Jews of color, and a hip hop artist also known as Y-Love.

What am I feeling? Anxiety. That’s what I’m feeling. I had an anxiety attack on Friday. I live in the ‘hood, I live in Bushwick, so I’m not really geographically in the Jewish community, but I know that somebody on Friday for instance was shot not too far from me and I was terrified as to what the response to that was going to be, were cops going to respond and was rioting going to happen in my neighborhood?

And in the Jewish community, this is the kind of fight that I’m having: “This didn’t happen after the Holocaust, why are black people acting like this?” It’s that role of explaining over and over again to people who quite often don’t want to listen.

I feel like there’s the same split that’s going through America in ideological lines, is going through the Jewish community … whatever percent of Orthodox Jews that support Trump, you see it more from these people. When we say the Jewish community in general that also consists of people like JFREJ [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice] and Jewish Voice for Peace and these other organizations, but in the Orthodox world, the pro-Trump wing is where I’m hearing these types of conversations. And I’m seeing this, ranging from lack of knowledge to callousness regarding people of color. There are some people who genuinely don’t know, and to whom a lot of these issues are very new. Especially Hasidish people, for instance, this just isn’t part of the Shabbos-table conversation — police brutality, inequality, systemic racism. But you have some people who just show callousness.

Gulienne Rishon is a diversity expert and chief revenue officer for TribeHerald Media.

I am thankful for true allies, who understand that this is not the time to center their own experiences. I am thankful for true allies, who understand that the experiences they and their ancestors have had are to be used in this moment as empathy, and that no one is denying them their experiences in asking them to listen and learn.

But mostly, if one more white-presenting Jew tries to tell me today that they don’t have white privilege (not that they aren’t White, but that they don’t have white privilege) because they’re Jewish/the Holocaust/Jews got kicked out of schools, I might lose my mind. I should not have to deal with people telling me that my story (the Black part) doesn’t exist because my story (the Ashkenazi experience) exists. But I do. And I am confident that part of why G-d put me in the skin of a biracial Jewish woman descended from a kindertransport survivor, a WWII veteran who was kicked out of his Hamburg Gymnasium for being Jewish, and two Southern Black Virginians, is to help us as a people face our sinat chinam and take responsibility for being the light unto the nations by helping, not closing our ranks and denying the pain others feel because of the freshness of ours.

Facilitating difficult conversations about race is literally my profession. Yet, some days, I’m just a person behind a keyboard on Facebook who came out of our day of rest hearing that the world erupted in flames, and I look at the beautiful brown skin of my daughter and her parents, and I’m angry and afraid. I’ve worked so hard to have these conversations with grace when you’re caught up in your feelings about the complexity. On a day when it’s not about the complexity, but processing and mourning actual death, can you please give the same grace to mine?

...Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is

a musician

who blends traditional Yiddish and African-American music.

Let’s get real here, American Jews: You are living in an Old Country, whether you choose to recognize it or not. The state-sanctioned violence visited upon Black communities happens in ghettos you can easily pronounce, in towns you visit without the aid of a tour guide and cities you reside in without a granted law of return.

So, who are you in this narrative, this country from which there is no real option of flight, this century which is your own, your heartless ruler, hands slick with the blood of children and refugees, the cavalries, maintaining “order” on your behalf over a people whose mere existence for centuries has been deemed disorderly?

Solidarity with Black people doesn’t require a radical act of historical imagination. You are here. We are here. You know what to do. Do it. Now.

Tema Smith is a writer and the director of professional development at 18Doors, an organization for interfaith families.

I’m deeply upset about George Floyd and also that he is not the first and not the last, and that it’s taken a murder so egregious to really get people out into the streets in this way, and get a lot of people to wake up to what happens unfortunately too frequently.

I also have deep gratitude for the moment that we’re in, for so many people who hadn’t previously spoken out are speaking out.

As far as the Jewish community, the number of people who either have spoken out publicly or who have reached out privately as people who just care and want to make sure that me and other Jews of color are feeling OK right now — and I think most of my friends who are Jews of color are experiencing similar things from their friends — is huge. Frankly, I’ve gotten messages from people who I’ve never corresponded with beyond public tweets, just reaching out saying ‘Are you OK?’ and a recognition that is in many ways at a new level.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. This is the first time I’ve received messages from so many people and that makes me hopeful for that grassroots community level being there to support each other, and that is huge. And the fact that there is a growing chorus of voices in the Jewish community speaking up, that’s huge, and that people are showing up at protests, I can’t say enough of how meaningful it is to see that...

[mother-snake]

cut you a piece

(oh boy! its been a hot second since ive posted a story... hope you enjoy! tell me if i need to tag somthing!)

tags: @idkanameatall warnings: angst, majour carachter death. tw self hurt, tw soup of slide. adult language words: 7488

-why was janus the way he is... and what can happen when you lose everything youve ever known.-

Janus, he was fucked up, and Romulus he was pureless. So of course they fell in love.

Self-preservation smiled as he sat next to Romulus. The two had known each other for around a week. Both of them had hit it off almost immediately. both of them not liked by the others. but they were okay with that, after all they had each other.

They were sitting there next to one another. Romulus was drawing something that had happened in the imagination. self-preservation was scribbling down names on a sheet of paper. He was yet to find one that he liked. It was difficult.

He let out a small sigh as he looked down at the note book that seemed filled with different names. None of them seemed right. he crossed out the ones that seemed to plain. The ones that were hard to pronounce.

“hey! Are you alright?” Romulus asked his friend.

Said side blinked. He hadn’t realised he had begun to cry. “I’m fine,” he said as he rubbed the tears out of his eyes.

Romulus picked up the book and read some of the names. A small grin on his face as he kept reading. “what about Janus?” he said finally as he put down the notebook in his lap. “that’s a girl’s name though,” self-preservation pouted. “no! j-a-n-u-s. as in the god of half-truths!” he cheered at the scaled side.

He pondered this name for a couple seconds. Slowly a warm smile lit up his face as he looked at Romulus. The smile becoming infectious along with the happiness rolling of him. “okay then! Janus it is,” he said with a wide smile, “don’t tell the others though. Shh!” whispered. “okay,” Romulus whispered back.

Both of them giggled as they leaned their heads on one another. both of them completely content with what little they had.

Because to them…each other was enough.

Romulus let Janus know what was wrong with him. And Janus stopped using, and binging, and pissing his whole life away.

Romulus wasn’t happy with any of the sides. When he got the chance, he would bash them over the head with his shield.

Why? I hear you asking. Right now, Janus was crying into his shoulder. Tears set off by their reaction to what he had hoped to never happen.

His once bleach white scales had changed to what he considered a pretty yellow. Sunflower yellow. he held his Janus close. The two of them had been dating since Janus’s second month of creation. Both of them had never gone anywhere without the other nearby.

Not that either minded. They actually found peace in knowing where the other was in these times.

“Janus? Its okay, you’re okay… they can’t hurt you as long as I’m here. Okay?” “I know…” he got in response as Janus sniffed.

He looked up to Romulus with red puffy eyes. The anger in Romulus’s stomach swelled. “let’s give them a visit, shall we my sunflower?” Romulus said slyly as he held out his arm.

Janus let out a small laugh and looped his arm around Romulus’s. said side pulled the other closer. “no, I wouldn’t like that,” he smiled widely.

But before they could get to the door there was a sharp knock at the door of creativity’s door. They looked at one another before Romulus ushered Janus behind himself.

“Romulus? De- self-preservation?” oh morality. “we need you guys quick! There’s a new side here!” he yelled, his voice both a mix of concern and excitement.

They looked between one another. There hadn’t been a new side since Janus appeared. And that had been apparently very unexpected.

Both of them ran next to each other as the door burst open. Romulus mildly confused on how Janus could run so easily in heel shoes. Janus was just focused on the fact there was a side with the light sides.

Scared that he would be treated the same way he and Romulus were. when they arrived, they stopped and stared at the side that hissed at logic like a cat. “I’m sorry, did you just hiss at me?” logic asked looking flabbergasted at the new side.

A wide smile grew on Janus’s face as he let out his own hiss. Grabbing the attention of the new side. the small child looked up to Janus who gave another small hiss. a hiss this time was directed at him. This one wasn’t as animalistic. But more friendly.

Janus and Romulus nodded to one another and held out their hands. the small child ran into their arms. “welcome to our dysfunctional family,” Janus mumbled as he hugged the smaller form.

And Janus told Romulus he'd die for him, Which looking back, was the right thing to say.

Janus sat there listening to music blaring from cautions room. Him and the newest addition, wrath, had gotten into another argument and it wasn’t pretty. He had witnessed the end of it.

He was positioned at the side of Virgil’s door. Waiting for the other to calm down. He hoped they would. “hey, you okay there?” Romulus asked.

Janus let out a sigh, “I’m alright. Just waiting for the two small hatchlings to calm down. It may take a while by the sounds of it,” he chuckled. “I think Thomas starting high school is getting the best of them.” He said.

“yeah… I can tell,” Romulus said, hiding his hand in his pocket; He could tell the other later. Romulus smiled and kissed his cobra on the head before turning around. “hey, Romulus? Id cut you a piece of me,” he said slowly, almost singing. “what?” “id cut you a piece of me, and where you go, I will go too. Yes… I’m now a part of you,” he smiled. Romulus felt tears pouring out of his eyes as he surged forwards and hugged Janus tightly around the shoulders. “how long?” Janus muttered into his shoulder. “a couple years at best. But no longer I’m afraid…” he muttered into Janus’s shoulder.

They didn’t do anything but hold each other. Romulus knew lying to his queen wouldn’t work. It never did. And as self-preservation. Something like this was bound to become loose. With or without him saying anything.

“I am now a part of you,” Romulus muttered.

I cut you a piece of me, I cut you a piece of me. And where you go, I will go too. Yes, I am now a part of you

They laughed as they sat around the screen. A movie had been chosen by Patton. but one was caught up in their thoughts. Not much had changed since everyone had found out that Romulus wouldn’t be around for long. and that made Janus feel things he didn’t want to feel. He tried his best to repress everything he was feeling. He knew it was causing him harm.

He found himself snapping at the kids and others more. he was scared. He was going to lose his best friend. Nothing else seemed to matter more at that moment.

“hey, sunflower,” Romulus said calmly as he wrapped an arm around Janus. Janus felt himself sobbing as his lover held him close. He buried his head in his chest. this had been the first time any of the others had seen Janus cry in front of them.

Romulus held Janus close. He was the only one who knew that this was almost a daily occurrence now. He didn’t want to leave his queen behind. If he could stop what was happening. He would. But there was very little in his power

Romulus pulled Janus closer. He wouldn’t leave Janus like this. He wanted to go out with a bang. And that’s exactly what he would do. “marry me,” he said as Janus slowly began to calm down. “what?” Janus asked shocked. “marry me,” Romulus said again, “I’ll be honest I would have waited till Thomas left high school. But with things going on now. Now is never a better time- “ “yes…” Janus said before wrapping his arms around Romulus’s neck ad pulling him close and into a kiss.

The lights looked at the two love birds wondering how they could have been so cruel to the both of them for so long…

Caution and wrath cheered at the scene in front of them. God, they had been close to forcing the two turtle doves to marry. They were perfect for one another.

But perfection doesn’t last. that was something they learned the hard way…

Janus and his romulus, got married in his temple, Cause they calculated,

The wedding was by no means small. they had it in the imagination. Something that had been a surprise when Romulus had offered to have it there.

It seemed everyone in the imagination knew of the event. and as soon as he had entered it seemed as if everyone knew who he was. the whispers of him becoming Romulus’s second hand was a surprise. But he guessed that was understandable with Remus being king creativity.

Laughter rung in the air as people danced and children played. Each person swelled with so much joy and happiness that their king had found someone to stay at his side. if only they knew…

Janus and Romulus sat on chairs at the very front of the castle. The party being outside to make room for everyone there.

“thank you,” a young boy whispered to Janus as Romulus stood up to talk to someone. “may I ask what for?” he said slyly getting a smile out of the young boy. “for making the king so happy!” he cheered. “I should be thanking him for making me so happy,” Janus said, “I don’t know where I’d be without my king,” he chuckled as he ruffled the young boys hair.

“would you care for a dance?” the young boys eyes lit up like stars and he almost dragged Janus by the arm and into the crowd.

Romulus spotted him from the crowd and let out a hearty laugh as he spotted his sunflower. Giving and encouraging wink. Janus stuck out his tongue in response.

The people around laughed as they watched their two rulers, their hearts warming knowing that the kingdom was in safe hands.

But… alas… time was slowly running out.

That Jules was more Jewish than Jessie was Catholic. Jules mother was pleased.

Janus knew that Romulus was slowly becoming weaker. Spending more time in his room than anywhere else. the two spent the winter curled up around one another. Glued to each other’s side. Christmas had been an event and a half. With Janus and Romulus teaming up and decimating the others in a snowball fight. Janus ended up getting a cold that very afternoon. But he was okay with that.

Valentines day had been spent handing roses to the people of Romulus and now Janus’s kingdom. hand in hand they had become something that neither thought could happen.

And then it began… his hair had slowly begun to turn grey… it was small at first. Just small strands here and there. He also found himself struggling to pick up heavy things that he could have picked up easily before.

Janus found himself glued to Romulus. then one day they found themselves wondering the streets of the city. People smiled and waved at the two of them happily. Greetings were shared and smiles returned.

It had been a perfect day so far. The sun was blazing down on Janus. Warming his scales perfectly. His cold bloodedness often caused him issues.

then everything seemed to go slow motion.

“hey… sweetheart… why is everything spinning?” he muttered. “my king nothing- Romulus!” he yelled as he caught his lover as his knees buckled and gave out below him.

He felt his breathing picking up as he laid Romulus gently to the ground. Everything else was forgotten.

Black streaks rose from his neck. Half of his right cheek was covered in the almost inky looking patches. Janus was panicking internally. But keeping as calm as possible on the outside. “come on sweetie… you’re going to be okay… let’s get back to the castle…” no one around said a thing. everyone worried for their king and queen who had only been married for five months.

Janus knew time was running short. He just didn’t know how short it would be.

Married six months, when on route 87, Janus turned quickly,

Janus didn’t leave Romulus’s room unless necessary. Virgil and Orpheus bringing him meals as he sat by his lovers’ side. His face now almost completely covered in the blackness that seemed to make him look like a void.

Janus hadn’t spoken very much. Romulus had looked at Janus with so much joy every time he woke up. small snippets of his memory disappearing daily. but never forgetting Janus. It seemed like him mind couldn’t forget him. And he was fine with that. It would be nice to remember his lover at his final moments.

Janus had been startled out of his thoughts when Romulus reached a hand out and nudged Janus. “yes Romulus?” “can I see them? One last time?” he asked his eyes weak and barely focusing. “…okay…” Janus said, trying to keep himself together.

He scooped Romulus up into his arms. It scared him how light his king was. he looked over to the face of Romulus that was almost hidden by his growing hair that was so dark now it almost matched his skin.

“let’s go, my love.”

In a beaten mitsubishi, killed romulus in a crash. A marriage begun and ended,

He walked through the streets. Barely keeping himself together as silent tears poured down his face.

The people moved out of their way, bowing their own heads. Tears streaking down their faces as they looked on in mourning.

When they arrived at the main balcony of the castle, facing where the sun had always set. and there it was, going down over head.

Romulus had his head in Janus’s lap. A weak smile on his face as he looked at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “I cut you a piece of me…” he sung. “Romulus?” Janus’s voiced cracked. “I cut you a piece of me… and where you go, I will go too. Yes… I’m now a part of you,” he sung weakly. “I’m now a part of you.  From now on I’m half a soul, without you I can't be whole, “Janus sung back. tears pouring out of his eyes. “oh you are the start of me…”

Romulus smiled as he looked at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His sunflower looking at him with a simile and love in his eyes. “goodbye my queen,” he whispered. “goodbye my king,” Janus choked out.

Janus cried out loudly in pain as he felt Romulus go limp in his arms. Wails of despair filled the air. the people below heard the cries of sorrow and tried to block out the gut-wrenching noise that seemed to cause everyone else to cry for the loss of their young king.

Everyone lined the streets. Holding red and green lanterns in their hands before sending them to the sky. Each one holding a small message written on the inside. Hoping that maybe it would reach their king.

Janus saw the lanterns flood the skies and smiled ever so slightly. He wouldn’t be alone. He had everyone here… but. No… he wouldn’t. no. he couldn’t return.

Romulus had long since faded. Leaving only his cloak and crown behind. a warm smile on Janus’s face. he had left his cape behind. He had always been forgetful.

He flung the caplet over his shoulders and stood up removing the crown that rested on his brow and placed it next to Romulus’s.

“goodbye my love… perhaps we may meet again in another life…”

With broken glass. His life was scattered, and soon was her ash

Janus looked dead. That was the first thing Virgil realised when Janus left Romulus’s room.

Virgil still couldn’t help but ask, “how is he?” Janus couldn’t look Virgil in the eyes, “he’s in a better place now,” he said weakly. Virgil surged forwards within seconds. Wrapping his arms around his pops. He himself didn’t know how to feel. He had never been overly close to Romulus like self-preservation had.

But he knew now more than ever that he was needed. And he swore to himself that in that moment. He would stay and protect his pops from anything that would come their way. “come, would you like me to tell the others?” Virgil asked.

Janus could only nod. Not trusting himself to say the wrong thing. it was then that he realised that Janus was waring Romulus’s cape. Heh. His dad had always been forgetful. But a small part of him knew that it had been deliberate.

The walk seemed daunting to Janus. This was one of the few times he had been anywhere without Romulus by his side. but now? There would be no one. Just himself it seemed despite the fact he knew he had his children by his side.

He felt the silent tears pour down his face. but he didn’t care.

Then he heard laughter. Virgil gave a small smile and walked ahead of his father.

There at the living room table was Logan, Patton and Orpheus. All eyes turned to the two of them. “how is he?” Patton asked.

Janus felt himself shaking as he pulled the caplet closer. Had the mind palace always been this cold?

“he…” Virgil began, “he passed away.” no one said a thing. As there was nothing to say… Patton felt something in his chest tighten. He could feel the amount og grievance coming of Janus. He was surprised the other was holding himself together. Logan… well. He didn’t know what to do. There was no logical way to help Janus unless he could find a way to bring Romulus back. Orpheus stared at Janus. Stared at his pops who was now widowed. He knew this would be a hard take on everyone. But this would be devastating on Janus’s behalf.

The silence stretched onwards. No one could say anything it seemed. but Janus couldn’t take it anymore. The silane wasn’t something he was used to. So, he took a couple steps away from the group, turned around and bolted to his room. The cries of everyone behind him were ignored as he closed his door.

He locked it and felt himself sink to the ground. his eyes darted around his room. He wanted to be safe. He didn’t like the cold he was feeling. He wanted to be held and have someone at his side.

He laid down on his bed, ignoring the pounding that came from outside the door and slipped under the covers. Holding the caplet as close to himself as possible. maybe if he had waited another couple hour’s, he would have met the two new sides… but, right now. Weather he knew it or not. He needed the sleep. and for the first time in forever he fell asleep, exhausted from crying. But that was okay… he would get used to the empty feeling eventually.

He may have wanted Romulus… but he knew he wasn’t coming back.

I cut you a piece of me, I cut you a piece of me. And where you go, I will go too. I lost my life when I lost you.

It had been a month. Janus barely spoke. But when he did it was always in lies. he had made them forget. He had made them believe that the twins had been there the whole time. He felt like he had betrayed Romulus. but it was for the best.

“hello my dear snake face!” creativity one cheered as he saw Janus walking to the kitchen. Janus let out a wince. He hated it when jabs were sent to his scales. “what don’t you want creativity?” he glowered. “come now, why do you refuse my name?” creativity said. Janus couldn’t respond but kept walking. Trying his best to ignore the other side. Janus froze as creativity 1 kept taking, “listen. Can you just not leave me alone. I don’t need my space,” he snapped at the red sashed side.

Roman seemed taken back by the words but his features softened, “very well my dear snake, I bid you farewell!” and as quickly as he was there. he was gone.

Janus sighed as he made his way down the quiet hallway. He knew that the others were trying to give him space, not knowing anymore why his mood had shifted so dramatically. from happy to so sad that Patton could barely spend five minuets in the same room as him before he accidentally starts to cry from the overwhelming sadness coming from him.

He looked blankly onwards towards the kitchen. He was after another bottle of wine. It helped numb the pain. he knew Romulus would have slapped him on the head by now and told him to tone it down with the spicy grape juice. But… well. He wasn’t.

And things hadn’t been going well to put it simply. ever since the twins arrived. he knew it was only a matter of time before the place split into two. And he knew that when it happened things would only get more difficult. Especially if he was stuck with one of the twins.

Don’t get him wrong. He loved the two to pieces. But it hurt to see them every day. So much of Romulus was in them it hurt to look at. roman had Romulus’s eyes and Remus had his chaotic personality.

Maybe if they hadn’t reminded him so much of his lost love, he would not need to cry himself to sleep, or hold up the illusion that he was okay. but he needed to stay strong. That was a fact he needed to keep up.

However, things wouldn’t be so normal anymore. Not after today. he was aware of yelling coming from the Livingroom. the same direction roman had gone in. but he didn’t think much of it…  that was until he entered the room however and froze. Orpheus was yelling at roman who looked ready to rip his head off.

“so what? At least he cares about us!” Orpheus yelled. “deceit is nothing but a lair and you know it!” roman yelled back, “he’s plotting something against us all. Why else the sudden mood shift?”

Janus stared at roman from his spot by the door. His chest aching from the words that had fallen from his mouth.

Then he felt nothing. Just an empty place where everything other emotion should have been. he stared blankly in his direction. “don’t worry creativity. You won’t be seeing much of me for a long time,” he said sharply before turning around and walking away.

Roman said nothing in response. Instead just looked at the spot where the side had been.

Orpheus shoved roman to the floor and spat next to him. “if you come near any of us again. I WILL put your head on a pike,”

That was the last time for years that he would see either side. and dinner that day would be the last time he would see Virgil and his brother. both deciding that it wasn’t worth staying with people who didn’t care.

And thus, the divide happened. No one would realise until the morning. With a single door cutting both sides away from each other.

Yeah you loved someone so much. That to lose them is to never recover,

It had been a month. Virgil, Remus and Orpheus were gathered in the Livingroom on the floor playing monopoly. No one seemed to be close to winning. Each side cheating in their own way.

Janus sat on the couch with a glass of wine. He watched blankly. Not saying a single word. He hadn’t spoken since roman had taken the major jab at him.

He glared at the cup in hand. He hated repressing his feelings. And normally wine would work… but he guesses his tolerance had built up greatly.

He let out a sigh and drooped his shoulders. He closed his eyes and felt the cold wave wash over him. Then there was nothing inside of him. He opened his eyes and looked over to the dark sides who glanced over at him. they knew what he had just done. But they had stopped trying to stop him a long time ago.

“still don’t know why you enjoy repressing your feelings,” Remus said, “repression never works,” “I know…” Janus whispered back. the entire mini group froze, their eyes snapping to Janus. “I just need to feel numb sometimes… its better than feeling what I feel…” he said as he looked at them.

It felt like the first time they had seen him properly since the door was put in place. his eyes looked almost dead. His once pale yellow scaled had become a dirty gold, pecks of brown mixed in.

He let out a short sigh before standing up and walking away. A hand rested itself upon his shoulder but he simply shrugged it off and continued on his way. he had work to get done. God knows what the light sides were getting Thomas to do.

Virgil looked at Janus as he left the room with wide eyes. Janus’s cold emotionless gaze imprinted in his mind. he wanted to know what had happened to his pops over the past six months. He had changed…he had changed so much and it scared him.

Remus looked at where Janus was and glanced down at his hands. had it been his fault Janus was like this? Did he himself do something or was it something worse?

Orpheus couldn’t look in their direction. He hated being able to do nothing. Especially when his pops was in such a state. It sent spikes into his heart. Yeah, he knew what it was like to have emotions you didn’t want. It sucked.

But at least all three of them would be there to help him.

You've given part of your being to them and when they Go, you can never have it back you can never have it back.

Janus was starting to panic. And that was an understatement. Ever since Virgil had revealed himself, he was slowly spending more time with the light sides. It had gotten to the point where Janus was only seeing him early in the mornings or late at night.

Every time they talked it always ended with an argument. Orpheus or Remus would have to break them up sometimes.

That’s how Janus found himself. Cradling himself in his bed. Wrapped in his blanket. Tears pouring down his face as his right eye was closed shut. An ice pack held closely to his eye. it was black and purple. Punched by someone with pure anger.

Orpheus had sided with Virgil. And he would be lying if he said he didn’t feel so lonely. It felt like that day all over again. Maybe the pain came from the fact it was supposed to be Romulus’s birthday today.

Maybe that’s why he snapped at the both of them. He regretted everything that had slipped out of his mouth during their yelling match.

His eyes glanced over to the bowler hat sat at the table.

“eh, hats aren’t really my thing you see,” Romulus said as he looked at Janus. “but why are you giving it to me of all people?” Janus asked curiously looking at a blushing Romulus. “its been a year since we’ve known each other. I thought it would be nice to get you something.” “but… I didn’t get you anything!” Janus said woefully. “I’ve got you! that’s all I need!” Romulus said as he playfully punched Janus’s arm.

Janus looked away and stared at the grey sheets covering him. Wincing as the ice pack sent spikes of pain into his injury.

God, what would Romulus say if he were here… he wondered who’s side he would take.

Three small knocks sounded from his door. “come in,” he said smally.

The door creaked open to reveal a rather shy Remus. Janus felt a wave of guilt spread through his soul. The poor thing never knew what to do in these kinds of situations. “come here,” he muttered as he patted the space next to him.

Remus gave a smile and made his way over. Tucking himself next to Janus. The scaled side wrapped an arm around the smaller side, holding him close. “deceit?” Remus said. “mph,” he hummed back. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Janus glanced to Remus with a raised eyebrow. “I’m sorry. I know you’re going through a difficult patch right now… I can feel your destructiveness coming of you. I don’t know why you’re like this. But if ever you need to talk… I’m here. Even if I can be fucking weird about it.”

Janus felt the tears beginning to fall once again. at least he still had Remus he guessed. “Janus,” he whispered as he looked to a rather shocked Remus. “what?” “my name… its Janus.”

Remus looked at Janus with wide eyes. He had never known his name. he was pretty sure no one knew his name until this second. “you can’t tell the others. please,” Janus said. “I promise,” Remus said with a sharp nod.

The two stayed like that for what felt like forever until Janus fell asleep in Remus’s embrace. the intrusive side was almost surprised to see Janus looking so peaceful as he slept.

Had this really been how he had once been? His memory was blurry. Not all there, and sometimes he could swear he didn’t do half the things his mind had told him he did.

And for some reason. He felt like he had never seen… Janus… so calm. So… dare he say; peaceful.

 I haven't thought of Jules, or Jessie, Or their story in the better part of a year.

Janus was slumped against the wall as he stared at where Virgil and Orpheus’s doors should have been. An empty bottle of wine sat by his side. god… he really was a fuck up. wasn’t he? He couldn’t keep himself in check. Relying on numbing himself with drink or his own power.

“hey… you okay there?” Remus asked Janus. a memory struck him sharply in the chest. why did he have to look so much like Romulus?!

He turned his head back to the wall. Glaring at where the door should have been. he didn’t want to have any memories right now. It would only cause him to cry once again. It seemed to be the only thing he had done for the past week. Waiting and praying that his children would come back…

But he knew that it wouldn’t happen. He had lost almost everything… Romulus…Orpheus…Virgil…his happiness… his love for things…his ability to feel.

The last thing he had was Remus. And that felt like its own personal hell. Don get him wrong. He had grown to love the side like his own child. But when he looks at him now? All he sees Is a young Romulus with a moustache.

He couldn’t look at him anymore. He couldn’t feel anymore. He didn’t want to continue like this… “don’t think like that,” Remus growled, snapping Janus out of his own mind. “you’re supposed to be self-preservation correct? Then help Thomas. Get out of the shadows you’ve trapped yourself in. or at least find a healthier distraction. For god’s sake, go and piss off my brother!” Remus yelled hysterically. “fucking get of the floor and tell me how to help you!”

Janus stared at Remus. Help Thomas? Would it really be a good idea… unless… “I have an idea? But I need your help,” Janus said.

A small spark lighting up in his eyes. Remus grinned as he looked at the deceitful side. He didn’t think he had seen the side looking almost excited about anything.

“what do you need?” “morality’s old outfit. If Thomas really wants to make a fool of himself, I would know… lets sort that out.”

Remus held out a hand and Janus took it. “well, for starters… his name is Patton. Logic is Logan as well. You ought to know that if you’re going to get away with this…”

Yeah… he didn’t need much. but Remus was enough for now. And that was okay.

But warming your hands in mine fills me with terror, That I will lose you, today, or tomorrow, in two years, or seventy.

Janus was beyond frustrated. What would it take for them to listen to him!? he had been trying his best to get the others to finally listen to him. God damn it he even tried his own way at the court room to get their host to listen to him. But of course, he was the villain. He was always the fucking villain.

“hey Janus guess what I found-“Remus said as he skipped into his room before freezing.

He had spent the past couple hours in the imagination. So, it was only reasonable that he wouldn’t know what was happening. That didn’t stop him from worrying and rushing over.

“sorry, I shouldn’t be crying over something like this…” “don’t apologise for having fucking feelings,” Remus said as he patted Janus’s shoulder.

They sat quietly next to each other. Neither said anything or a while. Just basking in each other’s company.

It was reaching the half an hour mark when Janus remembered. “why where you here again?” “oh right!” Remus grinned before reaching into his leather bag. Janus would never nor would he want to know what that bag was made of… that didn’t stop him from having suspicions though. “here they are!”

Janus felt himself lose his breath. “I found them in the ruins of some old castle, pretty cool right?”

Two matching silver crowns laid in Remus’s lap. One imprinted with a sword and shield. The other with his own symbol. The snake’s eyes however being a single ruby and emerald. “I guess you have questions?” Janus said in what was barely an audible whisper. “you bet your fucking ass I want answers. Tell me everything, and don’t think of lying to me Janus.”

He reached out and cradled the crown in his hand, took a deep breath. And began to recall everything he had tried so hard to repress over the past three years. Coming onto four. Remus listened closely. Taking in everything Janus said. Thoughts and feelings swarmed his mind and body.

But he couldn’t make himself angry. No matter how hard he tried. As Janus was sitting by his side. Smiling and laughing and looking years younger than he had looked in well… forever.

“he left and I broke. No matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t be happy without him there,” Janus said as he looked over to Remus.

the green coloured side looked at Janus. Both had tears in their eyes. “is that why you couldn’t look at me for so long? Because I reminded you of him?” he said, voice cracking. “yeah… god between you and roman, you really looked like him. And it hurt. But… I guess I just needed to get over it, like a wall I suppose. The first couple times can be hard, but you’ve just got to keep pushing forwards,” Janus said.

He looked down to the crown in his hands. he gestured for Remus to take it from his hands. “no,” Remus said as he laid the other crown in Janus’s lap, “they mean far more to you than me.”

For the first time in a long time… Janus was at peace. Sure, things were far from fine.  God knows it couldn’t be worse. But right now? He was content with just having Remus.

“If you have any more questions… ill be happy to answer them.

When even the Earth has numbered days. I can give just one thing that stays.

he fucked up. there standing in front of him was a teary-eyed Remus… oh god… what the fuck had he done. “do you really think I’m evil?” Remus said as tears poured down his face. “Remus- “Janus said as he reached out an arm. he flinched back as Remus summoned his mace. He held it in his hands. malic filled his eyes. he took a couple steps back. “follow me. and I won’t hesitate,” Remus said as he made his way over to the door that split the mind palace.

“Remus please. I’m sorry. Please. I can’t lose you too… please- “ “maybe you should have been more careful deceit,” Remus snarled before opening the door and slamming it behind himself.

Janus felt himself crumple to the ground; he didn’t know how much he was shaking. He didn’t care that he could barely breath.

He was alone… it was cold… there was no one. He was no one… nothing mattered. he felt nothing.

He wanted his king…he wanted someone to tell him he was okay. He wanted someone to look at him and tell him to get a grip.

he wanted Virgil… but he wouldn’t forgive him… he wanted Orpheus… but he would never trust him… he wanted Remus… but he would never look at him again… he wanted Romulus… but he knew he was never coming back…

and as he cried himself to sleep on the floor…. He had never felt more like a monster.

I cut you a piece of me, I cut you a piece of me. For where you go, I will go too. I am now a part of you.

Janus winced as the metal slid over his skin. Small trickles of ruby red fell from his arm like red stained tears. Screaming from his skin told him to stop. but he couldn’t.

He had been alone for a couple months now. It was an hour away from midnight. Signifying the death of his lover. he wanted a hug. He wanted someone to hold him as he cried.

What he wanted he didn’t deserve. He was the villain. He was the monster in the closet. and it was fine. At least he was something. Even if it hurt…

He hadn’t been summoned in such a long time. It had been the barely less since he had seen another side. he was scared that they had forgotten about him. Some nights, like today, he could hear laughter coming from the other side. And that was enough for him to know he wasn’t wanted.

They were fine without him. maybe it would be better to go completely. Joining Romulus instead of staying where he wasn’t wanted.

The empty wine bottles that were around him no longer were able to do their job.

He shook as the cold air froze his skin. It had been a while since he had turned the thermostat down. He deserved it though.

The thought of being able to see Romulus filled his head. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t feeling slightly giddy at the thought. Getting to see his best friend of so many years once again, but for eternity.

A small weak laugh filled the air as Janus stood up and made his way over to his room. He looked down at the bowler hat that sat neatly at the end of his bed.

He picked it up and dusted it off before placing it on his head. Trying his best to ignore the shiny objects that rested in their own cases in the back of the room.

The only question was where. Where would he go to do this? an idea struck him in the chest… yeah… that would be perfect… all he needed was to make a plan. no letters were needed, the others wouldn’t care enough to wonder where he had gone.

From now on I’m half a soul, without you I can't behold. So cut me a piece of you, Cut me a piece of you, and where I go, you'll always be.

It had been a struggle, trying to sneak into the imagination. But it had been much harder to find what he was looking for.

The buildings were broken. Barely standing. Vines and shrubbery grew out of cracks. It broke his heart to see that this is what had become of his kingdom. he thought once that it would stand forever. But nothing ever did. Did it?

Janus chuckled as memories filled his mind.

The streets him and Romulus would wonder for hours, talking and smiling with their subjects. the town square where he had danced at every Halloween with everyone around him. A wide smile on his face.

The castle grounds where he had danced wit the young boy who had thanked him for looking after their king. he wondered what that boy was doing… was he still alive? Was he dead?

Then the castle came into view, it wouldn’t be long now. the sun slowly had begun to set. The golden huge filling the sky like it knew what was going to happen. As if it were saying a final goodbye. He felt tears swell in his eyes.

Only five minuets later, he was standing on the weather-beaten balcony that had the perfect view of the city below.

And then he choked out a sob as ghostly figures, white wisps of phantoms filled the streets. Each holding a lantern before sending them up and up into the sky.

They shone like small red, green and yellow stars…

He looked down to the small bottle in his hand. He popped the lid open and drank its contents… he would be okay… he would see Romulus again. He lowered himself to the ground. Lying face up and staring at the sky flooded with fake stars.

And slowly his vision became blurry. “I cut you a piece of me, I cut you a piece of me. For where you go, I will go too I am now a part of you. From now on I’m half a soul, without you I can't be whole.” He sang weakly into the air…

“oh you are the start of me,” a voice sung back clearly. a sob left Janus with a smile on his face… he was home.

Romulus held out a hand. he took it without hesitation. Being pulled into a hug and very quickly a kiss. warmth, love and happiness flooded him as happy tears poured down both their faces. “hello my queen,” Romulus said as he looked at Janus with eyes filled with longing. “hello my king,” Janus said before bursting into tears.

So, cut me a piece of you, Cut me a piece of you, and where I go, you'll always be. Oh, you are the start of me, Oh, you are the start of me

“are you sure this is the right way?” Virgil asked concerned. “hell yeah emo-bitch!” Remus said excitedly.

He was taking them to see the lights that had begun in this area since well…forever. Always at the same time. Every year on the same day.

“I feel bad were not bringing Janus,” Patton said. “that asshole? Fuck him,” Orpheus growled.

Virgil paused for a brief second. Glancing at the castle. “hey… I think someone’s over there,” a figure outlined by the lowering sun stood on the balcony. it struck Remus quickly as to who it was. he felt himself filling with anger that seemed to plant deeply in his chest.

But… then it seemed to split in two. There was a figure standing next to Janus. And a song filled the air.

They all seemed to be thinking the same thing as they surged forwards. Bolting to the castle, hoping they were wrong as repressed memories filled their minds.

And then they stopped. Each one of them shaking as they saw the unmoving body of self-preservation lying on the ground. his eyes glazed over and his chest unmoving.

Two shadowy figures danced in each other’s embrace as they laughed. Peppering kisses on each other. a warm and sad feeling filled their chests.

This was the first time in years that most of them had seen Janus smiling. And he was in his lovers embrace.

“goodbye Janus,” Patton said as he waved over. “cya, on the other side Jan,” Virgil said… silent tears poured down his face. Logan gave a sharp nod and a small smile. Remus and roman gave a small wave. Not trusting themselves to speak. “take care of pops dad,” Orpheus muttered, his voice cracking as he did so.

“goodbye,” Janus’s voice echoed in their minds as the shadowy figures faded away. Smiling and holding one another with wide smiles.

Oh, you are the start of me

[araitsume]

The Acts of the Apostles, pp. 112-122: Chapter (12) From Persecutor to Disciple

This chapter is based on Acts 9:1-18.

Prominent among the Jewish leaders who became thoroughly aroused by the success attending the proclamation of the gospel, was Saul of Tarsus. A Roman citizen by birth, Saul was nevertheless a Jew by descent and had been educated in Jerusalem by the most eminent of the rabbis. “Of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,” Saul was “a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” Philippians 3:5, 6. He was regarded by the rabbis as a young man of great promise, and high hopes were cherished concerning him as an able and zealous defender of the ancient faith. His elevation to membership in the Sanhedrin council placed him in a position of power.

Saul had taken a prominent part in the trial and conviction of Stephen, and the striking evidences of God's presence with the martyr had led Saul to doubt the righteousness of the cause he had espoused against the followers of Jesus. His mind was deeply stirred. In his perplexity he appealed to those in whose wisdom and judgment he had full confidence. The arguments of the priests and rulers finally convinced him that Stephen was a blasphemer, that the Christ whom the martyred disciple had preached was an impostor, and that those ministering in holy office must be right.

Not without severe trial did Saul come to this conclusion. But in the end his education and prejudices, his respect for his former teachers, and his pride of popularity braced him to rebel against the voice of conscience and the grace of God. And having fully decided that the priests and scribes were right, Saul became very bitter in his opposition to the doctrines taught by the disciples of Jesus. His activity in causing holy men and women to be dragged before tribunals, where some were condemned to imprisonment and some even to death, solely because of their faith in Jesus, brought sadness and gloom to the newly organized church, and caused many to seek safety in flight.

Those who were driven from Jerusalem by this persecution “went everywhere preaching the word.” Acts 8:4. Among the cities to which they went was Damascus, where the new faith gained many converts.

The priests and rulers had hoped that by vigilant effort and stern persecution the heresy might be suppressed. Now they felt that they must carry forward in other places the decided measures taken in Jerusalem against the new teaching. For the special work that they desired to have done at Damascus, Saul offered his services. “Breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord,” he “went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.” Thus “with authority and commission from the chief priests” (Acts 26:12), Saul of Tarsus, in the strength and vigor of manhood, and fired with mistaken zeal, set out on that memorable journey, the strange occurrences of which were to change the whole current of his life.

On the last day of the journey, “at midday,” as the weary travelers neared Damascus, they came within full view of broad stretches of fertile lands, beautiful gardens, and fruitful orchards, watered by cool streams from the surrounding mountains. After the long journey over desolate wastes such scenes were refreshing indeed. While Saul, with his companions, gazed with admiration on the fruitful plain and the fair city below, “suddenly,” as he afterward declared, there shone “round about me and them which journeyed with me” “a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun” (Acts 26:13), too glorious for mortal eyes to bear. Blinded and bewildered, Saul fell prostrate to the ground.

While the light continued to shine round about them, Saul heard, “a voice speaking ... in the Hebrew tongue” (Acts 26:14), “saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me? And he said, Who art Thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

Filled with fear, and almost blinded by the intensity of the light, the companions of Saul heard a voice, but saw no man. But Saul understood the words that were spoken, and to him was clearly revealed the One who spoke—even the Son of God. In the glorious Being who stood before him he saw the Crucified One. Upon the soul of the stricken Jew the image of the Saviour's countenance was imprinted forever. The words spoken struck home to his heart with appalling force. Into the darkened chambers of his mind there poured a flood of light, revealing the ignorance and error of his former life and his present need of the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

Saul now saw that in persecuting the followers of Jesus he had in reality been doing the work of Satan. He saw that his convictions of right and of his own duty had been based largely on his implicit confidence in the priests and rulers. He had believed them when they told him that the story of the resurrection was an artful fabrication of the disciples. Now that Jesus Himself stood revealed, Saul was convinced of the truthfulness of the claims made by the disciples.

In that hour of heavenly illumination Saul's mind acted with remarkable rapidity. The prophetic records of Holy Writ were opened to his understanding. He saw that the rejection of Jesus by the Jews, His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, had been foretold by the prophets and proved Him to be the promised Messiah. Stephen's sermon at the time of his martyrdom was brought forcibly to Saul's mind, and he realized that the martyr had indeed beheld “the glory of God” when he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.” Acts 7:55, 56. The priests had pronounced these words blasphemy, but Saul now knew them to be truth.

What a revelation was all this to the persecutor! Now Saul knew for a certainty that the promised Messiah had come to this earth as Jesus of Nazareth and that He had been rejected and crucified by those whom He came to save. He knew also that the Saviour had risen in triumph from the tomb and had ascended into the heavens. In that moment of divine revelation Saul remembered with terror that Stephen, who had borne witness of a crucified and risen Saviour, had been sacrificed by his consent, and that later, through his instrumentality, many other worthy followers of Jesus had met their death by cruel persecution.

The Saviour had spoken to Saul through Stephen, whose clear reasoning could not be controverted. The learned Jew had seen the face of the martyr reflecting the light of Christ's glory—appearing as if “it had been the face of an angel.” Acts 6:15. He had witnessed Stephen's forbearance toward his enemies and his forgiveness of them. He had also witnessed the fortitude and cheerful resignation of many whom he had caused to be tormented and afflicted. He had seen some yield up even their lives with rejoicing for the sake of their faith.

All these things had appealed loudly to Saul and at times had thrust upon his mind an almost overwhelming conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah. At such times he had struggled for entire nights against this conviction, and always he had ended the matter by avowing his belief that Jesus was not the Messiah and that His followers were deluded fanatics.

Now Christ had spoken to Saul with His own voice, saying, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” And the question, “Who art Thou, Lord?” was answered by the same voice, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” Christ here identifies Himself with His people. In persecuting the followers of Jesus, Saul had struck directly against the Lord of heaven. In falsely accusing and testifying against them, he had falsely accused and testified against the Saviour of the world.

No doubt entered the mind of Saul that the One who spoke to him was Jesus of Nazareth, the long-looked-for Messiah, the Consolation and Redeemer of Israel. “Trembling and astonished,” he inquired, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.”

When the glory was withdrawn, and Saul arose from the ground, he found himself totally deprived of sight. The brightness of Christ's glory had been too intense for his mortal eyes; and when it was removed, the blackness of night settled upon his vision. He believed that this blindness was a punishment from God for his cruel persecution of the followers of Jesus. In terrible darkness he groped about, and his companions, in fear and amazement, “led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.”

On the morning of that eventful day, Saul had neared Damascus with feelings of self-satisfaction because of the confidence that had been placed in him by the chief priest. To him had been entrusted grave responsibilities. He was commissioned to further the interests of the Jewish religion by checking, if possible, the spread of the new faith in Damascus. He had determined that his mission should be crowned with success and had looked forward with eager anticipation to the experiences that he expected were before him.

But how unlike his anticipations was his entrance into the city! Stricken with blindness, helpless, tortured by remorse, knowing not what further judgment might be in store for him, he sought out the home of the disciple Judas, where, in solitude, he had ample opportunity for reflection and prayer.

For three days Saul was “without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.” These days of soul agony were to him as years. Again and again he recalled, with anguish of spirit, the part he had taken in the martyrdom of Stephen. With horror he thought of his guilt in allowing himself to be controlled by the malice and prejudice of the priests and rulers, even when the face of Stephen had been lighted up with the radiance of heaven. In sadness and brokenness of spirit he recounted the many times he had closed his eyes and ears against the most striking evidences and had relentlessly urged on the persecution of the believers in Jesus of Nazareth.

These days of close self-examination and of heart humiliation were spent in lonely seclusion. The believers, having been given warning of the purpose of Saul in coming to Damascus, feared that he might be acting a part, in order the more readily to deceive them; and they held themselves aloof, refusing him their sympathy. He had no desire to appeal to the unconverted Jews, with whom he had planned to unite in persecuting the believers; for he knew that they would not even listen to his story. Thus he seemed to be shut away from all human sympathy. His only hope of help was in a merciful God, and to Him he appealed in brokenness of heart.

During the long hours when Saul was shut in with God alone, he recalled many of the passages of Scripture referring to the first advent of Christ. Carefully he traced down the prophecies, with a memory sharpened by the conviction that had taken possession of his mind. As he reflected on the meaning of these prophecies he was astonished at his former blindness of understanding and at the blindness of the Jews in general, which had led to the rejection of Jesus as the promised Messiah. To his enlightened vision all now seemed plain. He knew that his former prejudice and unbelief had clouded his spiritual perception and had prevented him from discerning in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah of prophecy.

As Saul yielded himself fully to the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, he saw the mistakes of his life and recognized the far-reaching claims of the law of God. He who had been a proud Pharisee, confident that he was justified by his good works, now bowed before God with the humility and simplicity of a little child, confessing his own unworthiness and pleading the merits of a crucified and risen Saviour. Saul longed to come into full harmony and communion with the Father and the Son; and in the intensity of his desire for pardon and acceptance he offered up fervent supplications to the throne of grace.

The prayers of the penitent Pharisee were not in vain. The inmost thoughts and emotions of his heart were transformed by divine grace; and his nobler faculties were brought into harmony with the eternal purposes of God. Christ and His righteousness became to Saul more than the whole world.

The conversion of Saul is a striking evidence of the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit to convict men of sin. He had verily believed that Jesus of Nazareth had disregarded the law of God and had taught His disciples that it was of no effect. But after his conversion, Saul recognized Jesus as the one who had come into the world for the express purpose of vindicating His Father's law. He was convinced that Jesus was the originator of the entire Jewish system of sacrifices. He saw that at the crucifixion type had met antitype, that Jesus had fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Redeemer of Israel.

In the record of the conversion of Saul important principles are given us, which we should ever bear in mind. Saul was brought directly into the presence of Christ. He was one whom Christ intended for a most important work, one who was to be a “chosen vessel” unto Him; yet the Lord did not at once tell him of the work that had been assigned him. He arrested him in his course and convicted him of sin; but when Saul asked, “What wilt Thou have me to do?” the Saviour placed the inquiring Jew in connection with His church, there to obtain a knowledge of God's will concerning him.

The marvelous light that illumined the darkness of Saul was the work of the Lord; but there was also a work that was to be done for him by the disciples. Christ had performed the work of revelation and conviction; and now the penitent was in a condition to learn from those whom God had ordained to teach His truth.

While Saul in solitude at the house of Judas continued in prayer and supplication, the Lord appeared in vision to “a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias,” telling him that Saul of Tarsus was praying and in need of help. “Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight,” the heavenly messenger said, “and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, and hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.”

Ananias could scarcely credit the words of the angel; for the reports of Saul's bitter persecution of the saints at Jerusalem had spread far and wide. He presumed to expostulate: “Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to Thy saints at Jerusalem: and here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on Thy name.” But the command was imperative: “Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel.”

Obedient to the direction of the angel, Ananias sought out the man who had but recently breathed out threatenings against all who believed on the name of Jesus; and putting his hands on the head of the penitent sufferer, he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

“And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.”

Thus Jesus gave sanction to the authority of His organized church and placed Saul in connection with His appointed agencies on earth. Christ had now a church as His representative on earth, and to it belonged the work of directing the repentant sinner in the way of life.

Many have an idea that they are responsible to Christ alone for their light and experience, independent of His recognized followers on earth. Jesus is the friend of sinners, and His heart is touched with their woe. He has all power, both in heaven and on earth; but He respects the means that He has ordained for the enlightenment and salvation of men; He directs sinners to the church, which He has made a channel of light to the world.

When, in the midst of his blind error and prejudice, Saul was given a revelation of the Christ whom he was persecuting, he was placed in direct communication with the church, which is the light of the world. In this case Ananias represents Christ, and also represents Christ's ministers upon the earth, who are appointed to act in His stead. In Christ's stead Ananias touches the eyes of Saul, that they may receive sight. In Christ's stead he places his hands upon him, and, as he prays in Christ's name, Saul receives the Holy Ghost. All is done in the name and by the authority of Christ. Christ is the fountain; the church is the channel of communication.

[sandriinehebert]

say hello to my (revamped) little friend :)))))

lea michele has been my idol and source of inspiration ever since i was 11 years-old. i looked up to her and loved her and supported her. i met my two closest friends because of glee and lea. she’s the reason i got into glee, and glee is the reason why i decided to join roleplay years ago. i owe so much to lea. that being said, i do not support, condone or accept her alleged behavior. i knew about her being self-centered and difficult to work with, but i never thought i would log online some night searching for instagram photos for sandrine and find out all of that. i was reading the twitter thread all night long and watching a decade of my life disappear before my eyes. i know my feelings are worth nothing and are completely irrelevant & meaningless compared to the gravity of the situation that brought out all of these allegations. i also want to point out this is not a representation of mine or sandrine’s views on racism, bullying, performance activism or politics.

one of the first things that came to mine was sandrine and this group. i never bragged about being original, so it should come as no surprise that sandrine took a lot of characteristics from lea. her bubbly and lively personality, the tiny but mighty energy, the italian family background, the singing part, the cooking, the love of beauty, everything from her looks to her voice, it screams lea michele when i think about sandrine. changing her faceclaim was not an easy thing to do, because it implies changing this character i cherish with all of my heart. anyway, here’s a list of things that will change about sandrine from now on / things that will stay the same.

changes:

the faceclaim. lea is sephardi jewish (of turkish and greek descent) as well as italian. try and match that, it’s hard. plus, finding someone who is as expressive and joyful as sandrine is difficult too. i decide to use demet özdemir (who’s of turkish, bulgarian and german descent from what i read). compared to lea, i don’t know anything about her whatsoever. i lurked through gif tags and photos and she seems promising. if i don’t feel good using her, i will change to leighton meester and review, once again, the family background. (shoutout to lina for helping me, a true life saver!!!! <3)

alessandra “sandrine” serafina hébert. her last name changes. it is no longer lombardi, but hébert. (pronounced eh-bert in english, or hey-ber in french because the t is silent, i did some genalogy research and the surname hébert was, in some parts of the province, adapted from german so it fits with demet).

her age. sandrine is 30 turning 31 in september instead of 33 going 34.

her parents’ name. i will not redo the whole family post i did ages ago, but they all get a change of name and history. adamo is now only adam, and he’s 33 instead of 35. christian hébert is her father and monica evans is the mother. corinna remains corinna. christian’s father’s last name was actually esmer, but he changed to hébert when he moved in order to try and fit in the community.  the whole italian family storyline goes in the garbage bin, but since, historically speaking, traditional quebecer values are not that different from family, food and making babies, i’m good with that! i am absolutely not familiar with turkish and canadian history & relations so i have a lot of research to do there just to feel comfortable with this. i knew more about italo-québécois from school and from writing a paper about this community, hence why i felt no discomfort using cultural and historical aspects in sandrine’s story. montréal has the second largest turkish community of canada from stats i found, so, still, it’s not completely off either.

her career in ice skating / the reason she quit. sandrine will still be a successful figure skater who was amongst the best of her province, but i’ll twist things up. i won’t have her quit at 18, rather at 20. because (drum roll) i will give her a love interest. she started doing couple figure skating competitions at 17 and fell in love with her partner. they dated for three years, that innocent first relationship kind of love and he broke-up because he felt like he was too young to commit. hence why she still believes no one will ever love her as much as she loves them.

her timeline will go like this: at 20 she quit ice skating and dropped out of university. from 20 to 24 she stayed at home in montréal with her parents. from 24 to 26, she was roommates with adam in boston. and from 26 to now, 30 going 31, she is living on her own, running her salon in devinstone.

what stays the same:

lea’s voice is sandrine’s voice. when i write dialogues (which means 99% of all of my replies bc i can’t write), i hear lea’s voice. sandrine’ voice and singing voice will remain lea’s. that is unfortunately something i can’t let go of. 

she’s still lea’s height even if demet is 5″7.

she still has 2 of lea’s tattoos: the coffee mug and the musical notes.

she’s still a beautician. that does not change one bit! she still loves cooking. she still loves being annoying.

i will not delete any posts from before. i have so many faceclaim posts and instagram photos queued that some might slip away but those, i will delete them if i notice they get posted on accident. my queue has over 40 posts so it glitches and doesn’t always show me what’s in there.

everything else. she’s still the reincarnation of poppy from trolls, anna from frozen and pinkie pie from my little pony. big dumb dumb energy and all!

a faceclaim change should not be that big of a deal. but i’m a big baby who adored a celebrity for so long and i’m learning a hard lesson right now. i will proceed to changing her icon, theme, url, and to send a whole new biography to the main in the next couple of days. the main will also be contacted when they’ll come back to tumblr. since i don’t have discord, i couldn’t contact them sooner. i need time to process everything and to change sandrine’s muse without losing it. thank you for reading all of this and i am truly sorry if me using lea michele as a faceclaim ever offended any of you. i owed all of you an explanation and an apology as to why it takes so much time to change everything (idk who sent me this anon about me having to change my faceclaim but i was aware i had to do so since the moment i read the first tweets so i hope you didn’t worry about that too much). again, i’m sorry. stay safe, ily guys! <3

[creepingsharia]

“They Asked Him to Deny Christ” - Muslim Persecution of Christians, August 2019

by Raymond Ibrahim

Hate for and Violence against Christians

Cameroon: Militant Muslims reportedly connected with the Nigerian based Islamic terror group, Boko Haram, “reached new heights” of depravity, according to a report: after devastating the Christian village of Kalagari in a raid, they kidnapped and fled with eight women.  Some of the women were later released—but only after having their ears cut off (image here).  The report adds that  Boko Haram “has terrorised Christian communities in Nigeria for the last decade and has now splintered and spread its violent ideology into Cameroon, Niger and Chad.”

Nigeria: On August 29, Chuck Holton, a CBN News reporter, aired a segment on his visit with Christian refugees who had fled Boko Haram’s incursions into their villages.  Among the stories of death and devastation, the following, spoken by a young man, stood out: “On 29 September 2014 was the day that they attacked my village. Around ten I had a call that they have killed my dad. They asked him to deny Christ and when he refused they cut off his right hand. Then he refused [again], they cut to the elbow. In which he refused, before they shot him in the forehead, the neck, and chest.” “Many of the 1,500 Christians living in this camp have similar stories,” adds Holton.

Indonesia: A Muslim preacher in a Christian majority region referred to the Christian cross as “an element of the devil,” prompting outrage among Christians and some moderates.   Sheikh Abdul Somad made the comment during a videotaped sermon when he was asked why Muslims “felt a chill whenever they saw a crucifix.”   “Because of Satan! Was his response: “There’s an evil jinn in every crucifix that wants to convert people into Christianity.”  Christians and moderates condemned his words.  Even so, “I can’t imagine the reaction if it had been another preacher of a different religion insulting an Islamic symbol,” observed one moderate. “There would have been a tsunami of protests, with the perpetrator severely punished.”  Sheikh Somad responded by releasing another video; his excuse was that he was unaware that non-Muslims might hear his words: “The Quran reciting session was held in a closed mosque, not at a stadium, a football field, nor aired on television,” he explained. “It was for Muslims internally. I was answering a question about statues and the position of the Prophet Isa (Jesus) relative to Muslims.”

Burkina Faso: Although most mainstream media downplay the religious element in Muslim on Christian violence in Africa, attacks on the Christians of Burkina Faso have become so flagrantly based on religion that the Washington Post published a report on August 21 titled,  “Islamist militants are targeting Christians in Burkina Faso.”  Its author, Danielle Paquette, explained that “A spreading Islamist insurgency has transformed Burkina Faso from a peaceful country known for farming, a celebrated film festival and religious tolerance into a hotbed of extremism.”  She noted that the jihadis have been checking people’s necks for Christian symbols, killing anyone wearing a crucifix or carrying any other Christian image.   In a separate report discussing several deadly attacks on Christians and their churches, Bishop Dabiré said, “If this continues without anyone intervening, the result will be the elimination of the Christian presence in this area and — perhaps in the future —in the entire country.

Egypt: Authorities reinstated Sheikh Yasser Burhami, a notoriously “radical” cleric and hate preacher, to the pulpit (minbar) despite strong opposition.  Burhami had previously issued numerous fatwas—edicts based on Islamic scriptures—that demand hate and hostility for non-Muslims, most specifically the nation’s largest and most visible minority, the Christian Copts, whom Burhami has referred to as “a criminal and infidel minority,” and has invoked “Allah’s curse” on them.  He once went so far as to say that, although a Muslim man is permitted to marry Christian or Jewish women (ahl al-kitab), he must make sure he still hates them in his heart—and show them this hate—because they are infidels; otherwise he risks compromising his Islam.  Burhami has also stated that churches—which he refers to as “places of polytheism (shirk) and houses of infidelity (kufr)”—must never be built in Egypt.  He issued a separate fatwa forbidding Muslim taxi and bus drivers from transporting Christian clergymen to their churches, an act he depicted as being “more forbidden than taking someone to a liquor bar.”  Burhami’s fatwas also include calling for the persecution of apostates, permitting Muslim husbands to abandon their wives to rape, permitting “marriage” to 12-year-old girls,  and banning Mother’s Day.  In a video, Dr. Naguib Ghobrial, a Coptic activist, politician, and head of the Egyptian Union for Human Rights Organization—which over the years has lodged 22 separate complaints against Burhami—repeatedly questioned Egypt’s leading religious authorities’ decision to reinstate the hate preaching sheikh:

Is what Burhami teaches truly what Islam teaches—is that why no one has done anything to him [in regards to the 22 complaints lodged against him]?  Truly I’m shocked!  Please answer Sheikh of Al Azhar; please answer Grand Mufti: are the things Burhami teaches what Islam teaches?  Is this why none of you oppose him or joined us when we lodged complaints against him?… Why are you so silent? Amazing!

The Slaughter of Christians

Pakistan: “A ten year old Christian child who chose to work in a dangerous scrap factory so he could support his mother who had to fend for a family of two boys and a drug-addict husband, was raped and tortured before being killed by his Muslim employers,” according to a report (with photos).  Badil, 10, worked at the men’s factory in order to support his impoverished mother, Sharifa Bibi:

I worked hard for many hours just for the sake of my two sons so that they would not have to suffer as I have suffered without education.  My son Badil couldn’t bear to see the struggle of his mother and insisted on working to help the family—despite my insistence that he avoid work till he was older.  Badil was such a responsible son.  Daily before leaving for work he asked me what should bring in the evening from his wages.  I insisted that he kept his money for himself, but he brought groceries like sugar, rice, flour, ghee daily.

Badil had to walk long distances and work for many hours a day to earn the equivalent of one dollar a day.  Soon his employer began to cheat him on his wages.  His mother insisted that he quit, but the boy persevered; at one point he took his younger brother, 9, with him to help.  When the employers refused to pay his brother anything for his contribution, Badil finally decided to quit—which angered his Muslim employer.  His younger brother recalls:

As Mr Akram heard this he ran to hit Badil but Badil ran from the shop and Akram gave chase.  However, A friend of Akram was standing nearby on his motorcycle and told Akram to sit behind him, then both men chased Badil till they caught up with him. Akram then got off the motorcycle and dragged Badil back to the store.  They took Badil inside the store which is full of scrap.  For half an hour I was completely unaware of what was happening with Badil inside.  Eventually both men came outside and pretended as if nothing had happened inside.  I thought my brother had also left the store from another exit so I went to look for him.  I searched vigorously for 15 minutes and then saw my mother [approaching to walk the boys home], so I rushed to her to tell her what had happened.

Sharifa and her younger son searched frantically for Badil and finally found him collapsed on the ground near their home.  They rushed to him, thinking he was exhausted from the day’s work and subsequent thrashing, but quickly realized that he was barely breathing: “At this point the whole situation was too much to bear for Sharifa who began to scream and wail hysterically,” the report notes.  Badil was taken to a hospital where, seven hours later, the boy was pronounced dead. His brother “has been traumatised following his brother’s death and hasn’t left his house since and often screams in terror thinking the men responsible will take him too.”

Cameroon: A Bible translator “was butchered to death on Sunday morning [August 25] during an overnight attack while his wife’s arm was cut off,” according to a report:  “Bible translator Angus Abraham Fung was among seven people said to have been killed during an attack carried out by suspected Fulani herdsmen sometime during the early hours of Sunday morning in the town of Wum, according to Efi Tembon, who leads a ministry called Oasis Network for Community Transformation.”  Fulani herdsmen are Muslim and the chief persecutors of Christian farmers in Nigeria.  “They went into houses and pulled out the people,” Tembon explained: “They attacked in the night and nobody was expecting. They just went into the home, pulled them out and slaughtered them.”  Fung’s wife, Eveline Fung, who had her arm hacked off was last reported as receiving a blood transfusion at a local hospital.

Attacks against Apostates and Evangelists

Iran: Authorities sentenced a 65-year-old woman, a Muslim convert to Christianity, to one year in prison, on the charge that she was “acting against national security” and engaging in “propaganda against the system.”  According to the report, “The hearing was owing to her arrest shortly before Christmas when three agents from Iranian intelligence raided her home and took Mahrokh to intelligence offices where she endured ten days of intensive interrogation before she was released after submitting bail of 30 million Toman (US$2,500).”  Friends of the woman said that “the judge was very rude and tried to humiliate Mahrokh after she disagreed with him.”

Separately, a Kurdish bookseller in Bokan, Western Azarbaijan province, was arrested for selling Bibles.  According to the August 27 report, “Mostafa Rahimi was arrested on 11 June on charge of selling bible[s] in his bookstore, and he was released later on bail until the court issued his sentence. Hengaw Organization for Human Rights has learned that Rahimi is sentenced to 3 months and 1 day imprisonment.  Later in mid-August he was arrested again, and he is currently at the central prison of Bokan.”  Another report elaborates: “Iran’s government is officially Islamic, and authorities actively restrict access to Bibles and other Christian literature. Sharing one’s faith is categorized as a criminal offense, usually of the national security nature. The authorities often pressure Christians so extensively, routinely violating their human rights, that they are given no choice but to escape their country.”

Somaliland: An August 16 report shares the experiences a married Muslim woman, 32, underwent after her husband discovered a Bible in her possession.

“I told my husband that I found the Bible in Nairobi and wanted to read it,” the woman responded. “He just pronounced the word talaq [Arabic for divorce] to me. I knew that our marriage had just been rendered null and void because I joined Christianity, so without wasting time I left the homestead….  There and then he took our two daughters [ages 4 and 7] away from me and divorced me.  He gave me a stern warning that I should not come close to the children, and that if I do, he will take the Bible to the Islamic court and I will be killed by stoning for becoming an apostate.”

Her former husband proceeded to expose the clandestine Christian to her Muslim family. “My brothers beat me mercilessly with sticks as well as denying me food,” she said. “I feared to report the case to the police or the local administration, because they will charge me with a criminal offense of apostasy in accordance with the sharia.”  She has since relocated to an undisclosed location: “God has spared my life, and my fellow underground Christians in other regions of Somalia have received me and shared the little they have, but I am very traumatized.”  According to the report,

Somalia’s constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and prohibits the propagation of any other religion, according to the U.S. State Department. It also requires that laws comply with sharia (Islamic law) principles, with no exceptions in application for non-Muslims.  Somalia is ranked 3rd on Christian support group Open Doors’ 2019 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.

Pakistan: After opening a summer education program for the youth, a Christian family was “terrorized” and forced to shut down on the accusation that they were clandestinely trying to convert Muslim children to Christianity.  According to a family member: “We started a project for interfaith harmony and education teaching marginalized children from different faiths about a year ago. In June, we started a summer camp that provided a free program for children that have dropped out of school. The design of this program was to provide guidance for these children to become civilized and tolerant.”  Two weeks into the summer program, a group of men, two of whom were armed, stormed into the academy, did violence to the property and harassed the children, and beat one of the instructors: “They threatened us with consequences if the academy was not shut down.  They alleged that we were promoting Christianity and were doing Christian evangelism.  For safety and security, we had no other choice but to obey the extremists and shutdown the academy….  I don’t want to lose my son or any family member. This terrorizing incident has already put us into trauma.”

In a separate incident in Pakistan, around 4 a.m. of August 2, seven Muslim men stormed into a parish house, where they tied up and savagely beat two young priests, Fr. Anthony Abraz and Fr. Shahid Boota, all while they “humiliated and abused them for preaching the Gospel in a Muslim-majority neighborhood.”  The invaders also vandalized the building—including by breaking windows, bookshelves, and cupboards—and desecrated Christian objects, including Bibles, Christian literature, and icons. Afterwards, “We were told we will have to face consequences if this house is not vacated,” Fr. Abraz reported. “They said, ‘We don’t want a Christian center near the mosque.’”

Finally, increasing numbers of Christian girls continue to be targeted for kidnapping, rape, and/or forced conversion in Pakistan.  According to one report,

In August, Yasmeen Ashraf, age 15, and Muqadas Tufail, age 14, were kidnapped and raped by three men in Kasur. The pair of Christian girls were taken when they were on their way to work as domestic workers.  Also in August, another young Christian girl, named Kanwal, was kidnapped, raped, and forcefully converted to Islam by a group of Muslim men and a cleric in Lala Musa, located in the Gujart District. After reuniting her family, Kanwal shared that she had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and threatened with the deaths of her brothers if she refused to convert to Islam.

In the previous month of July, at least three similar cases occurred.  “Oppression exists in different layers for Christian girls in Pakistan. They are suffering on the bases of gender, religion, and class. It has been documented that young Christian girls face higher levels of sexual harassment and are persecuted for their Christian faith,” Nabila Feroz Bhatti, a human rights defender in Lahore, said in response to the aforementioned incidents.  Similarly, the Pontifical charity, Aid to the Church in Need, announced in August that it “is sounding the alarm on the plight of young Christian women, and even teenagers, in Pakistan who are forced to convert to Islam.”  “Every year at least a thousand girls are kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert to Islam, even forced to marry their tormentors,” elaborated Tabassum Yousaf, a local Catholic lawyer.

Meanwhile, those who try to protect Christian girls are punished.  On August 16, Maskeen Khan and two other Muslim men attacked the home of Bahadur Masih, a Christian.  While holding a knife, Khan and his partners tried to rape Masih’s daughter, Rachel, but were prevented by the rudely awoken family that immediately and desperately responded.  “Since the Christian family was defending themselves, Khan also got some injuries,” Ahsan Masih Sindhu, a local Christian political leader, reported. “The family handed Khan over to police and he got medical treatment. However, he later died in police custody.”  Police arrested and charged four members of the family with murder, even though they were in their own home protecting their daughter from violent intruders.  Other members of the family have gone into hiding due to threats from the dead would-be rapist’s relatives.  “We are sad about the death of Khan, however, the Christian family did have the right to defend,” Sindhu explained. “The police must conduct a fair investigation into this incident.”  Instead, police are denying the family the “right to defend” itself.

Attacks on Churches

Algeria: On August 6, police barged into a church during worship service, evacuated reluctant worshippers, and sealed the church building off.  “I am deeply saddened by so much injustice – it breaks my heart,” Messaoud Takilt, the pastor said.  “This is not surprising since other Christian places of worship have been closed and sealed as was the case today. But anyway, we will continue to celebrate our services outside while the Lord gives us grace for a final solution.”  When police denied, with a veiled threat, his request to at least let the worship service conclude,  “The assembly finally yielded and agreed to leave the premises, but with much pain.  Some went out with eyes full of tears. ”  Police proceeded to empty the premises of all furniture and sealed off every door before the distressed pastor (picture here).  Responding to this latest church closure the World Evangelical Alliance issued a statement on August 12 calling on Algeria to cease closing and instead reopen churches. A portion follows:

We deeply regret that two additional churches were forcibly closed by administrative decisions, in May and in August 2019 in the city of Boudjima, northeast of Tizi-Ouzou in Kabylie Region.  This brings the number of forcibly closed churches to 6, including one house church…. Many more churches are threatened with closure, amid denial of formal registration and recognition by authorities.

Indonesia: Muslim protestors compelled local authorities to revoke a permit for and cease construction of a Baptist church in Central Java.  On August 1, residents went to the partially constructed church and padlocked its fence.  A meeting was later held between the church, local residents, authorities, and others.  Although the pastor displayed the governmentally issued permit to build a church, Muslim residents insisted that it was wrongly given, leading to a standstill in negotiations.  In the previous month, July, two other churches were shut down in Indonesia following local protests.

Turkey: St. Theodoros Trion, an abandoned, historic church—the original Greek congregation of which was purged by the Ottoman Empire—was vandalized, including with genocidal slogans.  According to the report,

The vandals sprayed hate speech across the church’s walls. The vandalism was largely a reference to the secularism that Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, had forced into the governmental structure….  Just a few years ago, the same church was targeted by Islamist vandals who wrote slogans such as “the priest is gone, he went to the mosque” — a reference to the country’s genocide and the forced conversions which occurred during this time. There are no Christians attending this church. All of the congregants were victims of the genocide. They faced death, deportation, and forced conversions. Those few who survived have since fled the country. The church currently stands as a historic monument to the Christianity that once was commonplace in the region.

Egypt: A Christian toddler was the latest, if inadvertent, victim of Egypt’s draconian restrictions on churches.    According to an August 21 report, Youssed Ebid, a 4-year-old Christian boy (photo), was struck by a tractor while waiting outdoors for a bus to take him to church in another village.  His own village is currently denied one, forcing its Christian residents to travel long distances to attend church.  Many Christians in Egypt are in the same situation, and accidents during their long treks are not uncommon.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

About this Series

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic.  Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed in 2011 to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that occur or are reported each month. It serves two purposes:

1)          To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2)          To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

[arigatogatos]

Making the Draenei Language - Part 2

Part 1 | Part 3

First off, thanks to all the people who’ve expressed interest in this project! It makes me super happy that people think what I’m doing is interesting :D

Anyway, last time I went through and got a basic idea of the structure of the language, this time we’re diving into WHAT 👏 THAT👏 MOUTH👏 DO (and also spelling)

... and by that I of course mean phonetics (the study of the sounds produced in speech), phonology (the study of which sounds differentiate meaning) and phonotactics (how sounds are put together).

Phonetics and Phonology

Before we can even consider choosing some sounds for the language lets take a moment to consider those TEEF! 

Taking my main boy Aegagrus (drawn by the wonderful @rurukatt, definitely didn’t put this in here cuz I still love this pic) as a model for my headcanon of Draenei teeth, we can see how those might get in the way of some sounds... but just like, specifically [f] and [v] (sounds in square brackets represent sounds not the letters, to hear what they sound like go here!) Both of those sounds involve making the same shape with your mouth - touching your bottom lip to your top teeth, but when you got some real long or pointy teeth, that might be a little bit hard to do! (or an accident waiting to happen if they’re sharp enough)

There’s only a small problem with this though, we have some canon words that use these sounds e.g “Pheta vi acahaci” - Light give me strength. I’m gonna explain this away by saying that we’re dealing with an approximate transcription using the Latin alphabet and English spelling conventions, which definitely wasn't designed to write down languages outside of well.. ideally Latin. I mean there’s a reason why English spelling is the way it is and one of those reasons comes down to using an alphabet too small for the number of sounds in the language. 

Tangent aside, this means those two sounds are probably something like [ɸ] (again click here to hear these) for f and [β~ʋ] for v. These are sounds similar to [f] and [v] but they don’t involve teeth touching lips, check, and they’re probably what human transcribers misheard as [f] and [v]. 

Going through the other transcriptions in the data and making some guesses as to what they could be, we end up with something like this:

and huh that seems familiar... wait a second!

Yeah that’s just Hebrew without voiced fricatives, affricates or the sound [j] (the ‘y’ sound in English), and a bonus rhotic. I mean that’s probably to be expected as Draenei are heavily coded to be Jewish (a good post on that), so it makes sense that the sounds are also similar. It’s a shame to have such quote-unquote normal sounds (the th sound [θ] in ”thin” and “ether” is only in 4% of the worlds languages!) but that’s what you get when English devs make a game for a western audience, you get... ~~the fantasy accent~~ a.k.a discount slavic/germanic accents. 

By the way [r] is the ‘trilled’ or ‘rolled’ r and [ɾ] is a ‘tapped’ r like in Spanish "por favor”.

Also, as another side note, this sound [ʔ] - the glottal stop is present in English too but you probably don’t recognise that it’s there. It’s the ‘-’ break in between “uh-oh”, and its also present in some dialects of American and British English where the [t] in words like “bottle” (bo’el) and “water” (wa’er) are replaced with the glottal stop.

Anyway, onto vowels! And yet again we come back to the problems of English spellings. English has approximately... too many vowels. In my dialect of Australian Standard English there’s up to 20 different vowel sounds depending on how you count. I mean all things considered we've done pretty well with the 5 vowel symbols we've got but good luck trying to accurately represent all this:

(not to mention the diphthongs) with just a e i o u. Most languages only have ~5 vowels so that’s about what I’m looking for. Taking into consideration all the English wackiness in spelling, we end up with what I think are 7 vowels (the pronunciation examples are definitely not gonna be spot on due to regional differences, learn the IPA its good):

[i] - meat, me, three, e-mail

[ʊ] - (short though) good, should, wood

[ʊ:] - (same as above but long)

[e] - bed, head, red

[ɔ~o] - (somewhere between the vowels in) bought, bot (those of you with the cot-caught merger are having real fun now)

[ɐ] - (this one is really only in Australian English) but, strut, bud

[ɐ:] - (same as above but long) bard, palm, start, hard

The two vowels with long forms are the interesting ones. All throughout the canon text we see ‘aa’ and ‘uu’ popping up again and again in things like “Maraad”, “Sayaad”, “Enkaat”, “Vaard”, “Tuurem” and “Krokuun”. Now this could just be stylistic choices made by the dev team to make the language seem more ~exotic~ but I think that it is definitely a case of phonemic vowel length. That’s where distinctions in words are made by elongating a vowel - something Latin had. But it’s not to be confused with what English calls ‘long vowels’, which are really the leftovers from actual vowel length after everyone in 1500 decided to pronounce every vowel just... completely different for some reason. The Great Vowel Shift is an interesting read). Anyway, it makes these double letters make sense, and is way more interesting than random double vowels. It’s also interesting that it’s not perfectly symmetric either, not all the vowels have this distinction, which is cool and perfectly natural for languages to do! 

What is weird is that  [ɔ~o] doesn’t have this feature, because in our vowel system, it’s almost directly in the middle of our two long/short vowels so it would probably assimilate and end up doing the same thing! So, going off that I’m going to simulate the beginning of language evolution, where the [ɔ~o] sounds is in the process of diverging into [o:] (oar, caught, thought) when it’s followed by ‘r, t, d, k or g’ and [ɔ] (lot, pot) everywhere else.

So, now we have the sounds for our language, how are they used? (dw hardcore conlanging people, I’ve worked out the rest of the allomorphy rules for the consonants but this post is already loooong)

Phonotactics

Phonotactics is largely about how syllables are formed and what sounds are allowed where. In an effort to try and not make the language *too* similar to English I want these rules to differ from English. Luckily, that’d really easy to do because yet again, English is a statistically weird language! 

Syllables are divided into 3 parts - The onset, The nucleus and the Coda. For simplicities sake this corresponds to the consonants before the vowel, the vowel, and the consonants after the vowel. English lets wayyyyy too many consonants on either side ending up with abominations like “strengths” having 3 sounds before the nucleus and 3 after, or crimes against god like “twelfths” with 4 sounds after the coda.

Draenei on the other hand seems to be at most (C)(L)V(C). The brackets mean a sound is optional, C’s being consonants, L being ‘liquids’ like [l] and [r] (and [ʋ]) and V of course being vowels. Now going through the data (plus some creative input) we end up with some rules as to what can go where...

but we’ll leave the details of that for the final documentation and head onto...

Spelling! Everyone’s favourite...

There have been countless forum posts about how to pronounce ‘Draenei’ and even between developers at different panels there doesn't seem to be a consensus. This is probably due to the inconsistent spellings used throughout the lexicon so far - draenei and auchenai rhyme (I think) but they’re spelt with different endings! 

With the language I have a few main goals

- Make it match as closely as reasonable with canon and common interpretations - Have the spelling be consistent (same letters should always produce the same sound) - In line with the first one, keep as much of the spelling the same as possible - Make it as alien as possible within reason (sadly phonetics and phonology will not be the place to do that)

So coming to a word like “Draenei”, I have to break at least one thingon that list. Personally I want it to be pronounced [drɐ.naɪ] (druh-nai). So, to be consistent with the sounds from before it should be spelt ‘Dranai’ but that definitely won’t do, or I could keep the spelling and pronounce it literally [drɐ.e.ne.i] (druh-eh-ne-ey to give a rough guide for that), which is... equally bad. 

The compromise I'm going with is keeping the spelling of Draenei but making the [aɪ] (ai) sound spelt ‘ei’ across the language. Meaning is gonna be Auchenei. Well, not really because there’s still a bunch of other spellings that need standardising.

the ‘ch’ in “Auchenei” is pronounced with a [k], so is the ‘c’ in “Dioniss aca”. Going through and standardising things like ‘ph’ -> ‘f’, ‘ch’ -> ‘k’ or ‘sh’ depending and rewriting vowels to match the phonology we end up with something that preserves most of the identity and look of the language but just makes more sense! Aukenei would then be the spelling I’m using in the lexicon, probably with a little note for the canon spelling.

So, from now on I'm going to be using the reformed spelling TM, which hopefully will mean anyone attempting to speak this language will have an easier time getting what I'm envisioning, cuz everything is now consistant.

That about does it for this post. Yet again if you made it all the way to the bottom, congratulations! Hopefully the next posts will be a bit more interesting (I’m so fucking pumped for how the culture will impact the grammar and vocabulary holy shit) but I gotta get this one out of the way.

Next time, we’ll be doing word-building - the morphology of the language, Thanks for reading!

[mszegedy]

Speaking a non-lectal idiolect for fun and profit: an essay

This is an essay on what’s in it for you if you make the way you talk unique. It’s very long, because first you need to understand the social implications, which requires a lot of background knowledge. Think of this as a technical introduction to something that’s hard to do right, but written without assuming you already know anything about sociolinguistics. In my opinion, it’s worth it to know all of this, because then you can think about the way you speak on a new level, where you’re aware of what it’s doing for you socially.

What is an idiolect?

It’s the way a single person talks in a single language. Most people’s idiolects belong to a dialect or regiolect (a regional variety), a sociolect (a variety associated with a social group), and some amount of registers (varieties used in different social contexts). Some examples of dialects of English, with varying scope, include General American, North San Francisco Bay English, Older Southern American English, and Scottish English. Some examples of sociolects of English include African American English, surfer slang, the “gay lisp”, and Received Pronunciation. (All sociolects are somewhat regional in nature, too.) Some examples of registers of English are the way you’re asked to write in essays in grade school, the way you talk with your family, the way you talk with your friends, and the way you talk on the internet. (Prescribed registers like Grade-School Essay English are usually plagiarized off of old high-prestige sociolects, so they can feel sociolectal. But the way you write grade-school essays is your grade-school essay register, and that’s a register, not a sociolect.)

These categories can collectively be called “language varieties” or “lects”. The boundaries between lects are fuzzy. The way you tell whether an idiolect belongs to a lect is whether it has some features that are part of that lect: pronouncing a vowel a certain way, using certain words instead of other ones, that sort of thing. But these features never cluster together cleanly into lects where everybody has all the features of that lect. Each feature has a slightly different geographic and social distribution. Here’s a bit of Rick Aschmann’s wonderful map of American English phonological features:

This isn’t even all of them. You can see him picking out dialects, but it’s hard to do with so many intersecting features.

Regardless, you don’t have to have all features of a lect to have that lect, since no feature even “belongs” to a lect in the first place. But there are some features that aren’t even on the radars of any of these lects, and would be out of place in the idiolect of one of their speakers. For example, pronouncing “new” as “nyoo” would be weird anywhere on this map. The people who do that learned English on a different continent entirely.

If the language you’re speaking is your second language, your idiolect might be pretty unique, and contain features from your parent language, with the most apparent ones being phonological ones. There isn’t a good word for this as far as I know; I just hear it discussed as “foreign pronunciation of X” or “X as a second language”, which makes it sound like a collection of speech errors instead of an idiolect. It’s not. Your idiolect is always valid. It might cause problems, though, especially if you’re a second language speaker, when people can’t understand you. It might also cause problems if people stereotype you based on it (see below). Finally, it will cause problems if your idiolect contains slurs, and I have no sympathy for you in that case. But no matter how many problems your idiolect causes, it’s not worse than anyone else’s on some universal scale. It’s just different.

What your idiolect says about you (to laypeople)

People are better at identifying lects than they give themselves credit for. They might not be able to narrow it down to a single city and social group every time, but at the very least they can tell the country you come from, and can pick out major sociolects like African American English (AAE). They use your idiolect to infer a lot of things about you, based on how they feel about the groups that use those lects. They often go so far as to say that the language features they notice in these lects inherently produce these feelings. When people say that, they are almost always terribly wrong.

A common example of this is racism towards black people. If you speak a version of AAE, people are reminded that you come from a black community. They will then apply their assumptions about black communities to you. White people will imagine you growing up in a ghetto, and not having a good education. They imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. Their assumptions are built on the AAE speakers they’ve seen in the media, and in real life. Black people have gotten to the point in mainstream media where now there are multiple black person character archetypes. But most real people don’t fit those.

(Meanwhile, a black person who speaks a white sociolect will get called “articulate”, because people have better stereotypes about black people who speak that way.)

Another common example is the image of upper-class British people that Americans have. If you are a Received Pronunciation (RP) speaker, Americans will describe you as “posh”. They will imagine you having lots of money and strong opinions. They will, again, imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. This is again because of the contexts in which they’ve been exposed to RP in. In media, its speakers are educators, acclaimed writers, royalty, and historical figures. As an RP speaker, you might not be any of those, but you will still get the credit for it.

This effect intersects with sexism as well. Valley Girl English is a heavily-stereotyped sociolect. If you have features of Valley Girl English, people might call you “superficial”, and think that you are dumb and that you sleep with many people. They will imagine you dressing and acting a certain way. (I’m repeating myself for the third time because with all of these examples, you can probably imagine what way I’m talking about without me telling you. Everybody knows Valley Girl English speakers, for example, wear revealing clothing and have expressive body language.) They will imagine sexist things about you because the Valley Girl stereotype is in general a sexist stereotype.

One interesting example I don’t see brought up very often is features associated with bigots. One such feature is using the substantive for certain groups of people. People get offended if you say “blacks” and “Jews” instead of “black people” and “Jewish people”, because they know that that’s what bigots say. If you have this feature, people will imagine that you are dismissive towards the problems that minorities face.

What (lay)people say about your idiolect

People who think they know things about language will say that their stereotypes about your lects come directly from the language features themselves. They will say that the AAE sentence fragment “did’n do nofin” sounds “lazy” and “uneducated”, and when asked why, they will say that it’s lazy to not have a “t” in “did’n”, it’s lazy to have “f” and “n” instead of “th” and “ng” in “nofin”, and most of all, it’s bad grammar to have two negatives. They will say that Valley Girls use “like” as a filler word so much because they don’t actually have anything to say. And they will say that the reason that words like “blacks” are offensive is because it is dehumanizing to not include the word “people”.

All of these things are wrong. The truth is that these features occur more or less randomly regardless of social attitudes. Sound changes occur all the time to every language and every lect; the “posh” RP is just as much of a pile of sound changes as the “lazy” AAE. There are many languages and lects where flipping all the negatives in a sentence negates it, like in AAE, instead of just flipping one negative. My first language, Hungarian, is one of them. AAE isn’t any worse for having it. It’s just a way that it’s different from most other English lects. “Like” isn’t used more than any other filler word, and filler words are in every language. There is nothing empty-headed about using filler words. Everybody does it. Saying “<adjective>s” instead of “<adjective> people” is far more common than not, over all languages. In many languages it’s the only way to do it. Even in English, it’s the preferred way to do it for nationalities, e.g. “Americans” instead of “American people”, or things that sound like nationalities, e.g. “lesbians” instead of “lesbian women” (although you do hear the two-word forms in some narrow contexts).

The best way to figure out whether your feeling about a feature is an inherent thing about it or just a bias of yours is to ask, “Does this feature also occur somewhere where I don’t feel about it this way?” The answer is almost always yes. It’s a big world out there.

Rigging the system

Getting stereotyped isn’t fun. Nobody can opt out of stereotypes. People will take every little facet of you, from your clothes to your height to your gender to your skin color and infer a whole bunch of things about you no matter what you do. But you can stop people from including your idiolect in the information they use to construct their stereotypes. Or at least, you can discourage them. Or instead of opting out of stereotypes altogether, you can try to control them instead, and use them to express things about yourself. You can do this by being aware of which language features form which lects, and which lects invoke which stereotypes. After that it’s just a matter of adopting the language features you want, which is still easier said than done.

One way to use this power is to adopt an idiolect that runs counter to the stereotypes that people might construct about you for other reasons. You can often do this just by changing register, without retraining yourself to a different lect. For example, as a child, I got stereotyped as “smart” and “gifted”. I did not feel very smart or gifted, but I did know that I wanted to erase stereotypes. So I tried to speak very informally all the time. My hope was that my actions would speak louder than my words, and people would think I’m smart for real reasons, and feel less like the register I was using was only for dumb people. It’s hard to estimate the amount of success I had, but I never stopped wanting to speak in ways that people don’t stereotype as “technical” and “too complicated for normal folk". People still think of me as “technical”, so I guess I’m a failure.

Another way to use this power is to adopt a non-lectal idiolect. This is the main point of the post. “Non-lectal” is a term I made up to refer to something that has a collection of features that make it impossible to classify into a lect. Having a non-lectal idiolect will make it difficult, but not impossible, for people to form stereotypes about you based on your idiolect. It might also give you more freedom of self-expression, because each language feature can say something different, instead of all of them together saying that you belong to a stereotype.

Non-lectal idiolects

Having a non-lectal idiolect is harder than it sounds. You can’t just make a grocery list of language features you want, because that list is endless and you will always forget something. Maybe one day, somebody will write a complete guide to all English language features, telling you who uses them, and how people feel about that. Then, in a year or two, that guide will be useless, because attitudes towards certain language features have changed, and new, interesting language features have sprung up that should really be in your guide. But then, that’s the almanac model. If people cared about that sort of thing, you could make a lot of money re-releasing an updated version of your book every year.

A good way to make a non-lectal idiolect is slowly. Think of yourself as a language feature collector, like somewhere between a postcard collector and a Pokémon trainer. Whenever you notice a cool language feature you would like, think about what groups it would associate you with. If you’re comfortable with that, add it to your idiolect. Maybe read up on how it works, if you’re lucky enough to have literature on that. If not, do your best to figure it out on your own, or come up with your own version of it.

There’s a couple of pragmatic considerations to keep in mind:

Borrowing features from lects that are closely associated with minority groups you aren’t part of is not a good idea. People will think that you are pretending to be a member of this minority. The people who will be the most offended are the minority members themselves.

A classic case of this is that it’s not a good idea to borrow distinctive features from AAE if you are white. I have personally wanted to do so many times, as a sign of respect and as a way of normalizing a sociolect that people look down on. But I’ve ended up borrowing only innocuous things where I have the plausible deniability of having taken it from somewhere else. I feel justified in using multiple negatives, for example, because my first language also does it. But really, I do it because of AAE.

Trying to use language that people consider offensive in a way where you feel like you’re removing the offensiveness is not a good idea. You will never make anything but enemies if you try to bleach or reclaim a slur, for example, especially if you’re not part of the group that the slur applies to. You have to get an army of people to do the same thing with you before you can do that and not be taken for a bigot.

Trying to use the substantive, which, as noted above, is associated with bigotry but isn’t inherently insulting the way slurs are, is a project that maybe has more merit, but consider this. You will, eventually, use the substantive around a minority member and make them feel unsafe. This is a somewhat different dynamic than when, say, a white person feels unsafe around an AAE speaker because they associate AAE with crime. In the first scenario, the minority member is guaranteed to have already experienced bigotry, and has every right to be wary of bigots. In the second scenario, the white person is just racist, precisely because they haven’t interacted with AAE speakers enough. Is it a positive thing to give a minority member experiences where a substantive user turned out not to be a bigot? Well, sure, but in the meantime you’re making their life worse. I would err on the side of not making people’s lives worse.

Is a non-lectal idiolect right for me?

Think about what you want your idiolect to mean. It matters more what your idiolect’s features mean to you than what they mean to other people. You’re the one who has to listen to it all the time, after all.

Sometimes what a feature expresses to you can be so different from what it expresses to other people that you start to feel bad about it. And sometimes this is a feature you’ve acquired naturally, not by planning your idiolect. For example, the thing that affects the way I speak and write the most is that I have central auditory processing disorder. I absorb language and information through text far better than through speech. It about balances out; it’s like the text and speech capabilities of a neurotypical person got switched. I hardly ever remember things from lectures, but once I read something in a textbook, I’ll remember it for a long time. In my dreams, I can read text, but I can’t understand speech. And, most importantly, I naturally acquire language through text, not through speech. This means that, while most people end up writing the way they talk until they are trained to use a unique register for writing, I would end up talking the way I write if I didn’t put every ounce of my effort into not doing that.

I would love to naturally express to people through my idiolect that I have more of a connection to written things than spoken things. And in theory just letting the acquisition take its natural course would be a good way to do that. But the problem is that the most common written register of English is basically an anachronistic pastiche of formal English sociolects from the 20th century. People don’t just think that I sound like a book. People think that I sound “smart” and “educated” and “technical”. This is what I’ve wanted to avoid all of my life.

I would like to express other things than just my connection to text. There are many lovely dialects that I have respect for and a personal connection to that I would like to give a shout-out to in my idiolect. For example, in the Hungarian lect my family speaks, the word for “New York” is Nyujork instead of Nujork, because it was borrowed from British English and not American English. I think this is really cool and cute, so as a way of paying tribute to it, I pronounce words like “new” and “nude” as “nyoo” and “nyood”. I could have just changed how I pronounce “New York”, but I already have other features competing for New York-related real estate, and having the sound change be universal is easier anyway.

The biggest reason to worry about which language features to have is that you ultimately know yourself better than your language acquisition engine does. Your language acquisition engine will take features from your environment and dump them into your lap. Your job is to vet these features and see if you like what they tell people. If you just let it do its thing, your idiolect will probably tell people where you lived, and maybe what communities you’ve been part of. But probably not as well as if you’d put some thought into it.

Putting thought into your idiolect doesn’t have to mean making it non-lectal. Making it non-lectal is the nuclear option where you don’t want people to immediately associate you with certain places and cultures. If you are okay with being associated with a place and/or a culture, consider its distinctive lect something to build around. There is no hard boundary on being a non-lectal speaker. You can have a lot of features that point towards one thing and several other features that point towards other things. Experiment.

Conclusion

Language is the most versatile tool for expressing yourself. The semantics of any language are already a powerful engine of communication that you’ve been training yourself your entire life to use. Make the pragmatics, the metatext, work for you too. Don’t worry about every feature; there’s too many of them to do that. But if you single out features you care about, you can turn your idiolect into a beloved work of art that you can carry with you everywhere. Whether the art that you make will be non-lectal, I cannot say. But know that the option is there, and it’s a goldmine of untapped self-expression potential.

[is6621]

Online Dating is Killing Romance.  - Hattie Swank

Here’s the deal. The dating world is never going to be the same. No more organically meeting a guy at a bar, no more being set up with your Mom’s friends’ cousin, and no more traditional dating. This in thanks to the overwhelming popularity of dating apps in the recent years. I remember my first encounter with online dating: my 10th grade geometry teacher met, dated, got engaged, and married to a man she met on ChristianMingle.Com all within the year she was my teacher. She had shame in telling us they met online, especially because they met on a site like Christian Mingle. Sure we giggled behind her back because it was a foreign concept to our 13-year-old selves, but looking back it wasn’t that weird.

The explosion of dating apps means there’s one for everyone. Between a site for Jewish people, a site for Farmers Only, a site for over 50s, even vegans, every type of demographic is covered in terms of availability of specialty dating apps. No matter the category you put yourself into there’s a dating app for that. This being said, with so much choice around which dating app to choose, it is hard not to wonder if these platforms have gone too far.

Bumble, the first of the dating apps to give control to women, recently opened up a café called Bumble Brew. Located in SoHo, NYC, this meet-up place was carefully curated to set up the perfect date, meeting, or girls night. Each decision that went into building the Bumble Brew was meant to cultivate the best possible scenario for people intending to use the space. Tables in the space are only meant for two to encourage dates, both romantic and platonic. Couches and lounge areas exist throughout for the groups that wish to participate. The menu is carefully curated to feature date-friendly food – meaning no messy hot wings or full fish heads. The wine list only features a slim 15 choices, easy to pronounce and understand what they are. Only a few bottles are available in case your date is not going too hot. Although this seems like a great way to encourage dating beyond behind a screen, it almost seems like it is set up too perfectly.

Facebook Dating is the most recent online dating platform to come into existence. When you sign up for Facebook Dating, it will automatically create your dating profile from your own Facebook profile. Once your profile is created, Facebook will start to send you matches based on your interests, location, age, and so on. The good thing about the privacy of Facebook dating is that it will never send you matches that you are friends with on Facebook – unless you want that. This is definitely a smart solution to the overwhelming process of selecting an online dating platform. Facebook is making it easier to have all of your accounts under one roof, but it raises the question of if Facebook should just stick to what their good at. Is the company spreading itself too thin by now trying to get their users to date? I think so.

Will dating ever not be online? Nope. Not with Tinder around. A few years ago, people would bashfully admit that they have the Tinder app on their phone hidden among their Bank of America and Dunkin’ apps. But now, it has turned into a game. College kids now sit around and swipe left or right for fun, even without the intention of finding something they could seriously date. Bad Tinder pickup lines are becoming memes and crazy profiles are being sent around to friend group chats for humor. Although you would think this is decreasing the popularity, it is actually driving people to download Tinder! Online dating is becoming a falsified way to search for potential hookups, and even though this was not the intention of them, these companies are running with it because it is making them money.

This new era of computerized dating is killing romance as we know it. Dating should be a natural progression of two people deciding they like each other enough to spend a little time together here or there, not two people swiping left or right on each other. Dating apps are allowing people to choose based on looks alone with little consideration of personality or literally any other winning characteristic one may have. It is sad, but this is the world we live in now. But if I have any advice to people looking for that special someone, don’t go on a date with someone just because their profile says they’re 6’2, chances are that’s a lie.

Sources: https://adage.com/article/digital/dating-app-bumble-opening-wine-bar/2175331

https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/how-to-use-facebook-dating-to-find-the-love-of-your-life-or-at-least-a-date/

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-dating-in-the-us/

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/09/8458247/what-is-tinder-swipe-night-october-2019

https://www.businessinsider.com/dating-apps-how-to-choose-2018-3 https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/tinder-changed-dating/578698/

[heiiressapparent-blog]

[[ lyndsy fonseca, cisfemale, she/her ]] EKATERINA ‘ERICA’ MARKOVY-WRIGHT just walked into the club, the 31 year old HEIRESS has been a member since MARCH 2014. i heard they’re pretty DETERMINED & HARD-WORKING, but can also be a little MANIPULATIVE & COLD. rumor has it, they’re DEMI-PLATONI-PANROMANTIC/PLATONI-PANSEXUAL and also love BONDAGE/SHIBARI, IMPACT PLAY & SENSORY PLAY, but are turned off by BODILY FLUIDS, FEET & VORE.

**hi all, i’m jack and i’m super excited to join bliss and get back into roleplay again-- also please forgive my rambling and i’m so sorry it’s taken forever for me to get an intro up; i was knocked out with anaesthetic on monday so i’m a little goofy, tired and sore. i really hope y’all like erica though, she’s one of my most precious projects and i’ve been playing her for about seven to eight years. i’ll probably add to this as i go, too!

-- erica’s the eldest of four siblings at 31 to their parents, mikhail markovy and isabelle wright, and is currently in line as heir to her mother’s very successful clothing line, and receives some royalties from her father’s very well-received book series.

-- erica has always been the kind of person to work extremely hard, either to prove herself or to prove to others that she’s worth the air she breathes. having been born in new york, and moving out to los angeles of her own volition, she found that while she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of new york, and la for that matter, she found it extremely hard to live independently while living so close to her mother. even as she grew into adulthood, she found she was still treated like a child, and for someone as headstrong as erica, she found it extremely difficult to live a normal life while constantly butting heads with isabelle.

-- before she moved, however, she attended college in new york for law; a last ditch effort to gain independence. unfortunately it didn’t work in the way she’d been hoping, and she soon realised that despite scoring rather high within the course, she didn’t have the drive, fire nor the interest in becoming a lawyer in any field. with no real destination in mind and no goal to strive for, erica moved out west, at first landing in washington before eventually moving south to los angeles, making the city her new home.

-- currently, erica is doing her best to support her lavish lifestyle by performing odd jobs here and there (at least, ones that she’s qualified to do). with that in mind, her father, mikhail, has been taking as much money from his account, that he’s sure isabelle won’t notice, to send to his daughter in order to keep her fed and watered. unfortunately, he has foolishly trusted his eldest daughter to spend it in the right places without truly checking in on her and asking her where it’s all been going-- his wishes for how it might be used may happen... or they may not.

-- being a regular at club bliss does mean that quite a bit of the money goes toward drinks and drugs, dancers and escorts at bliss when erica feels as though there is a lull in excitement in her life, which is far more often than she would like to admit. so, no, she may not be using the cash in the smartest way possible (even she knows that) and with her preference for the finer things in life, it can disappear much faster than she realises.

-- one more important quality to note about erica is the fact that no matter what her younger siblings do, wrong or right, she can’t help but love them unconditionally. she’d protect and follow them to the ends of the earth in order to keep them safe-- really, there isn’t a thing she wouldn’t do for her siblings.

-- just a few more quick facts: her full name is ekaterina ‘erica’ leanne aliena markovy-wright; a fair mix between her father and mother’s names, and she vehemently demands that others call her erica as it is easier to remember, and simpler to pronounce. she is of jewish-american and russian descent, from her mother and father respectively. she can speak english, russian, yiddish, hebrew, italian and french. thanks to her mother’s determination (which was passed down to her), ekaterina will work at something, even a menial or useless skill in order to become better at it, regardless of whether or not it will get her further in life.

-- she’s panromantic and pansexual, as well as polyamorous and demiromantic. she also tends to develop feelings for people she may be friendly with, which has led her to identify as platoniromantic/platonisexual. erica’s not entirely sure if it fits, but until she can unearth a more appropriate term, this is the one she’s sticking with.

-- she’s quite slim, and very athletic, attending the gym as often as she can to keep herself in the best shape possible. her height, however-- she’s not entirely sure where she got these genes (both her parents are quite tall), but she’s by far the shortest in the family-- barely managing to hit 5′4″ on a good day. she’s also lost the genetic lottery when it comes to her eyesight, stuck with rather severe shortsightedness, and astigmatisms in both eyes. she chooses to wear contacts instead of glasses to minimise the attention brought to this particular physical ‘handicap’.

-- regarding the type of people she’s into, as long as she can hold an intelligent conversation, they’re physically attractive, tend to find more intense aspects of bdsm to their liking, and don’t show interest in erica simply because of her money or her last name, there’s a high chance that her curiosity will spike upward. if she is simply looking for a quick shag, then it truly does not matter-- but she has her favourites, several regular escorts that she’ll approach with an agreement she’ll have set up long before that point in time.

personality traits: sadistic, manipulative, diligent, hot-tempered, dutiful, adaptable, determined, witty, intelligent, agile, impulsive, hedonistic.

possible connections: honestly, anything and everything! i’m up for past lovers, enemies and rivals, best friends, and everything in between. if you have an idea for a connection erica might fit, just shoot me an im on discord or here and we can sort out details!

[belonglab]

Growing Up Brown in America: When Every Day is Halloween

By Neha Sampat, Esq.

October 16, 2018

(Previously published in News India Times, The Teal Mango, and Thrive GlobaI)

Sometimes, taking off the mask is what is really scary.

I’ve been working on that the past few years. I found myself struggling to process a personal loss, mainly because I was more worried about how others perceived my loss and my reaction to it than allowing myself to just feel what I felt and honor those feelings. I realized I had become so swift to gauge others’ needs and so preoccupied with telling them what they wanted to hear, that I had forgotten in some ways who I was. I had covered myself in a cloak of expectation, carefully crafted over four decades of my life, and it was suffocating me.

“How did I get here?” I wondered. I thought back to kindergarten, when I proudly raised my hand when the teacher asked who knew the alphabet. Upon her request, I began to recite it, but was brutally stopped at “H” by my classmates’ uproarious laughter. I couldn’t comprehend why they were laughing at me, which only added to my distress. Finally, someone explained to me that it was pronounced “aych,” not “etch,” as my mom had taught me through her Indian accent. From there sprouted a seed of self-consciousness, a ceaseless suspicion that there was the equivalent of a “Kick me” sign taped to my back, and the silencing shame of being different.

I started to adapt by downplaying my differences. I figured I had to try to be like them in order to be with them, and I had to say what they wanted to hear so they would listen to me. And thus, I gathered the fabric of fitting-in and the string of assimilation, and I began to assemble my costume.

Once I had a passable prototype, I began to perfect it with the right props. For me, one such prop was the simple fork. In my Indian-American family, I remember from early childhood eating with our hands. My mom and grandmother would use their hands to carefully and evenly work warm jaggery into crumbled wheat rotis to create glistening spheres of goodness, which they would lovingly pop into my mouth. Even in the moments we resorted to silverware, we went straight for the spoons, effectively cutting food by forcefully and frantically sawing with the spoon’s side. When invited to a white friend’s home for a meal, I initially feared the fork. I would meticulously study how my friend’s family ate, marveling at their mastery of interchangeably using three utensils in one meal, and I would bring home with me those lessons in “civility, normalcy, and good manners.”

In middle school, I was thrilled to discover another useful prop: Lip gloss in the perfect shimmery shade of frosty pink. It made all the white girls look so shiny-sparkly-good, and that’s what I needed to be! But with my darker lips asserting themselves from beneath the cotton candy sheen, I couldn’t quite achieve the desired effect. Yet, there was no room in my world for the question my mom gently proffered as to what was the right shade of lip gloss for me, so I persisted with the pink.

Thankfully, we all grew out of the Bonne Bell stage. But for many of us brown folks, that just meant our costumes needed to be updated. I observed with an eagle-eye every expression, every choice, every quiet movement made by my white counterparts, and I plotted how I could improve my costume to make it more real and more believable. I started to become more accustomed to wearing the costume and, soon enough, was rarely taking it off. In the safe space at home with my Indian-American friends, I thought I was taking the costume off, but I realize now that remnants of the deception remained: an expression, a choice, a quiet movement.

All of this seemed to work well enough for me as I graduated from my educational endeavors and entered the professional world. I knew how to dress like a white girl, talk like a white girl, and for the most part, act enough like a white girl to get by. And trust me when I tell you that this is what it takes to get by in many professions. Even worse is that in most professions, mimicking a white girl isn’t even enough to excel, due to a cultural bias against women leaders.

In spite of this set-up, I took some risks. Once, when I was a summer intern at a law firm, I asked my assigned mentor attorney if I could wear an Indian outfit to an off-the-clock gathering at a law firm partner’s house. My mentor shook her head incredulously and issued a resounding “Noooooo!” Curiously and quite distressingly, despite my consistently well-received work product, I later was denied a position with the firm for reason of “not being a good fit.” It doesn’t take more than one or two outcomes like that to shake your confidence and chase you right back into your costume, which then is what begins to feel like the safe space.

Without even consciously realizing it, my M.O. became more and more about flying under the radar. If they didn’t notice me, it meant that I was fitting in. That my disguise was working.

Eventually, my costume started to fray from overuse, and the seams started to split to reveal more of my true personality, which, as it turns out, does not want to fly under the radar. I want to do something big and important! I’m tired of the same ineffective solutions to the same problems in business and society, particularly when it comes to diversity. And I’m tired of listening to people tell me their stories and then walk away before hearing mine.

I’ve tried to share with some people how much I was bullied as a child because I was different, but I often find they start to get visibly uncomfortable or try to tell me that my race may not have been a reason, for they, too, were bullied for being nerdy or not wearing the right clothes. I’ve learned through my now well-honed observational skills that people don’t really want to hear me talk about how I was called a “sand n_____” by my elementary school classmates. Or how, even after being the last one picked in 6th grade gym class, my square dance partner considered my brown skin too dirty to even touch, and we both miserably do-si-doed with a deep, dark chasm between our outstretched hands. Or how my high school English teacher told my mom that my potential was less than that of my white classmates since I was “English as a second language.” All of those stories make people break eye contact with me, wriggle in their seats, and try to change the subject.

I have this friend who is Jewish. She and I often have connected over some of the similar traits of our cultures. She is a gifted storyteller who doesn’t shy away from questions that help her understand others’ experiences, and I accordingly have found her to be compassionately and sincerely open to my stories. I recently relayed to her a detailed version of the story about my request to wear Indian clothes to the law firm gathering. Her eyes welled up as I related the events that led to me being dinged from the firm. I could see that it was hard for her to hear. As it should be, because it was hard for me to tell and even harder to experience. In fact, there was a new pain I felt in relating that experience. It was the pain of knowing better. It was the ache of wisdom telling me that I shouldn’t have put up with that and regretting that, as a young, female law student of color eager to make a good impression, I felt disempowered and showed up to that event costumed up, asking them to drop a treat in my bag.

Unfortunately, yet understandably, this form of disempowerment is common among minorities and women. In the 1960’s, sociologist Erving Goffman coined as “covering” this behavior of a known stigmatized individual attempting to mitigate the obtrusiveness of the stigma. It is difficult to metrically ascertain the impact of covering, when it includes lost professional opportunities, decreased confidence, identity and self-worth, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. But as law professor Kenji Yoshino recognized, “covering” amounts to a civil rights issue: African-Americans have lost their jobs over wearing their hair in cornrows; Women have been demoted for choosing to become mothers; and Jews have been terminated from the military for wearing yarmulkes. Professor Yoshino explains that courts are willing to protect immutable traits such as the color of one’s skin and one’s sex, but “will not protect mutable traits, because individuals can alter them to fade into the mainstream…If individuals choose not to engage in that form of self-help, they must suffer the consequences.” Such consequences are too often dire in these days of rampant racial profiling, especially for our African-American brothers and sisters who might wear a dark hoody on a candy run. And so, as incentivized by some of our classmates, teachers, neighbors, mentors, and bosses, and also by the law of the land, we cover, hiding our true selves behind masks of the majority and resigning our society to a persistent and oppressive homogeneity.

Abby Norman, in her article about liberal progressives not enrolling their children in her predominantly black neighborhood school, asks, “Really, if we are experiencing diversity on white terms, what good is that diversity anyway?” I’d guess that Ms. Norman and I would agree that the answer is, “not very good at all,” but you don’t have to take our word for it; the data speaks loudly and clearly. In spite of ongoing claims of diversity as a top value and mission of many organizations, African-Americans and Latina/o-Americans remain significantly underrepresented in many industries, even more so in senior leadership roles. Even in a legal profession charged with upholding justice, barely modest strides have been made in diversity metrics.

Clearly, “success” needs to be redefined when it comes to diversity, and innovative and diverse approaches must be welcomed, supported, and earnestly attempted to reap the many benefits of diversity and inclusion. To genuinely engage our underrepresented brothers and sisters, we all must battle our own implicit biases, in part by expanding our own social networks to be genuinely inclusive of others who have different backgrounds and experiences from us. If organizations truly seek diversity and inclusion (and that is a question meriting candid organizational introspection), they must make space for everyone, especially minorities and women, to bring their true selves to the table. Most, like me, have learned the art of “covering” to survive in organizations because that is what our society has required of us. It is now on our society and our organizational leaders to undo that to allow minorities and women to thrive and offer their unique perspectives and ideas for assured organizational and societal improvements. Seats at the table aren’t enough; organizational leaders must warmly and earnestly ask minorities and women to share their stories and then must listen, especially when it is painful and uncomfortable.

At the same time, we minorities and women must be more aware of and intentional about when we put on our costumes. There always will be some amount of care and strategy we employ in determining with whom, in what scenarios, and to what extent we show our true colors. However, it is important that we not be scared by past risks that didn’t pay off and continue to share our stories with the people in our lives who will be moved and impacted, and who will remind us of the power of our true narratives.

For me, that means remembering the way food always tasted better to me as a child when it was fed to me by my mom’s or grandmother’s hand instead of a cold-clawed fork. And it means acknowledging that the pretty pink lip gloss made me look like the living dead.

I’ll save that costume for Halloween.

Neha Sampat is founder, consultant, trainer, and coach at GenLead|BelongLab, where she collaborates with clients through consulting, training, and individual coaching to innovate approaches to leadership, inclusion, and professional development that are both data-driven and grounded in the subjective experience. Her best Halloween costume to date was Buffila Slayerjee (the South Asian vampire slayer), and when she wears lip gloss, it is in the shade of coco plum. Find her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram (@belonglab) and Twitter (@nehamsampat and @BelongLab).

[readreadbookblog]

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron

https://www.amazon.com/Killing-King-Assassination-Yitzhak-Remaking/dp/0393242099

This book is an excellent chronicle of how a Israeli leader was killed and why and how the assassin did it.

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister by a radical orthodox Jewish settler named Yigal Amir is perhaps the most or second most important event in Israel’s history. A book of this monument would probably be hard to follow along especially with it’s vast cast of foreign politicians that most people won’t know, but author Dan Ephron masterfully manages to introduce and explain each character without the reader losing track of them. I never lost track of who was who, what relationship they had with Rabin, and their occupation and importance to the assassination story.

It is interesting to see how despite being on an almost half century war with the Palestinians, security was very lax to the Prime Minister. Despite the condemnation that the Jewish radicals faced both in society and the Israeli parliament, Rabin’s successors failed to rally support for coexistence with the P.L.O. even though international support for such plans were at an all time high, which climaxed with a lackluster Oslo Accords.

Ephron’s book is very successful in telling how the assassination occurred and why but it does not do such a good job at explaining the consequences of the event. Modern Israeli international politics today are almost the same as they were those years ago, with settler settlements still an issue, Israeli Palestinians facing discrimination and second class citizenship, and radical Jewish fundamentalists attacking Palestinians civilians and calling for genocide. I personally saw parallels with the United States, with two sides against each other with one aligning themselves with far right groups, fascists, and Nazi sympathizers. The leader of the nation being an old man who still believes in unity despite the concerns of both sides and the active threats from one specific side being brushed aside. In fact I’ll say it, Rabin this cover above looks too much like President Biden. Look out Biden, you don’t seem to be taking the threats against you seriously, don’t get assassinated!

I read this book in audiobook form. It was simple to follow and I didn’t seem to miss anything that text reading could have only given me besides seeing colored pictures. The narrator seem to pronounce Hebrew and Arabic words very well. But the funny thing about the narrator is the voices that he made when there was women’s dialogue, as he intimated their voices to such a degree that it was laughable. Also funny was when Bill Clinton had dialogue, the narrator also tired to copy his memorable voice. Laugh out loud moments.

Programs such podcast as NPR or history related ones might better details on how the assassination affected today’s Israel with a mute Palestinian resistance and pro-settler society that the Jewish state still has today. Ephron throws in the end of the book a weird story of him following a conspiracy theory that is akin to JFK’s assassination in that someone else or something like that killed Rabin instead of Amir. Instead of putting this overlong story of him explaining the various theories and his personal story of going to American labs to test out Rabin’s blood stained clothes, a section explaining Israeli guilt over the assassination and it’s results would have been better. Despite the thin ending and crazy end chapters, this book is very good and I would place it along the best books on contemporary Israel.

[ancientbrit]

Natter #8   9/8/2020

Tue, Sep 8, 2020, 11:14 PM A lovely day today - sunny with a very attractive breeze and I was able to complete the electrical conduit work in the greenhouse without breaking much of a sweat. When I returned indoors for my well-deserved cup of tea I started to read the New York Times and then there was this fantastic article! I don't know how many of you are familiar with the story of the Methuselah Date Palm, but if you have attended any of my Propagation lectures you would know. But just in case you were sufficiently ill-advised to stay home I will run a brief resume. 2000 years ago the Romans were flexing their muscle in the middle east and had captured Judea. Some members of the Jewish community rebelled against the Centurions but they were small in number and untrained compared to the Romans and the last of the zealots retired to the heights of Masada where the Romans besieged them. The Romans gradually erected an earthen ramp up to the summit and the rebels chose to commit suicide by jumping from the peak, rather than be enslaved by the Romans. Jump forward to the 1960s when there was an architectural excavation made at Masada and one of the things discovered was an old pot containing date seeds thought to have probably been left by the Zealots. These were taken and stored in a lab storage cupboard where they were later found again by a Doctor from the Israeli Natural Medicine Research Center. She treated them to gradual hydration, warmth, plant hormone and enzymatic fertilizer without expecting much. She was therefore delighted when she noticed a green shoot spearing through the soil surface a wee time later. The seedling was cosseted and eventually planted outside the facility in a fenced plot to keep it safe. In the meantime, the hard parts remaining of the date seed were subjected to carbon dating and found to be 2000 years old.     It was thought that the seedling, now named Methuselah, might eventually be the progenitor of a returning breed of Judean dates, which had been justly famous in their time, but had been extinct now for years and years They had been somewhat larger than most, delicious and very nutritious, In addition, they had been known to have medicinal properties such as being a laxative and an aphrodisiac. Obviously one would need to be a little circumspect in eating them! Unfortunately, Methuselah turned out to be a male plant and so the good Doctor went searching again and chose more than 30 seeds from archeological sites in the Jordan Desert including Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. They were planted between 2011 and 2014 and six of the seeds germinated. One of the ultimately female seedlings came from an ancient burial cave in Wadi el-Makkukh near Jericho, now in the west bank, and was carbon-dated to between the first and fourth centuries BCE, becoming one of the oldest known seeds to have ever been germinated. This seedling was crossed with Methuselah and this year one of these progeny produced her first crop of dates which were pronounced to be delicious, but there was no mention of their more dubious qualities - the testers probably want to keep that information rather quiet. Proof might prove to be embarrassing!                                           After that initial tasting, the remaining dates were rushed away for testing but I expect to see much more of these before too long. Something like this, able to produce what is an almost perfect food in such desolate conditions is obviously invaluable. My ideal sort of plant has beautiful foliage which is fragrant. It produces beautiful fragrant flowers that ultimately merge into delicious fruit. To date, I haven't found such a paragon but I do get partway with fragrant beautiful plants in my front garden which flower in phases, starting with two different Daphnes in December and running the gamut of Viburnum carlesii, Azalea "Gold Rush," Styrax japonica and Lavender continuing until around July. I am always on the lookout for similar fragrances to extend the year as I know that some of you are too. I have a giant Brugmansia in the back garden which has just finished it's first flush of fragrant blooms. It usually continues until first frost and this year I am afraid it will have to die - it is just way too big to be overwintered in the greenhouse, but I have taken cuttings so it won't be gone forever.                                                                                                                In the vegetable garden Broad Beans (Favas)  add their fragrance to the mix and when you think about it fragrance is one of the most evocative of experiences. Lilac takes me right back to an old Farm that I used to visit with my mother and sister where we picked Gooseberries and Blackcurrants. Their faces and presence are there almost within touching distance.  Scent makes connections with people in so many different ways - it switches on lights from your past, drawing forward little memories. Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame separated odors into moral and the immoral - the perfect division. Every scent seems to fall beautifully into that simple dichotomy: Day Lily flowers even switch from the former at noon to the latter when the end of the day crumples their blooms. There is a relatively newly revised book named "RHS Companion to Scented Plants" written by Stephen Lacey - a long-standing contributor to Telegraph Gardening. Stephan says “   that the best reason to grow a plant is it's smell and I could never consider buying a rose if it was not scented; I don't see the point.”                                                                                                  Early winter is a tricky time to find scents, but there are some. Buddleja auriculata flowers in November through Christmas in a suitable position. It might not be the most fascinating plant to look at, but the flowers smell of lemon peel and make perfect scented bunches for the Christmas table.  Winter Sweet (Chimonanthus praecox) has the most amazing scent for midwinter - lemon lipstick!   A couple of stems cut for the house will fill every room with perfume.  And for a little later, there's Oemleria, hugely popular in Edwardian gardens. It flowers before it's leaves appear, bringing the fragrance of almonds in February and March. Shrubs and climbers are often highly scented, possibly because many woodland plants have less opportunity to lure in pollinators in shady positions. Shrubs are out of fashion at the moment, whereas perennials and naturalistic plantings are everywhere, but involve few scents. To make matters worse, many beautifully scented plants are sold only for their looks. Stephen's book uses a rather more scientific, yet understandable classification than Mr Lloyd's. Rose scents, honey scents, spicy scents, and pea scents among them to help readers navigate.As well as being a guide to understanding scent and offering suggestions for the inquisitive, Stephen's book gets into the nitty-gritty of planning a garden around scent and getting the best from it. Building scent into your garden is one thing, but to get the best from it, you have to make it easy to enjoy. At Alderley Grange in Gloucestershire in England - one of the few gardens built around scent - lemon verbenas used to be grown as standards in containers and placed at path junctions, at the right height for the passer-by. Similarly, planning scent around windows and doors, at heights to suit, fills both garden and your life with magic. House plants, too - why would you have a house plant that wasn't scented? Consider a Meyer Lemon with it's superb thin-skinned fruit and wonderful perfume. Gardening with scent makes life more evocative and keeps your nose alert, but perhaps more importantly, it's more fun! A few more scented plants to consider are Rhododendron fragrantissimum with it's white flowers in late winter through Spring. The fragrance is wonderful - complex and lily-like. A good one for growing in containers as it is slightly tender. Philadelphus are very good performers. "Mexican Jewel" which hasn't been around for long, is a small-leaved philadelphus with a sophisticated floral pineapple scent. Another is P. Minnesota Snowflake, with a larger bloom very double looking as if the petals had been slashed with scissors with a lovely scent. Lilium regale with its wonderful scent is hard to beat and then, of course, there is my favorite Cardiocrinum giganteum. The Moss rose William Lobb with it's complex French perfume and the bonus of the resinous scent of the sticky buds. Magnolia yunnanensis is a newish shrub, like a small-flowered grandiflora. Compact, with small leaves and small creamy flowers. it has the same fruit cocktail/lemon perfume of grandiflora. Enjoy the sun and don't burn. Stay safe and we'll come through this.Your fearless leader,Gordon -

[davidrmaas]

His Authority Over Demons

Synopsis - Jesus demonstrated his victory over Satan by driving his forces out of the children of God – Mark 1:21-28. 

Jesus defeated Satan during his Temptation in the Wilderness, the effects of which were subsequently demonstrated when he exercised authority over demonic spirits in a Synagogue on the Sabbath Day. The town of Capernaum was on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee near the entrance to the River Jordan. It lay across a major trade route between the seacoast and the city of Damascus in the border region between the territories of Philip and Herod Antipas - (Mark 2:14).

[Photo by Stefano Zocca on Unsplash]

Synagogue’ means “gathering place” – It functioned as an assembly hall for Jews to study the Torah. It was not an institution established by the Torah; most likely, the synagogue came into existence during the Babylonian Captivity as a vehicle to maintain Jewish religious practices and identity. It became central to the practice of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple by a Roman army in A.D. 70.

(Mark 1:21-28) - “And they journey into Capernaum. And straightway, on the Sabbath, entering into the synagogue, he began teaching; and they were being struck with astonishment at his teaching—for he was teaching them as one having authority and not as the Scribes. And straightway, there was in their synagogue a man in an impure spirit—and he cried out aloud, saying—What have we in common with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Hast thou come to destroy us? I know thee, who thou art, The Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying—Be silenced and come forth out of him! And the impure spirit, tearing him and calling out with a loud voice, came forth out of him; and they were amazed, one and all, so that they began to discuss among themselves, saying—What is this? New teaching! With authority to the impure spirits also he giveth orders, and they obey him! And forth went the report of him, straightway, on every hand into the surrounding country of Galilee” (The Emphasized Bible).

The Jews at the synagogue were astonished by the authoritative manner by which Jesus taught, but NOT by the content of his teaching. The Jewish scribes expounded the Law by citing oral traditions and legal precedents, the “tradition of the elders.” In general, the scribes did not make authoritative pronouncements on scriptural interpretations; however, Jesus taught decisively on his messianic authority. 

Of the thirteen miracles recorded in the gospel of Mark, four are exorcisms, the most frequent type of healing by Jesus in this gospel. Eleven times it refers to demons as “unclean spirits,” and at least eleven times as “demons.” Four times Mark employs a verbal form of the Greek term for “demons” to signify someone who is “demonized.” In other words, oppressed by demons. 

In this story, “unclean” refers to a state of ritual defilement. A person with an unclean spirit would be excluded from the synagogue and the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem, at least, not without undergoing the required rituals to reestablish ritual purity. Why, in this case, was the man allowed into the synagogue? 

In Mark, the synagogue was a place where, all too often, demons were present, religious authorities antagonistic, and hardness of heart persistent. The synagogue became an arena of conflict whenever Jesus arrived and began to teach - (Mark 1:39, 3:1, 6:2, 12:39, 13:9). 

It is not accidental that the first recorded miracle of Jesus was an exorcism. He came to destroy the works of the Devil - His real battle was with the cosmic forces opposed to God that were determined to enslave humanity. Furthermore, several times he demonstrated his authority over ritual purity. 

The demon spoke through the man - “What to us and to you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” Although only one demon was present, he used the plural pronoun to represent all demonic forces. This event was a harbinger of the larger conflict building between Jesus and the forces of Satan that, ultimately, culminated in his arrest, trial, and execution. 

Thus, the Messiah began to plunder the Strong Man’s house. The “destruction” of the works of Satan was a key component of his ministry. The demon in the synagogue recognized Jesus as the “Holy One of God.” Though hidden from men and women, the demonic spirit knew who and what Jesus was. His command to silence the demon was not an attempt to hide his messianic status; however, by identifying Jesus in public, the demon could discredit his mission. 

More than the content of his teachings, what matters in this paragraph is the way in which he taught - As “one having authority” - and its effect on the assembly in the synagogue - (“They were all amazed”). His words demonstrated his superior authority over that of the scribes. His exorcisms demonstrated his authority over the Devil. The authority by which he taught was the same authority by which he expelled demons. Each exorcism demonstrated that the “coming one” was reconquering territory from Satan and adding it to the Kingdom of God.

[Originally published on Disciples Global Network website]

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[facingthenorthwind]

an open letter to ars paradoxica

@arsparadoxica

In episode 24, Esther compares internment of Japanese-Americans to Majdanek. I'm extremely uncomfortable with this because Majdanek was the first death camp found by the allies and the only one to be found intact, which made it one of the most widely-publicised and well-known symbols of the Shoah in the immediate post-war period.

At Nuremberg, the Soviets accused the Nazis in charge of Majdanek of the murder of 1.5 million people, and even in 1960, the Soviet estimate was 350,000. The estimate these days is quite a bit lower than those figures, and while the internment of American citizens for no crime was immoral, reprehensible, indefensible and definitely caused lasting damage to the survivors and descendants of that internment -- including the roughly 2000 who died in internment -- I think it is dangerous and dishonest to compare it to a death camp where 90,000-150,000 people were murdered.

But, honestly, the most telling thing for me is your mispronounciation of 'Majdanek'. Esther would absolutely know how to pronounce it (she speaks Yiddish, her family's surname was Russian; she knows that's not an English j) -- which is not how it was pronounced in the episode. It's Polish; if you google 'how to pronounce Majdanek' a sound file comes up hosted on a .edu site near the bottom of the first page of results, accompanied by a phonetic approximation in writing.

Particularly in light of the rise in neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial, I ask the ars team to reconsider -- if nothing else, dubbing the pronunciation of Majdanek. Preferably removing the 'hair's breadth' comment, too. Pretty much any other mention of the way both sides imprisoned people would be fine! But as it stands, it really feels quite ugly that no one checked how to say Majdanek out loud.

I used to love ars Paradoxica -- I was a patreon supporter for some time! -- and I still want to but these continued errors have made me feel extremely unwelcome as a listener. Last time I brought up some concerns about the way you were ignoring the atrocities of the Shoah, it seemed like you were receptive to that criticism. I was really hopeful that you were going to narratively address the difficult moral and emotional implications of setting a time travel show in the Cold War with an anchor point in 1943. But ultimately not much came of it besides a shoehorned lampshade in ep 22, where Chet Whickman dismissed the idea as "logistically impossible" (read: "too hard") without Bridget pushing the issue at all or Esther even present to speak for herself. It really seems that the ars team doesn't feel that it's necessary to put the effort into being sensitive to a marginalised character's heritage/identity/history, unless it's convenient for the narrative.

The conversation in episode 22 and Esther's comments in episode 24 together feel like a kick in the teeth, it makes me really sad that you don't take the cultural and individual trauma that the Shoah inflicted on Esther (as a Jewish woman) seriously.

(many thanks to @let-it-be-extraordinary for their enormous amount of help with this post)