#working for 9 years to get this award being told they weren’t worth it

[mikrrokosmos]

just watched svts acceptance speech for mama and im crying

[lanwinograd-blog]

Topic:Men's RIghts Movement

During the very late hours of November 8, 2016 and early morning November 9, 2016, I sat in shock along with the rest of the country. The most qualified person to ever run for President had been defeated by a bumbling, sexist, clown. How did this happen? What actually happened? I spent a lot of time dissecting the election, and of course I ended up looking at whether or not gender played a role. Four years later Biden would pretty easily defeat the clown. The 2016 election was so close I wondered “if Hillary were a man, would she have won? How many people voted against her just because she was female?” While I watched the Trump supporters (of the asshole variety) gloat on Facebook, I would occasionally see people post “A win for men! A woman can’t be President. The Men’s Rights Movement Survives!” It goes without saying that anyone who said that repulses me…but “men’s right’s movement?” WTF is that? It sounded like a White Power thing…something that would repulse me…however, I had to do my research, to prove to myself it was nonsense…and, spoiler alert…for the most part it is, but not completely.

Now, let me get something out of the way right now…there are many hateful organizations that cloak themselves are fighting for “Men’s Rights.” Incels, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, etc. I always assumed that anyone who supported even examining “Men’s Rights” was filled with hate. Well, I’m not filled with hate. I’m a feminist…and I don’t identify that way in an effort to get laid…cause well, although I’m not an “incel” I’m incel. (get it…hahaha). As I started my research I was lead to the “documentary” titled “The Red Pill.” Great…a documentary making some stupid Matrix analogy. Before I watched it I did a little research on it…it was funded by Prager University and Milo Yiannopoulos. Greeeattt…a movie funded by an organization I hate with a passion, and a person I hate with a passion. Ohh, and the person interviewed the most was Paul Elam…(male backwards…coincidence? mmmmm) who is quoted as saying “P---- is the only real empowerment women will ever know. Put all the hopelessly wishful thinking of feminist ideology aside and what remains is the fact that it is men and pretty much men only who draw power from accomplishment, who invent technology, build nations, cure disease, create empires and generally advance civilization. Women whether acknowledging it makes us feel warm and fuzzy or not, depend on men for all of that and the only tool they have at their disposal to have any sort of influence on any of it is the power of p---- and p---- is powerful indeed…Sexual robotics may well prove to be the best thing that ever happened to women from the standpoint of their humanity.... what would that do to the vast majority of women who would suddenly have to prove their worth as human beings beyond simply being the owners of said p——." I was not excited to watch this but I had to if I was going to write about it…however much I thought the whole concept was nonsense. So, as promised, I watched it, and yes, most of it was not reality based. Making dumb points that “Women and children are always brought to safety before men in an emergency” and “women should make less than men cause they live longer.” Honestly, I don’t even see how one had bearing on the other…and that “men are victimized in domestic violence situations almost as much as women.” Wait…is that true? The first two were opinion and the third was an actual statement of fact. Now, I wasn’t going to trust anything this movie said so I had to do my research. The answer surprised me…of course it was no…women are the victim quite a bit more, but the number of male victims was not as low as I originally had thought. “The crime survey’s stats also showed that 3.8% of men (equal to 786,000) and 7.5% of women (1.6m) were victims of domestic abuse in 2018/19. As ManKind points out: ‘For every three victims of domestic abuse, two will be female, one will be male.’”(National Domestic Violence Data Base). However while this is true, there is only one domestic violence shelter for men in the entire United States. This also can be misleading because the majority of DV shelters are unisex. Now, the movie pretty much had the thesis “someone cannot be a feminist if they admit males are disadvantaged AT ALL.” I disagree with this whole heartedly…because just looking at certain statistics…males are disadvantaged. Keep in mind, I identify as a feminist. Now, it goes without saying that if you take list and write the ways women are discriminated against the way men are discriminated against, you might have a mile high list for the women, and half a sheet of paper for the men. But the half a sheet of paper is not zero. It’s those things I would like to discuss. Now, let’s get some faulty statistics out of the way…you know, the ones the movie pushes. 93% of work places deaths are men…true but out of context…men typically have more physical jobs due to genetic makeup and women have just recently been taking part in these jobs. The movie states that 90% of the homeless population is men…that is just a flat out lie…it is 60%. The movie states that 90% of suicides is the United States are men. While that is not true, the number is 78%. Why this disparity. The only conclusion I could come up with is that men, throughout history have been taught to hide their emotions or they will come off as “a p—-.” I even have examples in my own life where I held back true emotion under fear of being ostracized. One thing that wasn’t mentioned in the movie but has always bothered me from observed experiences is false allegations against men. Whenever someone comes out against a politician or celebrity and accuses them of rape and/or sexual assault men are asked to fall in line, and not voice any other opinion other than “the woman is telling the truth.” I have encountered this twice in the past year. The first time was when I posted that Aziz Ansari did nothing wrong and the I did not believe the claims of Tara Reade against Joe Biden. Holy hell did men and women come after me like I was a woman-hating chauvinist pig. I pride myself in not being that; however I was called things I will not mention in this rant…but they were bad. Before I get myself into too much trouble, let me say that I believe every sexual assault allegation should be taken very seriously and thoroughly vetted by the police and any other agency that looks into it…however, that doesn’t mean they are all true. I will often times be told…only 8% of rape accusations end up being false…so the numbers speak for themselves. Actually, it’s 5.9% but I do believe that number is out of context. That number (5.9%) are rape allegations that are proven…100% to be false by either a confession of the woman, DNA showing it was another man, or proof that the man accused was in another state or country. However, the amount 44.9% of rape accusations are not handed over to the prosecutor. That number can also be misleading because prior to the #metoo movement…there was the ethic that “boys will be boys”…and I’m happy that is dead because it is offensive. I do predict the number of rape accusations handed over to the DA office will go up, but the amount not handed over will never be as low as 5.9%. Also, if a man and a woman are both blacked out drunk and have sex, the likelihood of the man getting arrested is much higher than the woman. The one place, and yes, only one, where I believe the woman has every advantage over the man is in Family Court. First, I am as pro-life as they get. Once a woman is pregnant is totally her choice whether or not to keep the baby…the man had a choice when he choose to have sex and put himself in that position…and that is probably 99% of the time…however, what about that 1% (these aren’t actual statistics). There are two types of men that have to be looked at here…married and unmarried. First, lets look at unmarried men. If an unmarried man is the father of a woman’s baby, he must pay child support…no questions, with only two exceptions (unless the woman doesn’t want it or another man adopts the child). However, would you believe that “sperm stealing” is actually a thing? I honestly though it just happened on lawyer shows and cop shows. Examples of this really are limited to a woman telling a man she is on the pill (probably cause of the heat of moment) while she is not. The movie quoted a Nigerian Story where a hotel maid took a condom out of the garbage and impregnated herself. Well, upon further research…that ended up being a satirical story with no truth to it. The movie also claimed that women use other “sexual techniques” to get the sperm, and than impregnate themselves with it…I could not find any examples of such. However, female on male rape is a real thing, admittedly much rarer than it’s counterpart, where once the woman gets out of jail, she can fight the man for custody…assuming she did not put the child up for adoption and the man is the sole custodian. When it comes to married men, their are much sadder stories. One thing the movie showed that I thought was insightful (and there weren’t many), was a woman on “The Wendy Williams Show” saying she wanted to have another child but her husband didn’t, so she was going to “trick him” and THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE clapped with approval. Here are some statistics that really made me think…and I’m still thinking: Fathers are granted custody only 18.3% of the time Mothers are awarded child support nearly 2 times as often as fathers are Fathers are awarded nearly 10% less, on average, in child support Fathers receive less of the awarded child support than mothers 69% of people surveyed believe that having two parents in the home is essential to a child’s happiness More than 25% of fathers live apart from their children Only 10% of nonresident fathers help their children with their homework Nearly 60% of fathers who do not get custody, speak to their children on the phone 4 times a month or less Over 25% of fathers who do not get custody, have zero in-person visits with their children each year Nearly all (97%) of the fathers surveyed agree that the rewards of being a parent are worth the costs/work that go into it. (National Institute of Divorce and Custody) Believe it or not…their are some good men out there. Men who want to be in their child’s life…I would actually say that is probably the majority; but being the woman holds the baby for nine months, it would appear she is preferred once those nine months are over. One of the saddest issues is false paternity. In all 50 states, when a married woman gives birth, the husband is legally deemed to be the father. However, what if he isn’t? What is the woman had an affair? Irrelevant. It is also illegal to perform a paternity test on a baby without either the mother’s consent or a court order. In these situations there are two male victims. First is the husband, who could be raising a child that is not his…and if he finds out the child is not his, he will be on the hook for child support anyway and has already formed an emotional connection with the child. The second victim is the biological father who will have NO LEGAL rights to a child that is biologically his. While asshole men might see this as a blessing…I have personally met men who have become suicidal over this. In conclusion, I am not a Men’s Rights Advocate…I am a feminist. However, I enjoy ranting on issues that people don’t talk about…all the way from porcupines to men’s rights…that doesn’t mean I fall on any side. I believe that in order to gain equality we have to work on and focus on how females have been discriminated against over the years; but to just ignore the (albeit few) ways men are discriminated against is irresponsible.

[vanaera]

Dandelions on Stage

Synopsis | You've always stayed far from the limelight and Jungkook hates to see you hide yourself and the wonderful things you can do in the dark. He encourages you to take The spotlight, but then he kinda regrets it when you aimed for The actual spotlight. Look, you mean a different thing and it looks like Jungkook quite made a mistake just to have the spotlight with you. Well, here goes something new he has to overcome again.

Genre | Fluff (tooth aching fluff) (football!jk + childhood friend!you)

Word count |3,892 (I’m sorry this gif made me lose control)

Disclaimer |  GIF credits to @jungshiii​

Read more of football!jk drabbles in The Prince and His Rose

     Jeon Jungkook likes a lot of things. Football, his friends and family, pizza, action and horror movies, Buzzfeed Unsolved, and of course you. Everyone knows these except the last part (everyone actually knows except you). But just like how he likes a lot of things, there are also some things that makes Jungkook's mind pass out in irritation and unfortunately that also applies to his love of his life. And no, chasing for your affections is definitely not irritating, he practically enjoys every second of it. It's actually the way you make yourself smaller, and stay far from the limelight when you actually deserve every shine and exposure you could get having the spotlight. You've always been the center of the galaxy when you were young, why shy away from your own glow now?

Otor-nim Y/N: You know I'm not that confident, Kook. Let's just brush it off there'll be more opportunities to come I'm just not ready yet. (9:39 P.M.)

     Jungkook wishes his glare could penetrate the screen of his laptop just so he can make you understand what the hell you're missing on.

Star Kook: But the play will be directed by Kim Aeri! Your favorite prof in Lit and damn I say for sure she's impressed with your works in class even if she looks apathetic to it with her mean frown. I mean, you're the only one who got 1 in her class in our batch!

     Jungkook always knew your admiration for your literature professor and the way she directs plays managed by the Drama club in the university that even received awards that prided your school in the field of performing arts and literature. He remembers you squealing in your freshman year when you told him you want to try writing scripts for a play too. Sure enough, you became one of the contributing writers of the next production. You dragged him along with you to watch what you helped to create eventhough Jungkook has mixed feelings about it just the moment he read the tagline of that play. Maybe he's kinda disappointed you weren’t the head writer that came up with the whole storyline when you can produce much better work in the first place - maybe he's just biased to your works, mostly to you, he can't quite tell. Looking at you beside him in the dark auditorium smiling so wide and hands clasped in excitement, he decides he'll just be by your side in your writing endeavors if he'll get to see you this happy upclose.

    By sophomore year, he thinks the minimal distance between you two wasn't enough for him when the realization of the reality of his affections for you finally settled in. If he has to defy distances to strengthen the gravitational attraction between you two just so he can satisfy his desire to orbit around you closer, then so be it. He joined the Drama Club too and he helped in the lightings and sound management - whatever Namjoon hyung preferred him to help him with for the production at hand. He hasn't joined any organizations yet in the university anyway and his experience in theater actually helped him in creating better animations he uploads in his youtube account. Of course, seeing you more frequently around the university is a great and one of a kind incentive.

     However, it irritates him to see you getting bossed around by your senior head writer who most of the time demands you to just write what his vision for the play is. It's excruciating to see you face rejection upon rejection of your storylines worth taking a physical form onstage just because of people refuse to get out of the well and explore new things worth tackling about. But most of all, it pains him to see you getting upset and disappointed of yourself when some of your suggestions for the plot got turned down "just because I'm only a contributing writer," you cried to him on some nights. He's very sad he can't do anything but embrace your shaking frame with the warmth he offers and he cards his fingers through your hair as he whispers "It would be okay. You'll get your shot soon," against your forehead. He knows it's hard to change one's perspective of themself so soon so he'll just try and try until you start to believe in yourself again.

     Now that it's junior year and the senior head writer finally graduated and is now far away from the club, the club is looking for a new head writer and new actors for a play they'll present in front of critics and journalists who decided to write your university's productions in a magazine. That's why the dots on the screen next to your name that kept going on and on frustrate the hell out of Jungkook.

Star Kook: If you want to make your dreams come true, you have to go out and make it work. That's sounds similar what you said to me back then, remember?

    "What do you want to do in your life, Jungkook?" you asked him, a question too heavy for your premature 14-year old mind, so casually while twirling a white dandelion.

     "I don't know yet. I'm not good in anything yet," Jungkook murmurs and he was startled when you suddenly nudged him with another dandelion for him to hold. He accepts it anyway. "What about you?"

     "I'm going to be a writer. A very good one," you beamed at him, giggling and eyes resembling half moons.

     Jungkook stares at you. He's never seen eyes so bright like yours before.

     When you look at him funny with your forehead furrowed, he breaks from his stupor and mumbles, "Th-That's great. I-I'm kinda embarrassed I still don't know what I'm good at."

     "You know you'll find it soon, right? You just have to get out there to find it though. Only then you'll be happy with yourself."

     Laughing at his blank look, you just tapped him and said, "Let's just blow the dandelions away and hope for the best, hmm?"

     "Yeah." And you blew away the petals hoping it carries your dreams and hopes somewhere in the following years.

Star Kook: I hope you still remember what you said to me in your garden.

 ***

      "I'm going to do it, Jungkook."

     "What?" Jungkook almost chokes on his breakfast.

     "I'm going to take the spotlight!" you lunge yourself towards him to hug the life out of him and Jungkook opens his arms to engulf you in his warmth, sandwich and coffee now at the back of his mind. Spotlight? You're gonna go onstage? Why not the head writer? Maybe you got it wrong, no? What he actually meant in his message is for you to take the head writer position, not be an actress so suddenly.

     You mumble in his jacket, "So many people are going to recognize me! Thank you so much for the encouragement!"

     Jungkook manages a crooked smile. He didn't expect you to decide so suddenly to be an actress, but well, you always manage to surprise him in every moment of his life in the first place. Whatever you do, your call.

     "That's great! You finally put your head in good use," he lightly flicks your forehead.

      "Meanie," you pouted before breaking into another giggling fit. "But I'll agree with you on that."

     Jungkook laughs. He knows he'll forever be by your side in the adventures you'll take in your craft.

     The next week, particularly the week of the applications, Jungkook suddenly thinks he might be wrong in encouraging you.

     "Jongin, you're gonna apply for the main role, right?" Jungkook hears Kyungsoo by the neighboring table in the cafeteria and he can't help but keep his ears open to their direction.

     "Umm, yeah. I've been eyeing the spotlight since freshman. Prof. Kim already posted the upcoming production is a musical about unfortunate love between polar realms and it's up to the new head writer how he... or she could work around under Prof. Kim's guidance. Anyway, the head writer will work solely alone in the next project so the next storylines will be totally different and it's kinda exciting."

     With clammy fingers, Jungkook types up your name in his messaging app. You're taking too long to get in the cafeteria for your snack anyway.

Jungkook : Hey, where are you? And what do you mean by spotlight last week? (10:47 AM)

 Y/N : I'm on the way!!! And The spotlight spotlight! (10:48 AM)   

    Damn it.

    If you're going to take The spotlight, he can't let Kim Jongin, top ballet dancer, be your freaking leading man. That guy's been unnecessarily getting too close to you this year with all that "inquiries about the script" he does in the Drama Club and all he can do is watch with green envy up in the sound control room as you interact with that guy. In his defense, why the hell does a side character have to interact with the writer in the first place? He should go to the director to ask!

    Of course, he's definitely not shittalking Jongin just because of his childish desire to be your leading man if you're going to be the star female lead. It's definitely not because he may or may have not also daydreamed of being your male lead that may hopefully come true in the real life. It's definitely not because of that.

     Bitter thoughts left him the moment you ran to his table huffing land catching for your breath.

     "You're so late! What took you so long?" He grabs your bag to set it beside his in his chair.

     "My - ha - my Bio prof extended the class."

      "Oh. Okay. Understandable too with that short legs of yours."

      "Meanie!"

      Later that day he accompanied you to hand in your application to Prof. Kim in the Drama Club. Unbeknownst to you, after he walked you to your dorm that afternoon, he sprinted to the Drama Club and rushed an application of his.

     And it's definitely because he thinks of the best for the play. Of course he's more suitable for the lead role than that Jongin guy.

 //

      Jungkook didn't expect to be awaken mid-five o'clock in the morning after two weeks since the audition he spent nights to work on. He actually crashed polished his dancing and singing skills that got quite rustic after he focused on football. So who the hell disturbed him from his much needed rest -

     "Jungkook! Oh my God I finally got the spotlight!"

     Jungkook's eyes shot open and a smile immediately replaces his irritated scowl. He turns to his side, his day already made with having you call him first thing in the morning. "Oh - oh yeah... That's great." So is the thought of you being his lead female. He already got the acceptance letter in his e-mail yesterday. It's only time you -

     "And oh my god, you got the lead male role! I didn't expect you to actually go onstage my God, imagine former sound and light technical Jeon Jungkook now the male lead of a production? What a promotion, man! You must have spent nights after your practices just to get the choreos in musicals!"

     Jungkook chuckles; you always knew him like the back of your hand.

     "Anyway I'm the new head writer and Prof. Kim already gave me the guidelines of the prod although I'll be on my own and submit for approvals for the next -

      Wait, what?

     "You - you're not the female lead?"

     "Of course, no. Jungkook, what are you thinking?"

     "But you - you told me you're going to take The spotlight spotlight?"

     "I mean yeah, the head writer position is The spotlight spotlight! Did you actually think I'm going for The spotlight female lead?! I can't even act for Christ's sake! Anyway as I was saying, I'm looking forward working with you, Dusk."

     God, what did he get himself into?

 //

      One to two hours of vocal practice everyday along with another two hours of dance practice every other day, Jungkook decided to trade in his morning sleep-ins for morning football practice to manage his schedule he drowned himself in. His friends Jimin and Taehyung told him he was kinda - scratch that - actual idiot for spreading himself thin to reach the girl he likes. Well, he reasoned what he does wasn't one sided when you've always tried to stay later to accompany him in his late football practices eventhough he told you you can just go home. You just wave him off from the bench you're sitting on and proceed to diligently work on your homeworks and some pieces you could slide in your sched as stress relievers. It's only fair he reach out for you too, when fate's freely giving him opportunities to strengthen his gravitational pull on you. Sometimes, Jungkook thinks his intention in his involvement in the play was quite selfish and it's the first time he actually felt good about it. He only attended practices just so he can see you prancing around his vicinity, doing this and that, talking to the professor, the side casts, and lastly the lead characters. But most of all, he lives for the days you'll get to practice with him one-on-one for his delivery of the lines and other things.

     "Hey! Have you memorized the new set you'll dry run tomorrow? I-" you entered one of the rooms in the backstage to see him hunched over the desk, fingers tapping a beat against the wooden table.

     "What? Oh ah, yeah. Just a couple more and then I'm finally done for the set." He looked up at you, huge reading glasses perched on his nose. He immediately returns his eyes onto the script you must have spent nights and days writing before he could drink in your lithe form dressed in fitting jeans and denim top that just accentuates every curve you're blessed with. God, you're going to be the death of him.

     You sat on the bench facing him, fingers coaxing him to give you the script he's been reading over and over. "I've seen you burning holes in this with your intense gaze yesterday. I think you already got enough to be properly presented."

    Jungkook clears his throat. Right, you're very professional in whatever business you engage into, and he can't help but think half of what his classmates said about you is true : all-businessy, serious, and quite intimidating. However he finds this attitude of yours inspiring instead of condescending, and highly attractive rather than scary. You managed to own quite of a huge place in his heart and Jungkook would always know it's only right for an amazing person to do so.

     Jungkook says his lines with you nodding your head and it makes him anxious as up until he mutters the last line for the scene. " ...I bring the indigos and blues that color the skyline, my hues laden with rues your vibrant colors can never alight."

      "Good! You've already done the segmenting of each line properly," you said as you glance at the script then back at him, a wide crescent now visible on your lips. He knows he's the only one given the privilege to see you like this in the club when you just ease out small smiles here and there to your co-workers and that thought alone paints a huge grin on his face.

     "Just loosen the tension and the anxiousness then practice the feelings and such among these lines. Think of something you've always wanted to have yet everyone around you prevents you to reach that by setting more distance between you two. You get what I mean?" Jungkook nods. That's easy. He could just think of his current situation in the standing for your heart, his heart too, that got him to his position now.

     "That's only it. You don't have to stay too long here now. Jimin's ranting to me yesterday how I now literally glued you to my side," you chuckle as you motioned to him, standing up to let him fix his things. But before he could tear his gaze from you, his face is suddenly cupped by two hands. And now he's looking at you with centimeters apart from your breaths as you slowly take off the glasses from his face.

     "You know you should really clean your glasses," you brought up your small handkerchief he knows you always carry around to wipe the lens. "I really don't know how you can manage to work with these looking all blurry and stuff." Giggling, you fit his glasses back onto his face, palms warm against his hot cheeks, tapping them twice before snorting. "You only look cute like this when you've shut your mouth."

     Scoffing, Jungkook playfully pushes your hands away. "Oh, please, I always look cute."

     "Whatever you say, Kook. I'll go to the dorms late today so don't wait for me!"

      "Of course not!" He hollers and then you're off his sight, the birds in his ribcage letting out sighs of repressed songs now free in the open.

      Later that night, Jungkook comes by the front door of the designated room of the Drama Club and you flicked his forehead for being stubborn. He walks you to your dorm and leaves with a goodnight wish and quick hug enough to warm his chest for the cold evening as he heads for his dorm.

     Of course, not all days are like this, especially when he has annoying Kim Jongin frustratingly hogging you when it's scheduled for you to meet the other cast. And during those days, he finds himself making up ridiculous requests just to tear that ballet boy away from you.

    "You requested for a run on for your lines again? We already went throught that yesterday!"

     "I need more practice."

     "Ugh, fine."

     ---

     "You said you requested for my appearance. What's your deal now?"

     "Nothing, just wanna see your dumb face."

      "Damn you, I'm leaving."

      "No, wait!"

     Sometimes he wishes he haven't taken the lead role so he won't have to deal with the burning stares of that irritating ballet dancer; so that he can work with Namjoon hyung again, seeing the man around the campus giving him funny nuances "You've been quite ambitious this hear, huh," or "I missed working with you, kid," that absolutely makes his heart cringe and soften at the same time for his hyung. But all of those are dismissed whenever he can see you on the other side of the stage, smiling and proud of your work as you see it take form in the lines he delivers perfectly for the dry runs. Imagining your face in the place of Lee Sungyeon, a senior he's good friends with and the lead female in the play, surely helped him give a good performance in the practices. Though sometimes, it's kinda hard when Sungyeon suddenly breaks into an awkward fit of giggles because she just had to repeat over and over again she's expecting Jongin to be the lead - not him, which makes him somehow feel bad coveting the spot. But still, he thinks there are more incentives for him to feel great with this impulsive decision he made when he gets praised for the work he does and he gets to see your eyes brighter these days.

     As the performance day nears, your schedule and workload made him see you less and less as he got busier with the final rehearsals. The distance makes him unnecessarily grumpy on some days though your texts of encouragement and evening meals packed in food containers you leave in front of his door easily pacifies the trainwreck he's feeling. However, the actual tornado in his chest comes when it's the D-day and his make-up is already done and the audience is already seated in the auditorium and his hands are already getting sweaty and just - can you at least show your face to him before he probably turn this day the worst day of his life?

      Well, he gets his wish when he hears a "Psst!" in the make-up room his occupying.

      "Holy shit, you scared me," he breathed out as you laughed, letting yourself inside the room.

      Nearing his chair, you played with the rose tresses of his. "Oh yes, your hair's looking good."

     "The make-up committee sprayed it in fucking pink. Taehyung made fun of me when he facetimed me twenty minutes ago."

     "Well, just bear with it. You really look like the Dusk I wrote about so I'm really happy. You look fantastic with it too."

     Jungkook gulps. "R-really?"

     You playfully poke his cheek. "Yes, handsome and it's not everyday you get to hear me say this so better imprint this in your memory."

      "Hell yeah, I will," Jungkook smirks and you let out a guffaw.

     Your phone suddenly rings and it's Professor Kim demanding your presence in the front row of the auditorium. You quickly say you'll be there, and this time Jungkook thinks the real deal is now happening and he's quite ready now after seeing your beautiful face.

     "Hey, I'm going back, now," you say with a smile. And before you leave him be, you hug him suddenly, knocking whatever breath Jungkook was holding in as he encases you in his arms. "Goodluck on the play and I hope you slay it." Pulling yourself away, you give him a quick peck on his cheek. Smiling as always, you mumble, "I promise to treat you in that expensive steakhouse you've been raving to me."

       "Really?"

       "Really."

       And you're off of his sight now, the warmth on his cheeks and on his chest spreading like wildfire consuming whatever wreckage the tornado left. He's more than ready now.

      The play ends successfully and by next week, a magazine about the brilliant performance of the actors and the genius plot of the play lands on your door.

      "Look, they said here 'the male lead's performance is extraordinary though it is necessary to point his attention is focused on the audience rather than the female lead which is quite new for a theater experience.' I can't treat you out!" you laugh, pushing Jungkook's legs off your lap as you throw the magazine to which landed in his awaiting hands.

     "Hey, they never said anything bad! See 'new experience'!" Jungkook emphasizes, index finger going on and on around that line. "Anyway, I think I've had enough of the spotlight. I'm gonna go back to Namjoon hyung."

    "Aww, I'll miss your unnecessary requests no male lead actor has ever done yet in my life."

     "You'll just miss working with me upclose, just admit it," He chortles knowing you'll never gonna say it. How can you? You've always brushed off -

     "That I do."

     Oh god. When it comes to you. It will always feel like he's doing everything for the first time. And Jungkook knows his heart will always combust again and again.

 "You never let me pay for you!"

"A-a man can't let a lady pay."

"Are you a man?"

"Hell yeah, I am!"

"Okay, whatever you say."

"Oy, come back here! I’m as manly as any man can be!”

 A/N: Hi hons! Sorry I wasn’t able to update this week so here’s something long to make up for it. I’ve been overwhelmed after I posted my first oneshot, Translucent Fireworks and so Iet it stay in the frontline of my blog because I feel utterly happy about it. Now, I’m still taking requests though I’ll only be able to post on weekends or whenever I had a free time since college already started. But I promise, I’ll post something for every week. 

Thank you for all the support you’ve been giving me. It really means a lot!

All Rights Reserved © Vanaera. No reposts, modifications, and translations of content is allowed without direct permission.

[stonefieldofdreams]

andrew/emma

so, since last year I’ve been thinking about how andrew still isn’t over emma after TWO years A LOT and I would like to talk about it a little and see what you guys think of this :)

this is a long post, so click on "keep reading” to see all of it.

1. the break up news came around october 2015

2. they were seen together publicly for the first time since the break up on august 2016 when emma went to london to see andrew on his birthday:

3. on october 2016 in her vogue interview, she talked about andrew, saying “[He is] someone I still love very much.”

4. then on november 2016 his interview with vogue came out and he said “ I’m not currently in a relationship with anyone. There is nothing but love between me and Emma.” this was the first time he talked about her after their break up. adding this quote with the photos of them on august it was clear they were still close and IN CONTACT

5. on the beginning december 2016 during hollywood reporter actor roundtable, the actors were asked “You're on a desert island and can have one actor or actress with you. Who?” and andrew’s answer was “Emma Stone. I love Emma. She's all right. She can come.” NOTE: HE COULD HAVE SAID ANY FREAKING ONE. HE DIDN’T. this is actually when i started to think “uh maybe andrew still has feelings for emma”

6. also on december 2016 at the critics choice awards (both emma and andrew attended), andrew said about emma/la la land/her success "It's lovely to see people that you care about and love doing things that are profound and that are seen deeply and are appreciated, it's a beautiful thing."

7. then also at the critics choice awards of course he was asked about his desert island choice, saying “Who wouldn’t want to be on a desert island with Emma? She is the greatest.”

8. critics choice wasn’t done for stonefield so we got two VERY CUTE videos where -this time- andrew wasn’t talking about emma and stuff but she was the one wanting his attention. theres two moments: one is when emma tries to get andrew to look at her and shows her brother spencer where andrew is and two is when she loses her award and turns to andrew so they could drink to that. I WANTED TO CRY.

9. in one interview for the guardian, he said “ I’m always cheering Emma on, in all ways. I’m one of the millions who is grateful that she exists.”

10. 2017 started with the  “awards chatter” podcast and YES YOU GUESSED IT andrew talked about emma, again. when talking about spiderman, he said “ So many beautiful things came out of that. I met someone that remains incredibly important to my life on that -you can fill in the blanks on who that is.” here was when i started to think that he WANTED us to know he still had feelings for emma. like, they were so chill and private when they were together and suddenly he talking about emma every chance he got. and it wasn't like when he was doing interview with emma for tasm. they weren't together anymore.

11. january 6, 2017 we got one picture of them together at the AFI awards. again, they seemed close.

12. the next day we had the golden globes AND EMMA WON. andrews reaction? STANDING OVATION. a super chill reaction from her ex. no biggie. nothing to see here.

13. emma’s reaction when she found out andrew kissed ryan reynolds. she was just standing there but when she hears andrew’s name she’s like WHAT DID YOU SAY

14. also at the golden globes he talked about emma, saying “I dore her and always will.” he was asked about her so i’ll let this one pass, andrew.......

15. january 12, 2017 on his interview with vanity fair, he said “It's been wonderful [doing awards season together] because we care about each other so much, and that's a given, that's kind of this unconditional thing. And there's so much love between us and so much respect. I'll speak for myself: You know, I'm her biggest fan as an artist. I'm constantly inspired by her work. I'm constantly inspired by how she handles and holds herself. So for me, I've—it's been bliss to be able to watch her success and watch her success and watch her bloom into the actress that she is. And it's also been wonderful to have that kind of support for each other. It's nothing but a beautiful thing.” if you watch the video you’ll see in HIS EYES!!! that he still loves her. it’s there. you don’t need to be a close friend to see it. its just so clear to me. he saying that its an “unconditional thing”. good god.

16. after the golden globes they were apparently seen together, which more than ever showed that they were still pretty close. 1+ year after they broke up and they were still being close and andrew was still showing so much love for her, instead of just not talk about her/avoid talk about her, like everyone usually does.

17. as awards season continued, they were both seen together again at the bafta pre-party, hugging and making me want to cry all night listening to sad songs. vanity fair said about that night “We also couldn’t help but notice how Garfield and Stone spent much of the night in rapture of one another. Could the BAFTAs bring everyone’s favorite couple back together?” apparently it could not

18. at the oscar being the most friendly exes ever because that is what normal people do ya know (also pictured: andrews dad)

19. there was A WHOLE LOT OF CUTENESS at the oscar when emma won her award (see THIS and THIS post) + emma looking at andrew from the stage when la la land won for like 2 minutes

20. just when we thought things were cooling down, on november 2017 they were seen together again at the governors awards. e! news said “ As cocktails were served, Garfield chatted with Carey Mulligan by the doorway to the ballroom as Stone walked in. She turned her head and saw him but went straight to her table. During the dinner break, she walked across to the other end of the dining room to Garfield and the two chatted and laughed for almost the dinner entire hour, just the two of them. After the gala, they and their groups walked outside together and chatted on the steps for a while.” note: at this point they were broken up for 2+ years!!!!!!

21. again we had andrew talking about emma when he could 100% not but okay at the sag-aftra interview, saying when talking about spiderman scenes, "I knew that me and Emma were getting along and I knew those scenes were gonna work. She's remarkable as an actor and as a human being. And I knew that was gonna be okay."

22. in an interview with evening standard on december 2017, he said “ It was beautiful to see someone you love being acknowledged like that. I was so pleased for her.” talking about emmas oscar win

23. during “breathe” premiere on december 2017, he was asked about emma. “When asked about Emma's portrayal of the real life Billie Jean King and if there was any friendly competition between the two, especially since both their films are out right now and are based on true events, Andrew laughed."I haven't [seen it] but I'm very excited to," he told E! News. "I'm nothing but supportive and her biggest fan.’” i think the reason people ask andrew about emma still is because he just CANT shut up about her??? we don’t see people asking emma about andrew.

24. and here we are 5 days into 2018 and already have yet another interview where andrew talks about emma. “Yeah, there was one amazing New Year where I was in Hawaii with my mother and a very close person in my life and all of my other family had gone to sleep, and we stood on the coastline where the ocean meets the sand, and it was just us, the three of us, and it was the most intimate New Year’s moment. It was very, very beautiful with two people that I love very much, and under the magic of Hawaii, as well. So I’ve had very nice, beautiful, calm New Year’s, but any wild New Year’s is not worth telling. It always ends up as kind of a shit story actually.” he doesn’t say her name but he doesn’t really have to. I CRIED.

25. this one is going to be me saying what i think, so it may or may not be what andrew meant. keep that in mind. during the same interview for w magazine where he talked about NYE, he also talked about his favorite toy, saying his favorite toy wasn’t even his (it belonged to his brother). you can watch it HERE.

you may be thinking what andrews favorite toy has to do with emma, right? well, after telling that, he says “That is kind of a good indication of what's happening with the rest of my life.” and YES i do think he IS talking about emma and her boyfriend here. something that he loves but isn’t his.

to me, he clearly still loves emma. which, at this point, is kind of sad, because she moved on with her life but he still is in pain. and i want him to be happy.

that is crazy to me, but also totally believable because andrew always made so clear how much he loved emma (when he was with her and even more so after they broke up). so thats my take on all of this.

what do you guys think?

[createdbyangels]

“C”

**Disclaimer - I can’t give details about C’s story, history or current situation.  We are contractually bound to maintain his privacy and intend to do so.  But this story is something I want to remember the details of because it could have only been crafted by God himself.  So there will be lots of letters used in place of names or other details I can’t share.  But this is a record of this story for our family to have in the future because it still seems hard to believe sometimes.

The week of December 9th was our first “back to normal” week, coming off the heels of a 4 week track out, Corbin’s birthday, Thanksgiving at Grandmom’s and our week at Disney.  Our foster license was approved 11/18 but we knew that with everything we had coming up in the next few weeks we wouldn’t even be considering a placement until at least December.  We actually got a very interesting placement email the Thursday we were at Animal Kingdom (our last Disney day) but of course I didn’t see it until late that night (after 7pm) and James and I were not even close to being in a state of mind to have a conversation about it until the next day in the car.  We decided we might be interested and I emailed our placement specialist.  She said she would let them know we were interested but she was pretty sure they had been placed already.  I felt....disappointed.  It was a sibling set in our age range it seemed like we could have been a good fit.  Several days later (the beginning of the next week I think) we got another placement email but it wasn’t something we could handle.

In the mean time, we have some friends at church who have become GREAT friends over the past year.  We didn’t realize until after we started getting to know each other that they had actually been licensed through the same agency we used months before we were.  They have teenage kids and are fostering teens - and are a general wealth of parenting knowledge along with being all around wonderful people.  And since it is hard to understand the journey of fostering if you haven’t been through the work that goes into it, we talk often about how we are feeling and what is going on.  M called me early in the week of December 9th to talk to me about a placement they were working on.  She would be visiting for the weekend (they’d met her once before) and our friends were excited about the potential.  The circumstances were different this time than they had been in past placements.  We talked for a while about what it would look like, expectations for the weekend and the fact that T had a brother who was also trying to be matched.  M asked what our age range was and when I told her “3-9″ nothing else was said.  I had a very small moment where I felt like I should offer to host the brother (even though he was out of our range) because he needed somewhere to go but I decided against it.  It might be weird to insert myself into their family’s journey and I didn’t know anything about this kid.  And he is 11 which is way older than our range anyway. So we wrapped up our call with promises to pray and keep each other in the loop.  And we knew we’d see each other Sunday at church and I’d get to meet T.

So Sunday 12/15 we got to see each other and I briefly met T since she was with our friends.  They’d had a good weekend and I found out that things hadn’t gone as well for the brother.  He’d met a few families but it wasn’t looking like they’d found a great fit.  But the siblings had to be moved to a new placement ASAP and they were relocating them to be near an older sister who was adopted a few years ago and is currently in the greater Raleigh area.

Monday 12/16 I was beginning to feel “back to normal” after all the trips and reentry from the trips.  I dropped everyone off at school and came home prepared to spend several hours working.  It was my favorite day of the year...Savannah’s school had extended hours as a “parent shopping day” so I didn’t have to pick her up until 2:30!! (Usually Monday pick up is 1:15 after kidokinetics and W/F are 12:30).  So I get to my desk and there is an email from our specialist.  Asking if we’d be interested in a “temporary placement” for a boy who we might be somewhat familiar with because our friends are taking his sister.

So, now we have been officially added to the mix.  I just stared at the screen for a minute and as I was typing a text to James I got one from him.  “You see the email?”  So I called him.  And told him everything I knew (which I hadn’t done before then because honestly, I assumed he wouldn’t care and things had been shared in confidence by my friend on the phone the week before).  James had hesitations.  There was still a family that might be interesting in taking him but they “didn’t want to move too quickly”so they weren’t ready for him to move in yet.  But it was time for him to move somewhere.  So maybe we’d just be a stop over while he visited and got to know the other family.  That seemed too risky to James.  He didn’t want to be another disappointment in C’s story.  Another failed placement.  And, he is a 6th grader.  Not even on our radar.  But everything I knew made me very insistent that it was our time.  We would frame it as, “We are getting you to the area to be close to your sisters and make it easier to find your forever home”  I had a long conversation with our placement specialist about that concern and how I wanted to be sure to talk about it.  She was on board.  At that point they said he might be arriving tomorrow.  As in, 24 hours from that initial conversation.  I called my friend and told her what was happening.  She was shocked that we’d been looped in.  And that we’d said yes.  Then she told me that T wasn’t coming until Wednesday bc that was the soonest they could be ready for her so we shouldn’t expect C until then either.  I couldn’t focus on anything else that day.  There was suddenly so much to do.  So many loose ends to tie up.  A mattress topper so the bed was more comfortable. Matching Christmas jammies since the rest of the family had them already (those came from our kindness elf so don’t mention that part of the story to the kids until they are older).  I had just THE NIGHT BEFORE gotten us tickets to a Carolina Hurricanes game in January (using Corbin’s 2 free tickets through a school reading program) so I called all the people and found a seat in the row directly behind us.so James could sit right behind us and we could all go.  We talked to the kids about what was going on and they were SO EXCITED. I honestly have no idea what happened on Tuesday.  On Wednesday I met my life group at church to help with something and then picked S up from school.  We ran one more last minute errand and then we came home to wait.

C arrived with his social worker shortly after 2pm.  He was shy and nervous but luckily Savannah is neither of those things and launched right into making him feel at home.  He’d made an ornament for our Christmas tree.  I talked to the worker for a while and then she drove away and left me fully in charge.  We played basketball for a while after showing him around the house.  When Corbin got home he was eating a sandwich.  They smiled at each other and within an hour it was like they’d know each other forever.

We went to Chick Fil A for dinner (C’s request) that night and James met us there from work.  He ended up having to turn around and go back to work that night before C’s bedtime.  C and I played a game until he got home and we tucked him in for the first time.  I distinctly remember trying to figure out what it must feel like to be 11 years old and suddenly living in a totally new place with new people and new everything.  And kind of being a professional at doing that. I couldn’t fathom it and it made me so so sad.

He had a good night sleep and the next day we were off to the races - an awards ceremony at Corbin’s school, meetings with social workers and our licensing specialist (that happened at James’s property so my dad actually got to meet C on day 2 because he was there doing a set up) and the workers bringing the rest of C’s stuff.  A LOT of stuff.  and SO. MANY. CHRISTMAS. PRESENTS.  They were concerned he wouldn’t get much at his previous placement so they really overcompensated and sent him approximately 2-3 Christmases worth of stuff.

I had a great friend in the neighborhood come over before Christmas and help me go through, open and sort the gifts to make it more manageable.  Friday he came with me to Savannah’s Christmas program at preschool.  He moved to the aisle so he could see better during their songs.  Things flowed easier than I expected.  The boys couldn’t wait for the weekend so Corbin would be home for a week and a half on Christmas break.  And boy do they have a good time together.

Now to some of the crazy things.  We found out that the family who adopted the oldest sister is friend’s with our pastor.  They go way back.  So even though all 3 siblings are placed with different families there is a tie that runs through all 3 of us.

Also - C came to us on 12/18.  Exactly one month after we got our license.  And crazier still, exactly ONE YEAR to the day from the day my leg pain moved from something annoying to something that I thought was really a problem,  I’ve said many times that I think God literally laid me out so I could understand that I’m not in control and even if I stop spinning all the plates, the world will keep turning. AND exactly one year TO THE DAY from the day I went with Pam to see “Instant Family” in the theater and told her, the first person I said it out loud to, that James and I had officially made the decision to look into adoption through foster care.  I spoke the words to someone after seeing a movie on the topic and 365 days later, C arrived.  

There are some crazy connections regarding his legal name that I obviously can’t share but they are enough to give you pause for sure.

Here is a story I shared on FB on Christmas:

Several weeks ago I went and bought "Santa wrapping paper" (2 rolls per kid for some reason) and stashed it in the back of the closet. I pulled it out yesterday and my heart skipped a beat when I realized that one of the rolls was Snoopy driving Santa's sleigh. It was meant for Corbin but I'm not sure why I picked it since neither of my kids are very interested in Charlie Brown. C LOVES Snoopy. He has several stuffed animals he sleeps with and his night light is even Snoopy. He has proclaimed his love more than once over the past week.  And one of the presents we unwrapped in the stash the social workers brought was a giant box of Nerds (one of the novelty ones) with grape and strawberry nerds.  A day or 2 before opening that package, I was laying on Corbin’s bed with the boys reading before bed.  They were acting a fool (per the norm) and I called them nerds.  They laughed and laughed and said, “Are you gonna eat us!?”  I pointed to them one at a time and said, “You’re strawberry and you’re grape”  And then I find the box.  That box came from me to them on Christmas.  They thought it was hilarious. No one can convince me that God didn't know long before we did that we'd have an extra stocking to fill this Christmas. I am so grateful for His perfect timing and faithfulness.

I saw that oldest sibling’s family had shared their story with a local church congregation during their Christmas service.  We had friends over for Christmas dinner who go to one of the campuses.  I asked if they’d heard the story or seen “these people” and they said, “YES!” They told me some of the story the family had shared (a story I already knew) and then said, “We wondered what happened to the other sister and brother she mentioned”.  My response?  “The brother.  He is upstairs” 

It keeps happening.  Please understand this wasn’t a local placement.  These kids came from a few hours away.  But the story continues to be woven together in a way that can only be explained by God.

It is day 16 and C started middle school today.  He was a lot more emotional than I thought he would be and it broke my heart.  I spent the day worried about him.  He came home smiling though.

The kids regularly and freely talk about how C should live here forever.  Our agency won’t start those conversations for at least 6 months.  We are all open but James and I are being careful about what we say.  16 days feels like a lot.  But it obviously is not.  To say this is a MAJOR decision is an understatement.  So, we continue to take it one day at a time and wait to see what God will do next.

[ramajmedia]

Bohemian Rhapsody: 10 Hidden Details Everyone Completely Missed

Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of the legendary Freddie Mercury, was a big-screen success from its launch day, with fans of Queen and Mercury, along with the general public, flocking to theatres to see the back story of the music icon.

Mercury, in his day, shook the world and left indefinable footprints across the music of his time. The film showcased phenomenal concert moments, showed the story behind his award-winning songs and revived the legend of Queen and the singer. Here are just 10 details you might not have noticed about the show or known about the making of the phenomenal movie:

10 Inspired by the Old West

The actual song Bohemian Rhapsody was first started by Freddie Mercury in 1968. It was begun with just one line, 'Mama, I just killed a man'. Mercury said his inspiration had been the Old West and truth be told, he almost called the popular song, 'The Cowboy Song'.

RELATED: 10 Biopics About Celebrities That Are Worth Watching

As he worked on the lyrics and chiseled them into what is today's famous Bohemian Rhapsody, he changed the name. Today, some fans call it 'Bo Rhap' but somehow one couldn't imagine the song with any other name.

9 Big names in the industry come together

The crew behind the movie included some big names in Tinsel Town, who gave it a solid foundation of gold on which to build big-screen success. Many well-regarded industry staples added their might to the film's proceedings.

Among those pulling strings behind the scenes was screen legend Robert De Niro, known for his skill and industry know-how. He joined the Bohemian Rhapsody team as one of the producers. Fans might not know that De Niro has been producing movies for many years. He was also extensively involved in producing Queen The Musical.

8 All in good time

Fans of the movie might not realize the extent of the work that went on behind the scenes of the film. The movie took a full ten years to take flight. Before it ever came to the big screen, issues among actors and directors had to be ironed out.

There were also other numerous delays and specifics which had to be worked out but a decade's delay did not stop it from being a smashing success. It just goes to show that when one believes they are sitting on gold, the dream is worth pursuing.

7 Recreating the past

Sure, movie directors often place products on set as deliberate product placements for advertising purposes. However, in Bohemian Rhapsody, the Pepsi glasses on the piano are not part of an attempt by advertisers to sell their product through the movie.

RELATED: 10 Iconic Singers Who Need a Biopic Like Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody

Rather, they are an attempt by directors to realistically capture well-known scenes from Freddy Mercury's life, down to the finest detail. Another example would be the air kiss which Mercury gave to his mother while standing on the stage, during a performance. This event is reproduced in the film's narrative.

6 Coincidence?

Remember that wacky 1990s movie, Wayne's World? In the movie, a younger Mike Myers was shown singing Bohemian Rhapsody with his friends in their car. This action-filled scene, with head banging and out-of-tune vocals, is possibly one of Wayne's World's most iconic scenes.

Ironically Myers was cast as an EMI executive in the movie. This same executive was the one who didn't like Bohemian Rhapsody. A twist of fate for Myers and a fascinating snippet of information for fans of the movie.

5 The Live Aid Stage was reproduced

Reconstructing the past for the movie also meant reconstructing certain structures from the 80s which no longer exists. To give an example, the part of Wembley Stadium where Live Aid was held had to be completely rebuilt for filming, as this 1985 version of the stadium is no longer in existence.

It was reconstructed on an airfield in London and the original director of Live Aid, seeing the reconstruction, was blown away by how authentic the set was!

4 A Soloist rises

The movie shows the Queen members splitting up as a result of Freddie Mercury's solo album contracts. Band members were shown criticizing him and saying he had 'killed Queen' by agreeing to the contracts.

RELATED: Rocketman, 5 Things It Does Better Than Bohemian Rhapsody (& 5 It Does Worse)

The reality was that each of the band members had been trying to start their own solo albums at the time Mercury was awarded his solo contract. Call it jealousy or pettiness, but good on Mercury for standing his ground!

3 From dinosaur park to stage

Time flies in the entertainment industry: a child star one day, an adult screen legend the next. In Bohemian Rhapsody this is true for actor Joseph Mazzello. Movie fans might recognize him as the rascal from Jurassic Park. The spoiled brat whose menacing gets him into a little more trouble than he would have hoped for.

In Bohemian Rhapsody, Mazzello takes on a completely different role. Now an adult, he plays the part of Queen's bass player, John Deacon. From dinosaur theme park visitor to the stage... not a bad transition!

2 Rami takes the lead

Talented actor Sacha Baron Cohen was originally chosen for the character of Freddie Mercury. For any actor, this is an immense challenge - one which Cohen was admittedly up to. However, Cohen's dreams of strutting his stuff as Mercury on stage weren't fully realized.

His reputation as being a comedian with a love for pranks meant that things didn't work out as expected. The result? Rami Malek took the reigns as Queen's lead. The rest you could say was history.

1 Perfect moves

Ever wondered how Rami Malek put on such a strong performance? Polly Bennett, a world-renowned British choreographer, worked with Malek to perfect and convincingly recreate Freddie Mercury's signature moves and mannerisms.

From Mercury's trademark cocky strut on the stage, to signature eye glances and body turns, Malek got his performance of the legendary performer down to a fine art. What's more, every flick of the microphone had to be exactly right. It was a tough act to produce but with Bennett's help, Malek pulled it off.

NEXT: 10 Music Biopics You've Probably Forgotten About (That Aren't Rocketman)

   source https://screenrant.com/bohemian-rhapsody-hidden-details-everyone-missed/

[gotbangvixx]

BTS when their son wants to be a Disney Princess

Seokjin

Are you serious? This man child is going to be the PERFECT Prince Charming to his son’s Cinderella. He went through store after store searching for the outfits and while he found his that only requird some embroidery here and there, he had to compromise and find a dress that was larger than his son’s size and alter it home. Seokjin was disappointed greatly in the children’s costume industry. They did not have a proper Cinderella dress selection to choose from. This is why he had to get a larger dress. Becuase they simply did not fit his son right. And he would be damned if his son looked anything but pefect for Halloween. Halloween was a huge deal for his son and therefor a huge deal for Seokjin. Seokjin worked late into the night making adjustment’s to the dress so that it fit his son just right. When Halloween dawned they went hand in hand down the line of houses and made a killing with candy. Luckily no one notices the bandages on a majority of fingers because it turns out hand altering a dress his not as easy as he thought

“Even though you are a princess it does not mean you get to eat more than 3 pieces of candy!”

Yoongi

Yoongi didn’t show much of a reaction when his 6 year old son suddenly ran up to him with heart eyes holding up the Snow White outfit he found to wear to his classroom Halloween party. He looked it up and down and calmly asked his son if he was sure that was what he wanted because he wasn’t going to buy him a different one if he changes his mind. His son determinedly said he was sure and marched to the checkout person. However when the kid running the cash register asked his son if he realized that he picked up a dress. His son looked at the cashier in confusion a look that was suspiciously similar to Yoongi’s. Of course he knew he got a dress! The cashier rolled his eyes and made a snide remark. But you are a boy! Boys don’t wear dresses! You should go back and pick out something else! Yoongi quickly got PISSED and was ready to murder this asshole but an idea occurred to him and he just smirked at the kid. You know what? You are right. Come on squirt. Let’s go find something else. His son’s eyes welled up with tears but Yoongi quickly picked him up and whispered in his ear. 15 minutes later they are back in line still holding the dress but this time with a proper crown complete with plastic jewels, a wicker basket that looks just like the one in the cartoon, adorable little heeled shoes, and red play lipstick. Yoongi looked at the cashier as if to dare him to say anything. He didn’t. But that didn’t stop Yoongi from calling in and making a warning complaint to the manager.

“Hello? Yes, you see I just came from your store and spoke with a certain smart mouthed little shit and you should know that the next time I see him...”

Hoseok

You never would of known that Hoseok had a minor freak out when his son excited told him that he wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. Don’t get him wrong it’s not that he had a problem with his son wanting to be a princess but what if the other kids tease him? His son is only 7! His feelings could be hurt and it could affect him for the rest of his life! But none the less he took his son to the costume store and helped him pick out a “tutu” version of Ariel because the traditional one didn’t fit him right. He had to admit his son was adorable dancing around in a purple seashells and bright green tutu and green leggings. He even found the long wig in the proper bright red to go with it! And if anyone asked he of course did NOT follow behind his son at a safe distance to make sure no one said anything. He didn’t have anything to worry about. The kids all loved his son’s costume, the parent’s however... Well the police weren’t called but it was a close thing after Hoseok was done with them.

“Okay I hear what you are saying but hear me out... If you say that again about my son you will be shitting out my shoe for the next month.”

Namjoon

Namjoon could not of been happier to see his son express himself. So when he came up to Namjoon exclaiming Merida was the bestest pwincess ever! I want to be her for Hawoween! In his adorable little lisp Namjoon found himself spending a bit more than he planned for his Halloween outfit. But come on! His son clearly needed a custom made bow! Merida HAS to have her bow in the cartoon therefor his son must have bow! And okay so he didn’t have to buy the expensive velvet green dress and then pay to have it altered. But the look on his son’s face when he saw himself in the mirror with it on was worth every penny. His son even sat and listened intently on the importance of making choices in your life and how to think carefully before acting. As depicted in the cartoon making a rash and selfish decision could hurt someone else. It did seem to escape his notice that his son was only 5 and fell asleep while Namjoon was starting to explain the mythology of Wil-o-wisps.

“You see son, they are fascinating creatures that were actually known to lure travelers into the forest to get them lost inste- Oh. Well I suppose it is your nap time...” 

Jimin

When his son quietly came up to him and sat his lap, Jimin knew that he wanted something. His son took after him completely. He had his sunny personality, his award winning smile, and his love of singing and dancing. He also inherited his small body structure, so when his son shyly asked if he could be Belle for Halloween, Jimin’s heart sank. He didn’t consider himself old fashioned. He was all for the world changing and becoming more accepting but boys wearing dresses... That was not something that was widely accepted and he just couldn’t bring himself to let his little innocent sweet boy deal with bullies. When he calmly explained that No you can not be Belle for Halloween but you can be the Prince! Or even the Beast! Or maybe Chip? And Jimin’s heart broke when he saw his son’s face fall. His son did not argue but instead nodded sadly and walked over to the corner of the room and faced the wall. Why his son just put himself in time out was baffling to Jimin and he did NOT want to think about how it looked like he was punishing himself for something. Maybe Jimin was spending to much time with Namjoon because surely this thing was not that deep and his 7 year old did not have a complex... Jimin agonized over what to do but in the end he decided that his son’s happiness was more important to him than society standards. So when he presented the golden ballgown and pretty plastic heels with a matching adorable little tasseled purse (not necessary but it was just too cute to pass up), his son’s face lit up like the sun and Jimin knew he made the right choice. His son may face bullying in the future but Jimin would be behind him and his choices 100% of the way. 

“I don’t care what you think. If my son wants to be a princess he will be a princess. You can go find something place dank and horrible to stuff yourself in.”

Taehyung

Taehyung teased Yoongi that his son and Yoongi’s son must of been switched at birth. Who knows?  They were born on the same day...  Because Taehyung’s son slept more than any other kid on earth! Taehyung had heard the horror stories of nap times and bedtimes and was fully prepared with books, songs, and night lights by the time his son was born. But he never had a single problem. In fact he had caught Yoongi napping with Taehyung’s son during play dates. So the irony was not lost on Taehyung when his son runs in screaming about a dress that changes colors and getting a kiss from the prince to break the curse all the while going in circles around the couch. (His son always did wake up with excess energy when he woke up from his naps.) His son came to a skidding halt in front of Taehyung and begged to be Princess Aurora for Halloween. Taehyung dropped his face in his hand for a moment before jumping up and chasing his overactive 9 year old who screeched in terror of the tickle monster. It was at times like these there was no doubt in his mind THIS was his son. After the spontaneous game of tag that was initiated when his son turned and started chasing Taehyung instead of being chased, they sat down in front of the computer. They scrolled through website after website to find the PERFECT dress for his son. Once they decided on a dress that was that shimmery fabric that changed colors as your turn they turned to then find the perfect crown even if son would most likely have the thing broken within a day of wearing it. He took after his Uncle Namjoon in that aspect, it was still the perfect look for Princess Aurora. 

“I know you are excited to be Princess Aurora but you can’t wear the crown or dress until Halloween because your Uncle Namjoon has rubbed off on you to much and I don’t want the dress spontaneously bursting into flames or anything...”

Jungkook

Jungkook fully blames Seokjin for why his son was wearing a green sheet wrapped around his chest so it flows almost skirt like. I’m Pwincess Tiana! He exclaimed and danced around happily. Not that Jungkook cared about what his son was wearing as long as he was warm in the winter and didn’t get too hot in the summer. But really a bed sheet is not an appropriate dress. So Jungkook let his son pick out a reasonably priced costume dress from a resale website and his son wore it threadbare from all of the times he wore it. It was almost an everyday event where he put on his dress and watched Princess and the Frog which Jungkook knew by heart now.  He admitted that it was adorable when his son sang along. When preschool came around Jungkook tried to convince his son to leave the dress at home because knowing from experience multiple kids in one place normally means something gets broken. But he could not persuade him so in the backpack the dress went. Evidently no one had a problem with son wearing it until late October came around and Jungkook received a phone call from the new Principle. I am sure you were not aware but your son has been seen on multiple occasions wearing a dress. Jungkook was confused. Yes? I know because I pack his bag everyday. Jungkook hears a sigh through the other line. I am sure you think there is no harm in your son wearing a dress but I assure you this will... The woman goes on but Jungkook doesn’t hear her finish her statement because anger fills his ears. How dare she imply his son is wrong to wear what he wants. He catches the last of her montage. Halloween is in three days and I expect to see him in appropriate costume. I know you don’t want your son to grow up to be a deviant to society. He is only 4 so there is time to fix him. Jungkook hung up on her. Rage filled him but he pushed it aside and determination filled him instead. He went online searched for hours until he found exactly what he wanted. He put a rush order on it and when Halloween arrived his son is ecstatic in a brand new Princess Tiana dress... and his father in a green bridesmaids gown. It was the only thing in his size that looked close enough to Princess Tiana. They went to school hand in hand and had the best Halloween party ever. And if Jungkook accidentally spilled the punch on the Principle... well that was of course not on purpose and he defiantly did not smirk at her as she frantically tried to wipe it off her Gucci sweater.

“No one tells me my son is going to be a deviant just because he wears dresses. My son will grow up to be who the hell he wants and YOU will not affect him at all or else you will not have a happily ever after... Understand?”

Omg I had so much fun writing this react. Like always I can’t escape the plot but I was able to keep them rather short... Well short for me at least. Requests are open so please feel free to send them! 

-Starfish

(Prussia inserting herself into not her reaction: Kids terrify me!)

[peace-coast-island]

Rowan Shapiro managed to take down his father and stepmother’s business with a disguise involving a bad wig, face prosthetics, and a loud wardrobe with an annoying posh accent to top it off. Well, not entirely by himself but after years of estrangement and being snubbed by his so-called family, it was a sight to see them finally get what they deserve.

Once upon a time Rowan had a loving mother and a present father. Fast forward ten years later and he had none. His mother, the one person he looked up to, died alone in the hospital on Christmas Eve. Rowan couldn’t remember the last time he saw her alive but by then the cancer had advanced and she was on life support. His father, who was always away on business trips, had signed the papers to turn off her life support and felt that it was better if they got it over with than letting Rowan say goodbye. Christmas came again and Wilfred remarried and Rowan gained a stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother.

Growing up in the Traynor household is not something that Rowan looks back on fondly. Arrogant stepmother, self-absorbed father, obnoxious step siblings, life was great. Wilfred and Caitlin and their lovely children Portia and Chad and… that one over there. From calling him by his middle name to nagging about his hobbies and making fun of everything he did, Rowan couldn’t wait to leave home. As he got older, the ice skating rink became his second home. He wasn’t the best, lack of proper lessons being a big part of it, but he always got lost in the music. That was the only place where he could feel like himself.

After graduating high school, Rowan went as far as a scholarship could take him. So he attended a college in Detroit and went into competitive figure skating just so he could get farther away. Of course no one ever showed up to support him, and why would they? Rowan enjoyed skating but the pressure of competitions and the hours of strenuous practice eventually put a strain on him. It was a miracle that he graduated in five and a half years and thought that he had a shot in competitive figure skating. Unfortunately after facing too many defeats, Rowan had to throw in the towel and had no choice but to return home where he was forced to work at Traynor’s Fashion.

That stint lasted for three months. Of course everyone knew about his failures so they would constantly remind him about what a loser he was. And it was back to the basement sorting the never ending mess of supplies. Five an a half years of being away and it was like nothing had changed. No matter how much Rowan tried to improve things, his hard work was worth nothing as his step siblings would take credit and make him look bad. Once again his father tied to get him to go into fashion design, which Rowan had grown to hate over the years. It never made sense to him why he was so insistent on having Rowan be part of the family business and yet discredit him when he applied himself.

Not surprisingly Portia and Chad wanted him out so they accused him of leaking designs to a rival company. Once he got the boot, Rowan was out, broke and homeless. At least he wasn’t homeless for long when fashion designer Victor Snow was in need of a roommate. As Rowan learned from Victor, working at Traynor’s Fashion was as bad as it looked. From underpaid and overworked employees, supporting terrible causes, poor management, the list went on. But the biggest thing Victor revealed was that Wilfred and Caitlin were responsible for shutting down three small companies by scandals and harassment. One friend, Michele, had worked at Traynor’s and created a fashion line that could have been big. And then Portia and Chad ruined her reputation by accusing her of plagiarism, ruining her career before it even started. Then there was another friend, Ella, who was the head of Fairytale Castle and could have taken off too if it wasn’t for Wilfred and Caitlin using their connections to pretend to be friends and then betray her by harassing her employees and sabotaging her designs. Tired of the constant bullying from Traynor and their supporters, Fairytale Castle was no more. Although he hated the place, Victor needed to pay rent so he was motivated purely by annoyance and hate with an ulterior motive: to take down Wilbur and Caitlin.

For Victor, it was pure luck that he came across Rowan. He and many others heard that Wilbur had a kid from his first marriage who was described as a disgrace to the family. Treating a family member like they’re a burden, calling them by the wrong name, misgendering them, and making a huge deal about their failures, Wilfred was sure to win award for father of the year. Rowan’s reappearance pretty much cemented Victor’s, Michele’s, and Ella’s thoughts that Wilfred, Caitlin, Portia, and Chad are some of the worst people to walk the face of the earth. Now with Rowan on their side, the three of them decided to finally put their ultimate plan to work and get revenge on the evil power couple and their henchmen.

So Rowan Shapiro, now Creighton Adcock walked into Traynor’s Fashion with his nose stuck up terribly high. The entrance interview was a breeze considering that Portia and Chad weren’t known for their brains, something that they clearly inherited from their mother. Apparently it also spread to their stepfather as Rowan totally bullshitted everything and yet his so-called family bought every single word. The horribly fake English accent must have won them over despite the fact that Rowan was specifically told not to talk like that because it would make him sound fake. The more exaggerated and foreign he sounded, the more his so-called family fell for it as they wanted to diversify the work place but didn’t want to make the effort to do so. It was torture but Rowan, like Victor and his friends, was fueled by spite and revenge.

Eight months later, revenge was served. “Creighton” managed to win over Wilfred and Caitlin with his fashionably mediocre designs, totally uninspired and colorful. A nobody turned into someone with a decent shot at a career in fashion. In the five years since he left, Rowan was surprised that Traynor’s Fashion dropped even lower in quality. Work was shit as usual but now that he was in the inner group, there were things that he really wished he could unsee and unheard. The catty environment being one of them, the things that come out of people’s mouths is another. It took a lot of willpower for Rowan not to beat the crap out of everyone in the room. Ice skating was the one thing that kept him sane after work, something that he really missed since coming home. Finally after gathering information and proof about the sketchy things Shapiro’s was responsible for, more things he wished he could unsee, Rowan, Victor, Michele, and Ella were ready to attack. July 9, the day of one of the biggest fashion shows of the year also marked the death of Traynor’s Fashion.

Unfortunately the victory, as sweet as it was, came with a price. Or prices to be exact. Not long after the showdown where “Creighton” revealed himself and publicly humiliated Wilfred and Caitlin, Rowan and the others were slapped with a massive lawsuit. But since it was undeniable that Wilfred and Caitlin did everything they were accused of and more, the lawsuit made them look even more guilty. With the legal messes they were tangled up in now that the truth was out, the lawsuit was postponed several times until it was finally thrown out. Most of the employees who played a role in the company’s harassment, frauds, and other illegal activities faced their own punishments from jail to getting blacklisted. And as expected, Rowan, Victor, Michele, and Ella had their own share of backlash from Traynor’s supporters, eventually to the point where they were escorted by bodyguards until the hype died down. For weeks Rowan received hate mail and death threats from strangers and his so-called family. But by then he was more than ready to put all of that behind him and start new.

One year later Rowan moved to Peace Coast Island to restart his career as a professional figure skater. Maybe he’ll get back into competing someday but for now he just wants to get comfortable on the ice. Last he heard about his so-called family was that they’re all in jail and he could care less about them. Victor, Michele, and Ella are back into the world of fashion design with their own company that’s doing well. They’re also the ones designing his costumes as well as his biggest supporters. It took five years of competitive figure skating for him to lose his passion for the sport and an eventful hiatus fueled by bitterness towards his so-called family to regain it.

[medkltty-blog]

The Integrity of Medical School

I’ve been in medical school for a little over a semester and I have become very disillusioned with medical school as an institution. I’m glad I’m in medical school and I know how lucky I am to be in medical school, however, I’m struggling with the ethics of medical school as an institution.

It took me six years to get into medical school. In that time I got a bachelor’s degree, a graduate degree, I worked full-time and volunteered nearly 20 hours a week. I took the MCAT and went on interviews and paid for my applications. In that time, I also probably spent well over 30 thousand dollars trying to get into medical school, not including the student loans I had to take out to pay for my pre-med and graduate classes. The cost of my applications, alone, was 5 thousand dollars. And that was the second time I applied. The cost of my interviews were also easily 5 thousand dollars as well. 

When I got into medical school I was excited to become a doctor. I was proud of myself and felt vindicated that all of my hard work paid off. I was ready to start learning how to be a doctor. My first semester was absolutely miserable. The morale of my class was extremely low. We go to a school that heavily emphasizes wellness but a slew of new changes based on feedback from students ahead of us created a schedule that was unsustainable and didn’t leave time for any self-care practice or wellness at all. The idea of wellness became a running inside joke in our class where people would proudly state that they participated in self-care by taking a shower for the first time in two days or by sleeping in past 7am on a Saturday.

But we got through that first semester, propelled by second year students telling us that it would be all downhill after that and that once we started organ systems second semester, we’d be so much happier and have so much time to take care of ourselves and study (because our schedule was so jam-packed that it left very little time to study and our attendance in class is required). We had third year medical students telling us how they would rather repeat their entire third year of medical school and all the crazy rotations that go with it than repeat their first semester. And so we took all of our finals and set off for winter break looking forward to next semester.

Our second semester started a little over three weeks ago. News that we lost six of our classmates spread through the class. They chose to leave or weren’t allowed to come back by the administration. It was an elephant in the room that none of us can talk about because of privacy rules. Still, morale is higher when we start up our organs systems classes.

And that is when I realized what a money scam medical school is. I am required to go to class if I want my class rank to be high not because our classes actually teach us information but because your grade is connected to your attendance, so poor attendance = a poor grade = a lower class rank. I sit in class for up to 9 hours a day and have clinicians read powerpoint slides word-for-word to me, none of which are interesting or helpful to my actual learning and all of which I could have read to myself at home. I am told by our academic administrators to buy resources like First Aid to study for Step 1, they bought us a Q bank but we have to pay for everything else. $900 later, I have subscriptions to Pathoma, RX, Sketchy, and Firecracker. I wanted to buy a set of clinical case books recommended to us but the price on Amazon was $653. By the time I take Step 1 I will have taken out 150 THOUSAND dollars in student loans ON TOP OF the student loans I already have from two bachelor degrees and a master’s degree. 

I will need to pay the fees for the Step exams on my own. I am expected to join various professional societies and pay their yearly fees because it will make my residency application look better even though joining those professional societies has no impact on what kind of physician I will be, how much I care about others, or my Step 1 score. And, of course, those professional societies are so generous and give you a discount because you’re a medical student, so instead of paying $500 you’re asked to only pay $150. But isn’t it worth it to add some fake prestige to your residency application by saying you went to the AMA conference one year? The AMA that endorsed Tom Price for HHS secretary? The AMA that endorsed someone who wants to remove the ACA and condemn 43,000 additional people to death due to lack of insurance every year. Sign me the fuck up, right?

I am disgusted with the cost of medical school. I knew it would be expensive but I feel it is unethical to ask students to spend so much money applying to medical school and taking the MCAT and then asking them to pay EVEN MORE. Especially when there was so much hand-wringing from the AAMC and NBME about how to make medical school more affordable and how to increase the diversity among students and increase the number of first generation physicians (since studies show that children of doctors tend to be worse doctors than their first generation peers). I have an idea:

Get rid of the first two years of medical school. Make Step 1 the admissions exam for students. Get rid of application fees and the MCAT altogether. Start students up in January, give them a ten week course in gross anatomy, followed by a two week intensive clinical skills course and a first aid/CPR certification, and start them up on wards in April, a full 2 to 3 months earlier than most schools. This gives students 5 to 6 months to explore specialties after their required rotations instead of 2 to 3 which aren’t even really used for students to explore since those are the rotations they need to do in order to get the letters of rec they need for their residency applications (may be the lack of time to explore specialty options is why 60-90% of physicians hate their fucking jobs). 

And then, of course, you have to spend thousands of dollars on your residency applications and travel for interviews, which are not factored in to your student loan awards. 

This will never happen, though, because the AAMC makes billions of dollars in application fees, MCAT fees, and official test prep materials. The NBME makes billions of dollars off the backs of students paying for their exams and the LCME makes just as much. None of the organizations that could change the system have the incentive to do so because they are too busy milking medical students for all the money they have.

I know it sounds like I’m too money focused. The truth is, I’m not. I gave up hope of ever paying off my student loans years ago. I will never pay them back and I didn’t want to be a doctor because of the salary. My disillusionment with medical school as an institution is due to the ethics of it all. When I was applying to medical school there was a huge push to improve medical class diversity and encourage more minority and lower class students to apply. You can get fee waivers and financial assistance to cover the cost of your MCAT fees. But that doesn’t go far enough. Those application fee waivers don’t make booking flights for interviews any cheaper, they don’t lower the cost of having to rent a car or buy a suit for an interview. 

How can we expect students living in poverty to drop 5 grand on interview costs just to get in to medical school? How can we expect students living in underserved communities to afford the cost of Step 2 and the price of travel to and from the 6 locations in the country you can take it? Underserved communities NEED students who understand what living in those communities is like to go back and be their doctors. And, yes, there are scholarships and small-scale help, but I’m arguing that the entire system, right now, is designed to keep students who can’t afford to pay for medical school admittance out. Is a student whose family is on food stamps really going to have $150 to pay for the MCAT? No. 

I look around at the people in my class, which to my school’s credit is exceedingly diverse in race and religious background, however almost everyone in my class comes from a family that was middle class or above. Half of my classmates have parents who can afford to pay for their tuition and living expenses. I am part of the other class that has to take out loans. But when I was applying to medical school and there was a mix up with my teaching assistant stipend that lead to it being delayed, my dad was able to loan me the $2500 I needed to submit my AMCAS application on time. If I had not had a full-time job as a graduate student, though, I would not have been able to afford the cost of interviewing, and a third of the interviews I went on were local. 

In class, we are asked to think about treatment plans for patients and discuss them with each other. The girl sitting next to me says she thinks this ethics class is a waste of our time. The patient is an overweight child who we need to counsel, she lives in a run down part of a large city. We work together on her treatment plan and my partner comes up with a list of groceries to buy. I point out that the patient in question is a minor and likely not in charge of her food and that the education needs to be directed towards the parent and the patient. I also point out that due to the income level of the area they live in, the patient’s mother is likely relying on food stamps. I go over the grocery list and not a single thing is realistic. I point out that food stamps cannot be used to buy milk. My partner is shocked, her eyes widen; when I tell her how food stamps in my state can’t be used to buy rice, her entire world is turned upside down. I voice this in class when we are invited to share. A male classmate who is openly gay and voted for Trump comes up to me and asks me to explain why food stamps can’t be used to buy milk. I do and he doesn’t know what to say.

I look at my classmates who do not understand what poverty looks like in reality and I think about the people I know in rural towns who blew their entire savings trying to get into medical school only to be told when they didn’t get in that they needed to go take the MCAT again because the 29 they got wasn’t good enough, they needed a 30. The people suggesting this to my friend recommend taking an MCAT course not realizing the closest one would be two hours away and that the nearly 3 grand the course costs makes that impossible, not to mention the cost of taking the test again. It doesn’t matter, though, because she wouldn’t be able to afford all of the resources for Step 1 let alone the cost of THAT exam once she got into medical school. She works as a CNA in a nursing home.

How can we put such a financial burden on students applying to medical school? How can we ask medical students to pay so much money for residency applications, licensing exams, and tuition? How can we do that and then ask them to enter a profession that requires them to get permission from insurance providers and hospital administrators to order a damn chest CT? How can we ask them to pay so much money and then ignore the fact that there aren’t enough residency spots available for all of them to train in? How can we ask pre-med and medical students to pay so much money when the health care system is in shambles and the only people making money are hospital CEOs and insurance companies? How can we expect medical students to pay back their massive student loans in a system like that? Why are institutions like the AAMC so comfortable setting so many medical students up for failure?

Because my school emphasizes wellness, we have mandatory wellness classes we have to attend. Because, in medical school, giving students time to practice self-care isn’t as important as requiring them to attend a four hour class telling them they need to practice self-care and get lots of sleep, all while requiring them to be at school by 8am and making us sit in class until 5pm, giving us five hours of the day to study before we do it all again. And, of course, in those five hours of study time we also need to fit in time to exercise, feed ourselves, and maybe speak with our loved ones for five minutes to make sure they are still alive. Because self-care!

I wouldn’t say I’m jaded about medical school this early on but I am questioning why this system is in place. Why pay for two years of medical school when everyone just uses First Aid and Step resources to get a good score? I think medicine, as an institution, is really stuck in this idea of “well, I had to do it so you do, too” which I think is a really dangerous way of thinking. I think if medical students have extremely high rates of depression and anxiety (myself included, however mine was with me long before medical school) and it just gets worse through residency and becoming an attending there’s something wrong with the system. And if something isn’t working, why shouldn’t it be fixed? “Because I went through it and you should, too” isn’t a good enough answer for me. It’s also not accurate, right? The doctors who are saying that bullshit excuse went to medical school in a different time, where they could actually make decisions about patient care without having to call an insurance company for permission first. They went through medical school when it was actually affordable. They went through medical school when the idea of a woman being a doctor was either not allowed, unheard of, or looked down on, because who would take care of their kids at home while they went through residency if their wife was in medical school? 

So, yeah, they went through medical school and worked all of these hours and paid for medical school but the context was different, so I still want to know why such an archaic system that is already financially unattainable for people we NEED to be doctors and is quickly becoming financially unattainable for anyone who doesn’t have a trust fund is allowed to exist. I want to know why a 60-90% dissatisfaction rate is considered acceptable among physicians without any examination of the system that makes them into physicians.

[jessicakehoe]

These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness

Many campaigns have worked to normalize the discussion around mental health (Bell Let’s Talk and CAMH’s One Brave Night among them). But one thing that really reaches the masses is when a celebrity speaks out about his or her struggle to spread the message that it’s okay to have a mental illness; it doesn’t make you weak.

Anyone who has ever suffered from depression or anxiety—whether temporary or chronic—knows the feeling of wanting to crawl into bed and stay there until things seem okay again. And somehow when these celebrities who seem to have it all come out and say that they actually don’t have their shit together, it is encouraging to us. By focusing on their health, it normalizes the conversation and gives us the courage to take care of ourselves (and be vocal about it).

Below, see the celebrities who are helping to fight the stigma against mental health by being open about their own struggles. Want to learn more about mental illness? Here are 5 myths about anxiety and depression, and information about different types of treatment.

Ariana Grande

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A post shared by Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) on Mar 30, 2019 at 9:57am PDT

In British Vogue’s July 2018 issue, Ariana Grande opened up on her experience with PTSD after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. “It’s hard to talk about because so many people have suffered such severe tremendous loss. But, yeah, it’s a real thing,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to talk about it and not cry.”

In November 2018, the singer/songwriter dropped a single titled “thank u, next,” dedicated to all of her exes, including the late-Mac Miller (who died this past September of a drug overdose) and ex-fiancé Pete Davidson, which resulted in fans wondering who her therapist is. “Therapy has saved my life so many times,” Grande tweeted in response. “If you’re afraid to ask for help, don’t be.”

photography via instagram/@arianagrande

In an Instagram story posted on April 11, Grande shared a side-by-side image of a healthy brain and a brain affected by PTSD. She also included an image of what is allegedly her brain, which appears to show incredibly high levels of PTSD. “Not a joke,” she captioned the story. In a follow-up story, Grande posted a selfie containing the captions “life is wild,” “she’s trying her muthafukin best,” and “my brain is tired.”

Prince Harry

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Day two of #SussexRoyalTour is underway, and The Duke and Duchess have joined young South Africans and @WavesForChange to focus on mental health and take part in ‘surf therapy’. • Hundreds of young people from Cape Town’s townships meet every week at Monwabisi beach to surf, but also share stories with mentors and talk through the daily challenges they face. Their Royal Highnesses were able to hear how the sessions are building trust, confidence, and belonging, and they also got to join in as children took part in ‘power hand’, which teaches them how to keep calm down reflect on strengths. While on the beach The Duke and Duchess met @TheLunchBoxFund – which was one of the charities they nominated to benefit from donations following the birth of their son, Archie. Almost 30,000 meals are provided by the charity every day across South Africa, including for three @WavesForChange projects. And before they left The Duke and Duchess joined the Commonwealth Litter Programme (CLiP) – which was teaching the surfers about the impact of plastic waste on the ocean. #RoyalVisitSouthAfrica • Photo ©️ photos EMPICS / PA images / SussexRoyal

A post shared by The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (@sussexroyal) on Sep 24, 2019 at 5:00am PDT

The Duke of Sussex has spoken out extensively about his own mental health journey, and the trauma he suffered as a result of losing his mother, Princess Diana, at a young age. In an interview with Bryony Gordon for her podcast about mental health, Mad World, the royal said, “I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well.”

“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle,” he added.

After seeking out counselling and learning to open up about his struggles with friends and family, the royal co-founded Heads Together, a mental health awareness campaign, with Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2016. While on a recent trip to South Africa with Meghan Markle, the royal couple met with Waves For Change, an organization promoting mental wellbeing through surf therapy, and spoke out about the need to counter the stigma against mental illness in our society.

“I think most of the stigma is around mental illness [and] we need to separate the two… mental health, which is every single one of us, and mental illness, which could be every single one of us,” he said. “I think they need to be separated; the mental health element touches on so much of what we’re exposed to, these experiences that these kids and every single one of us have been through. Everyone has experienced trauma or likely to experience trauma at some point during their lives. We need to try, not [to] eradicate it, but to learn from previous generations so there’s not a perpetual cycle.”

Selena Gomez

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I have a lot to be thankful for this year.. My year has been the hardest yet most rewarding one yet. I've finally fought the fight of not 'being enough'. I have only wanted to reflect the love you guys have given me for years and show how important it is to take care of YOU. By grace through faith. Kindness always wins. I love you guys. God bless

A post shared by Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) on Nov 24, 2016 at 6:21pm PST

In August 2016, Selena Gomez announced that she would be taking a break from her career to deal with anxiety, depression and panic attacks associated with lupus (an autoimmune condition from which she suffers). She made a return to the spotlight in November that year at the American Music Awards, where she delivered an emotional, heartfelt speech, briefly touching on her battle with mental health issues.

“I had to stop because I had everything and I was absolutely broken inside. I kept it all together enough to where I would never let you down but I kept it too much together to where I let myself down,” she said. “If you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.”

The songstress also opened up about her issues with mental health in the April 2017 issue of Vogue (which she covered). “Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she told the magazine. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it—which, I think, was a complete distortion.”

She revealed she spent 90 days in a mental health facility in Tennessee, surrendering her cell phone and taking part in various forms of therapy. And while Gomez is the second most-followed person on Instagram, she told Vogue she no longer had it on her phone, and an assistant had her password.

“It felt like I was seeing things I didn’t want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn’t want to care about,” she said. “I always end up feeling like shit when I look at Instagram. Which is why I’m kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit.”

Camila Cabello

Former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello made headlines in September 2016 after she left the stage early during a performance under the guise of a wardrobe malfunction. She later revealed, on Snapchat, that the cause was excessive anxiety, even tweeting, “just wanna sleep for 3 days.”

Cabello had already been open about her struggles with anxiety prior to the incident, however, telling Billboard that 2015 was a “low” for her, personally.

“I was having terrible anxiety, nonstop. My heart would beat really fast the whole day. Two hours after I woke up, I’d need a nap because my body was so hyperactive,” she recalled. “I was scared of what would happen to me, of the things my brain might tell me. I realized the stuff I thought was important isn’t worth my health. Now I write in a diary every day, work out and meditate.”

In March 2017, the Cuban-born star revealed to Latina magazine that she also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder. “It was just totally out of control,” Cabello told the magazine of her OCD. “I would wake up with a super-accelerated heartbeat and really negative, intrusive, compulsive thoughts. I was so inside my head, and I didn’t know what was happening.”

She continued, “I totally understand now, being in it, why there shouldn’t be such a stigma on mental illness, because it’s a pretty common thing for people. But you can get help. If you’re dedicated to making it better, you can—because I’m in a much better place now. I started reading books about it and it really helped a lot when I understood [the illness], and that [the thoughts I was having] weren’t real. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to slow down and take care of yourself.”

Zayn Malik

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A post shared by Zayn Malik (@zayn) on Aug 14, 2018 at 10:01pm PDT

In June 2016, former One Direction member Zayn Malik cancelled a U.K. concert due to anxiety. He made the announcement on Instagram, writing, “Unfortunately, my anxiety that has haunted me throughout the last few months has gotten the better of me. With the magnitude of the live event, I have suffered the worst anxiety of my career.”

Later that year, Malik revealed in his memoir, Pillow Talk, that panic attacks have stopped him from performing on more than one occasion. “I just couldn’t go through with it,” he wrote. “Mentally, the anxiety had won. Physically, I knew I couldn’t function. I would have to pull out.”

And while a member of his team offered to say he was sick, Malik insisted on being open about his struggle. “I was done with putting out statements that masked what was really going on. I wanted to tell the truth. Anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of; it affects millions of people every day,” he explained. “I don’t want to say I’m sick. I want to tell people what’s going on, and I’m not gonna be ashamed of what’s happening.”

Cara Delevingne

In 2016, Cara Delevingne took to Twitter to reveal she took a break from modelling due to depression. “I suffer from depression and was a model during a particularly rough patch of self hatred,” she explained. Later that year, she told Esquire she had been struggling with mental illness since she was a teen, more specifically, after she discovered her mother’s drug addiction.

“I was suicidal. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I realized how lucky and privileged I was, but all I wanted to do was die,” she told the magazine, adding a six-month break from school and medication might have helped save her life at 16.

However, Cara stopped the meds at age 18, saying “I get depressed still but I would rather learn to figure it out myself rather then be dependant on meds, ever.”

Adele

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Auckland / Mt Smart Stadium / Mar 25

A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Mar 25, 2017 at 9:41pm PDT

Despite being a 15-time Grammy winner, Adele still experiences stage fright. In March 2017, she admitted to her New Zealand concertgoers that she may never tour again, due to the ongoing issue. “Touring isn’t something I’m good at–applause makes me feel a bit vulnerable. I don’t know if I will ever tour again,” she told the audience. “I get so nervous with live performances that I’m too frightened to try anything new. It’s actually getting worse. Or it’s just not getting better, so I feel like it’s getting worse, because it should’ve gotten better by now.”

Lady Gaga

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I felt like a princess in custom @tiffanyandco made just for me for the #GoldenGlobes 🤗 The Aurora necklace was named after the Aurora Borealis as an homage to #AStarIsBorn 🌟 #TiffanyAndCo

A post shared by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:29am PST

In 2016, Lady Gaga revealed she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she was raped at age 19. “I suffer from PTSD, I’ve never told anyone that before,” she said on the Today show in December 2016. “But the kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as family and friends, has really saved my life.”

More recently, Gaga opened up about her mental health struggles in a conversation with Prince William, as part of the royal’s Heads Together #oktosay series, which aims to end the stigma with the help of celebrities.

“For me, waking up every day and feeling sad and going on stage is something that is very hard to describe. There’s a lot of shame attached to mental illness. You feel like something’s wrong with you,” she told the Duke of Cambridge via FaceTime. “In my life, I go, ‘Oh my goodness, look at all these beautiful, wonderful things that I have. I should be so happy,’ but you can’t help it if, in the morning when you wake up, you are so tired, you are so sad, you are so full of anxiety and the shakes that you can barely think.”

But despite her hardships, the A Star is Born actress told William “the best thing that could come out of my mental illness was to share it with other people.”

“I feel like we are not hiding anymore, we’re starting to talk, and that’s what we need to do really,” she said.

Demi Lovato

Demi Lovato is one of the most vocal mental health awareness advocates in the biz. The former Disney star, who has battled drug and alcohol addictions, bipolar disorder, self-harm and an eating disorder for years underwent rehab in 2010 and in 2013. Now, Lovato is much healthier and is committed to ending the stigma against mental illness. In 2015, she launched the Be Vocal campaign as a way to encourage individuals struggling with mental illness to talk about what they’re going through.

“I think the more people vocalize what they’re going through—their experience or just simply educating themselves so that they can learn more about what they’re talking about—that’s going to be the key to creating a conversation about mental illness and making it more understood,” she told HuffPost. “There’s a lack of compassion for people who have mental illnesses and there’s a lot of judgment. Once you make people realize that mental illness can happen to anybody—and it’s not anybody’s fault—then I think they’ll become more understanding of what mental illness really is.”

Jennifer Lawrence

Photography by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Jennifer Lawrence opened up about her struggle with anxiety in 2013, telling Madame Figaro that she began experiencing symptoms as a preteen. “When my mother told me about my childhood, she always told me that there was like a light in me, a spark that inspired me constantly,” Lawrence told the magazine. “When I started school, the light went out. It was never known what it was, a kind of social anxiety.”

She eventually went to seek help from a therapist and turned to acting as a form of self-therapy. She also revealed to the New York Times that she manages her anxiety with the use of prescription meds.

Emma Stone

Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Oscar winner Emma Stone told Rolling Stone in 2016 that she experienced bouts of anxiety and panic attacks as a child. “My anxiety was constant,” she said. “I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses anymore–I could barely get out the door to school.”

She did reveal, however, that therapy and acting, specifically improv and sketch comedy, is what helped her work through it. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” she explained.

Chrissy Teigen

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My stoop buddy

A post shared by chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) on Apr 29, 2017 at 6:47pm PDT

Chrissy Teigen is never one to hold back, but she shocked fans when she penned an essay for Glamour in 2017 on her struggle with postpartum depression. “I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy. I blamed it on being tired and possibly growing out of the role: ‘Maybe I’m just not a goofy person anymore. Maybe I’m just supposed to be a mom,'” she wrote, later adding “postpartum does not discriminate.”

Months later, Teigen finally saw her family doctor, where she got her diagnosis. She began taking antidepressants. “I’m speaking up now because I want people to know it can happen to anybody and I don’t want people who have it to feel embarrassed or to feel alone. I also don’t want to pretend like I know everything about postpartum depression, because it can be different for everybody. But one thing I do know is that—for me—just merely being open about it helps.”

Troian Bellisario

In November 2016, Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario revealed via a voting PSA that she struggled with an eating disorder when she was younger. She said it was early detection and mental healthcare that saved her. “If I had just been shunned to the side as not having ‘real problems’, I don’t know that I would be living today,” she explained. “I just want to make sure that everybody has the same opportunity for treatment that I have, and I think that we have to make sure that our government invests in those programs.”

Troian shared her story on her struggles with anorexia in her film Feed, which she wrote and directed. “It was not easy; it was like engaging with an addiction,” she told Interview magazine of revisiting her story, adding that working on the film was “like poking a sleeping dragon.” “One of the things I really wanted the film to explore was that once you have this relationship, once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away.”

And just like many others who suffer from mental illness, Bellisario said she feels like no one truly understands what she went through. “Still to this day, I couldn’t get anyone—even the people who loved me the most, even my boyfriend or my mother or my father—to understand what that experience was truly like for me,” she said. “It was about my eating disorder, and I found there were so many people who thought that it was about losing weight or being skinny, and I couldn’t quite get them to understand that it was about control on a very, very literal level.”

Gina Rodriguez

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One year after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, there is still work to be done. Thank you @ricky_martin for giving us all an opportunity to continue to contribute to the reconstruction of our beautiful island of Puerto Rico. #allin4pr #miislabonita ❤️🙌🏽 link in bio 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷

A post shared by Gina Rodriguez-LoCicero (@hereisgina) on Oct 26, 2018 at 4:12pm PDT

Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez got candid about her struggle with anxiety in a moving Instagram post. “I suffer from anxiety,” she captioned the video, which sees her makeup-free in a New York Yankees cap. “And watching this clip I could see how anxious I was but I empathize with myself. I wanted to protect her and tell her it’s ok to be anxious, there is nothing different or strange about having anxiety and I will prevail.”

Shawn Mendes

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Je t’aime France ! 🇫🇷 x

A post shared by Shawn Mendes (@shawnmendes) on Nov 10, 2018 at 2:31pm PST

It may be hard to believe that Canada’s very own heartthrob has had his fair share of anxious episodes, but he has. In April 2018, the singer-songwriter told The Sun in an interview that he had seen a therapist a few times. “I found I was closing myself off from everybody, thinking that would help me battle [my anxiety], then realizing the only way I was going to battle it was completely opening up and letting people in,” Mendes said.

Said anxiety was chronicled in his single “In My Blood” (Lyrics: Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in, sometimes I feel like giving up, no medicine is strong enough, someone help me.)

“All pain is temporary, and the thing is with anxiety, and why it’s such a hard thing for people who don’t have it to understand, is that it is very random and it hits you at moments you don’t expect it. Sometimes it lasts two hours, sometimes it lasts a day and sometimes it lasts five minutes,” he said.

Sarah Hyland

Back in December 2018, Sarah Hyland opened up about experiencing suicidal thoughts after her body rejected a kidney donated by her dad. The Modern Family star, who has had a slew of health problems her whole life, appeared on Ellen in early January 2019 and spoke about her depression.

“After 26, 27 years of just always being sick and being in chronic pain every single day—and [you] don’t know when you’re going to have the next good day—it’s really, really hard…” she said.

“I would write letters in my head to loved ones of why I did it, and my reasoning behind it, and how it wasn’t anybody’s fault,” the 28-year-old revealed, adding that she was “very, very, very close,” to taking her own life.

When asked how she overcame her suicidal thoughts and depression, Hyland said that she confided in a close friend (“I finally said it out loud to someone… just saying it out loud helped immensely, because I kept it to myself for months and months at a time.”) who urged her to see a therapist.

The post These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

These Celebs Are Destigmatizing Mental Illness published first on https://borboletabags.tumblr.com/

[itsworn]

This 1958 Plymouth Fury is the Ultimate Christine Tribute Car

What’s not to love about an automobile that fixes itself and can dispense some justice to your enemies? If that brings a specific car to mind, then you’re probably thinking about the demonic 1958 Plymouth Fury used in Christine, John Carpenter’s cult-classic horror movie based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. While King’s novel was a huge success, the movie didn’t get the same kind of love. It opened on December 9th, 1983 to lackluster reviews and poor attendance at the box office. It has, however gone on to be one of the most iconic horror and car films ever produced. Cast with relatively unknown actors, and what King described as a “forgotten car,” it cemented the ’58 Plymouth Fury forever on the automotive landscape with a huge worldwide following. As a result of the popularity of the film, it has spawned many Christine clones, yet only a handful can lay claim to actually being used in the movie.

When the film was originally planned, $500,000 was set aside and ads were placed nationwide looking for suitable candidates. A total of 24 cars were purchased for use during filming, with most being ’57 and ’58 Savoys and Belvederes, and one Fury. Since the automotive carnage that the script required was extensive, many of those cars were specifically destined as parts donors. Different cars were assigned specific tasks in the movie, and when filming wrapped up, all but three survived intact. One was sent to MTV to be raffled off. After it was given away, all traces of it disappeared to this day. Another one was sent to a radio station in Simi Valley, California as part of a nationwide promotion that was awarded on New Year’s Eve. That car ended up in the hands of Scott Edminster and was relocated to New Hampshire until 2004, after which it was sold at Barrett-Jackson to Ron Pratt. It was again sold there in 2015 and is currently on display in the Rochester Auto Museum in Rochester, New York. Martin Sanchez purchased the last survivor, which is currently on display at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, California. The remaining cars, or what was left of them, ended up at Bill and Ed’s Auto Wrecking in Fontana, California after the movie wrapped up. At this point you might be wondering what the story is on the Plymouth that you’re looking at. Was it in the movie, and also rescued from the junkyard? The best answer to that is – sort of.

New Yorker, Joe Caldwell owns this particular car, and it has its roots very much in the film. His fascination with cars, and horror movies, started when he was a young lad. At the ripe age of 12, he had to sneak into the local movie theater to see Christine when it was released. The movie had a hard R-rating for lots of F-bombs being dropped, so that was the only way he was going to see it unaccompanied by an adult. He recalls, “As a kid, I went in with the expectation of seeing a great horror movie, and not realizing that the Plymouth was going to be the star of the movie. That’s when I fell in love with the car.”

As he eased into adulthood, his automotive tastes gravitated towards the Pentastar brand and in 2009, he made his first big ticket purchase – a 1967 Plymouth GTX Hemi survivor. That car stayed with him for two years until someone came along and offered him stupid money for it. In his mind, that pile of cash was his ticket to one of the movie cars. He explains, “I took a car that I was a fan of but not in love with, and I sold it to buy a car that I was not only a fan of, but also one that I always wanted.” Unfortunately, reality set in when it became clear that with only two actual movie cars accounted for, getting one fell into the unobtanium category. That prompted a switch to plan B, which meant that he would build a clone.

In 2011 he found his donor car in Arizona. It was a low mileage, rust free ’58 Plymouth Savoy decked out in white with pink coves that had been parked under a carport since 1974. During the time leading up to that purchase, he also immersed himself in the whole Christine world to the point he became the co-president of one of the clubs. It was through his contacts with these clubs that his clone ended up taking a decidedly different direction. Just as he was starting the transformation on the Savoy, one phone call got him closer to an actual movie flavored car.

The foundation for the project started with this ’58 Plymouth Savoy. It was a fairly rust-free Arizona car. Only the shell was used, while the rest of the parts came from the movie cars.

When the remnants of the cars ended up in the junkyard back in 1983, there were a few individuals that got wind that the yard was loaded up with mangled Plymouths. The yards deal at the time was 100 bucks for a pickup’s worth of parts. Needless to say, all the cars were picked clean and three partially-complete damaged cars were pulled before everything else was crushed. Aaron Kahlenberg shot the vintage photos that you see when he went looking for a tail panel for his Plymouth. Others amassed stashes of parts to repair existing cars they were working on. Mark VanCleve purchased one of the damaged cars at a swap meet in Pomona, California with the intention of putting it back together. The car had no interior, the windows were tinted black, and it had been cobbled together with parts from other cars used in the movie. He would eventually buy one of the other cars pulled from the yard as a parts donor, along with additional parts that were salvaged by a few of the individuals in that circle. After many years of storage, the intact car he owned was dismantled and its parts either sold or scrapped. The bulk of that horde of parts ended up in the hands of Drew Picard, who was planning on building a Christine recreation using the salvaged movie car parts. Having lost the ambition to follow through on the build, in 2011 he was the one who eventually called Caldwell to ask if he was interested in the parts.

“He called and asked if I knew anyone that wanted the parts,” Joe explains. “I told him that I’d take them, I’ll take it all. I didn’t even ask how much?” Joe ended up buying numerous pallets of parts along with a rusty ’57 Savoy.

  After all the parts were shipped to New York, his plans for the rust free car shifted. He recounts,” I only ended up using the bare shell. That’s it!” Everything else that was on that car was sold off along with any unusable parts that were obtained from Picard. The plan was to assemble his car using the bolt-on sheet metal, drive train, and trim from the junked movie cars. The end goal was to have as much of the “Christine blood” on his car as possible.

  That journey started in 2011 and would take four years to complete. Along the way, the obstacles that he faced were extensive. He notes, “A lot of stuff was burnt. Things were pretty rough.” It all kicked off with the donor shell being sent to Brighton Collision in Brooklyn, New York for its rotisserie restoration. Caldwell wanted the bottom of the car to look as nice as the top, so everything was massaged and sealed in a custom red Glasurit basecoat and clear topcoat. When it came time to redo the drive train, he had a few donors to choose from. Included in the parts hoard were two engines, two rear axles, and two transmissions. After a close inspection, the engine that he went with was actually the one that the bulldozer drove over in the final scene of the movie. It was a dual-quad 350 Golden Commando that was complete from intake to oil pan and only needed a new set of carburetors and air cleaners. Like the rest of the hardware to be installed, it was given a full rebuild. As the car came together, one of the biggest challenges was the vast amount of chrome and stainless steel trim needed for the restoration. There was no easy fix for the poor state of the pieces from the movie cars. The bumpers, for example, were the ones that were on the car that was set on fire in the movie. They needed to be straightened and re-chromed. Much of the stainless trim was dinged up and in some instances, warped from heat. Caldwell had Roque Pimentel in Long Island, NY handle the aluminum and stainless, while the chrome hardware was shipped to Librandi’s Plating in Middletown, Pennsylvania. The money spent on these pieces alone was staggering. The interior and glass were additional hurdles that he needed to overcome. Many of the movie’s stunt cars had no interior, and the glass was painted black to hide that fact, so there weren’t many useable parts in the mix. The front seat frames, dash, steering wheel, and a portion of the headliner were the only items used. Everything else was sourced from various places and sent to Carthom Upholstery in New Rochelle, New York. Vintage Glass in Toland, Connecticut crafted new side glass and a windshield for the Plymouth, while the rear window is an NOS piece that Caldwell purchased at the Chryslers at Carlisle event. All that new glass was treated to a heavy layer of dark tint applied by Lorenzo Window Tinting in Bronx, NY.

More than just a straight up restoration, this car was a puzzle with many pieces that all merged from various sources. When it came time to put it all together, he leaned heavily on his buddy “Fury” Jim Rawa. As the nickname implies, he knows a few things about vintage Furys and was instrumental in helping Caldwell reassemble the car. Jim was also responsible for the rebuild of the transmission, rear, and instrument cluster. As it all came together, this car wasn’t destined to be just another Christine tribute. The vision was to emulate as much of movie car’s evil attributes as possible. Some of that was accomplished with items like the instrument cluster registering mileage in reverse, or when the door is opened, the interior lighting gets very bright and the radio starts playing “Keep a Knockin.” There is also a smoke machine that allows smoke to fill the interior, and exterior, as well as a front seat that will move forward toward the steering wheel – a feature Caldwell had disabled due to its potential danger. Under the hood, the only concern with authenticity came down to visually replicating the engine that was filmed in the “show me scene.” There is chrome where paint should have been applied, but it is all legit, right down to the zip ties holding things in place. In the trunk, he had Carthom Upholstery in New Rochelle, New York finish the trunk in red leather, which included the installation of a 40-inch plasma TV, that plays the movie at shows, and a massive JL Audio sound system installed by Audio Etc in New Rochelle, New York that pumps out music with speakers hidden in all four wheel wells.

After the Fury was finished, it had its maiden outing at a George Thorogood and the Destroyers concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. His song, “Bad to the Bone” was used in the opening minutes of the movie.

Since that unveiling, Joe has traveled extensively with the car and can often be found at Mopar events, Terror Con, and Comic Con shows with some of the original cast from the movie. It also set him on a path to document, as much as possible, the history and background of the movie cars. He has an extensive archive of behind-the-scenes movie photos, a large amount of emails from everyone involved in the production of the film, and a copy of the salvage yard’s ledger with the serial numbers of the junked cars.

This recreation is about as close as anyone will ever get to an actual Christine from the movie. For Joe Caldwell, it is the culmination of that 12-year-old boys’ desire to one day own such a car.

The post This 1958 Plymouth Fury is the Ultimate Christine Tribute Car appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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[lindyhunt]

These Celebs Are De-Stigmatizing Mental Illness

Many campaigns have worked to normalize the discussion around mental health (Bell’s Let’s Talk and CAMH’s One Brave Night among them). But one thing that really reaches the masses is when a celebrity speaks out about his or her struggle to spread the message that it’s OK to have mental illness; it doesn’t make you weak.

Anyone who has ever suffered from depression or anxiety—whether temporary or chronic—knows the feeling of wanting to crawl into bed and stay there until things seem OK again. And somehow when these celebrities who seem to have it all come out and say that they actually don’t have their shit together, it is encouraging to us. By focusing on their health, it normalizes the conversation and gives us the courage to take care of ourselves (and be vocal about it). One can’t help but wonder whether more openness could’ve helped musical wonders of the past who turned to addictions and those who had publicly documented breakdowns.

Below, see the celebrities who are helping to fight the stigma against mental health by being open about their own struggles. Want to learn more about mental illness? Here are 5 myths about anxiety and depression, and information about different types of treatment.

Selena Gomez

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I have a lot to be thankful for this year.. My year has been the hardest yet most rewarding one yet. I've finally fought the fight of not 'being enough'. I have only wanted to reflect the love you guys have given me for years and show how important it is to take care of YOU. By grace through faith. Kindness always wins. I love you guys. God bless

A post shared by Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) on Nov 24, 2016 at 6:21pm PST

In August 2016, Selena Gomez announced that she would be taking a break from her career to deal with anxiety, depression and panic attacks associated with lupus (an autoimmune condition from which she suffers). She made a return to the spotlight in November that year at the American Music Awards, where she delivered an emotional, heartfelt speech, briefly touching on her battle with mental health issues.

“I had to stop because I had everything and I was absolutely broken inside. I kept it all together enough to where I would never let you down but I kept it too much together to where I let myself down,” she said. “If you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.”

The songstress also opened up about her issues with mental health in the April 2017 issue of Vogue (which she covered). “Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she told the magazine. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it—which, I think, was a complete distortion.”

She revealed she spent 90 days in a mental health facility in Tennessee, surrendering her cell phone and taking part in various forms of therapy. And while Gomez is the second most-followed person on Instagram, she told Vogue she no longer had it on her phone, and an assistant had her password.

“It felt like I was seeing things I didn’t want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn’t want to care about,” she said. “I always end up feeling like shit when I look at Instagram. Which is why I’m kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit.”

Camila Cabello

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#BGT  here I cooooome !!!! gonna b singing #cryingintheclub woooop

A post shared by camila (@camila_cabello) on May 30, 2017 at 5:06am PDT

Former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello made headlines in September 2016 after she left the stage early during a performance under the guise of a wardrobe malfunction. She later revealed, on Snapchat, that the cause was excessive anxiety, even tweeting, “just wanna sleep for 3 days.”

Cabello had already been open about her struggles with anxiety prior to the incident, however, telling Billboard that 2015 was a “low” for her, personally.

“I was having terrible anxiety, nonstop. My heart would beat really fast the whole day. Two hours after I woke up, I’d need a nap because my body was so hyperactive,” she recalled. “I was scared of what would happen to me, of the things my brain might tell me. I realized the stuff I thought was important isn’t worth my health. Now I write in a diary every day, work out and meditate.”

In March 2017, the Cuban-born star revealed to Latina magazine that she also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder. “It was just totally out of control,” Cabello told the magazine of her OCD. “I would wake up with a super-accelerated heartbeat and really negative, intrusive, compulsive thoughts. I was so inside my head, and I didn’t know what was happening.”

She continued, “I totally understand now, being in it, why there shouldn’t be such a stigma on mental illness, because it’s a pretty common thing for people. But you can get help. If you’re dedicated to making it better, you can—because I’m in a much better place now. I started reading books about it and it really helped a lot when I understood [the illness], and that [the thoughts I was having] weren’t real. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to slow down and take care of yourself.”

Zayn Malik

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A post shared by Zayn Malik (@zayn) on Aug 14, 2018 at 10:01pm PDT

In June 2016, former One Direction member Zayn Malik cancelled a U.K. concert due to anxiety. He made the announcement on Instagram, writing, “Unfortunately, my anxiety that has haunted me throughout the last few months has gotten the better of me. With the magnitude of the live event, I have suffered the worst anxiety of my career.”

Later that year, Malik revealed in his memoir, Pillow Talk, that panic attacks have stopped him from performing on more than one occasion. “I just couldn’t go through with it,” he wrote. “Mentally, the anxiety had won. Physically, I knew I couldn’t function. I would have to pull out.”

And while a member of his team offered to say he was sick, Malik insisted on being open about his struggle. “I was done with putting out statements that masked what was really going on. I wanted to tell the truth. Anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of; it affects millions of people every day,” he explained. “I don’t want to say I’m sick. I want to tell people what’s going on, and I’m not gonna be ashamed of what’s happening.”

Cara Delevingne

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Had the most incredible time at @finolhu_maldives this holiday. Thank you @gentlemonster for hooking me up with the shades 🕶 📸 by @james_suckling

A post shared by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne) on Jan 10, 2019 at 12:26am PST

In 2016, Cara Delevingne took to Twitter to reveal she took a break from modelling due to depression. “I suffer from depression and was a model during a particularly rough patch of self hatred,” she explained. Later that year, she told Esquire she had been struggling with mental illness since she was a teen, more specifically, after she discovered her mother’s drug addiction.

“I was suicidal. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I realized how lucky and privileged I was, but all I wanted to do was die,” she told the magazine, adding a six-month break from school and medication might have helped save her life at 16.

However, Cara stopped the meds at age 18, saying “I get depressed still but I would rather learn to figure it out myself rather then be dependant on meds, ever.”

Adele

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Auckland / Mt Smart Stadium / Mar 25

A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Mar 25, 2017 at 9:41pm PDT

Despite being a 15-time Grammy winner, Adele still experiences stage fright. In March 2017, she admitted to her New Zealand concertgoers that she may never tour again, due to the ongoing issue. “Touring isn’t something I’m good at–applause makes me feel a bit vulnerable. I don’t know if I will ever tour again,” she told the audience. “I get so nervous with live performances that I’m too frightened to try anything new. It’s actually getting worse. Or it’s just not getting better, so I feel like it’s getting worse, because it should’ve gotten better by now.”

Lady Gaga

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I felt like a princess in custom @tiffanyandco made just for me for the #GoldenGlobes 🤗 The Aurora necklace was named after the Aurora Borealis as an homage to #AStarIsBorn 🌟 #TiffanyAndCo

A post shared by Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) on Jan 8, 2019 at 10:29am PST

In 2016, Lady Gaga revealed she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she was raped at age 19. “I suffer from PTSD, I’ve never told anyone that before,” she said on the Today show in December 2016. “But the kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as family and friends, has really saved my life.”

More recently, Gaga opened up about her mental health struggles in a conversation with Prince William, as part of the royal’s Heads Together #oktosay series, which aims to end the stigma with the help of celebrities.

“For me, waking up every day and feeling sad and going on stage is something that is very hard to describe. There’s a lot of shame attached to mental illness. You feel like something’s wrong with you,” she told the Duke of Cambridge via FaceTime. “In my life, I go, ‘Oh my goodness, look at all these beautiful, wonderful things that I have. I should be so happy,’ but you can’t help it if, in the morning when you wake up, you are so tired, you are so sad, you are so full of anxiety and the shakes that you can barely think.”

But despite her hardships, the A Star is Born actress told William “the best thing that could come out of my mental illness was to share it with other people.”

“I feel like we are not hiding anymore, we’re starting to talk, and that’s what we need to do really,” she said.

Demi Lovato

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A post shared by Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) on May 9, 2017 at 2:42pm PDT

Demi Lovato is one of the most vocal mental health awareness advocates in the biz. The former Disney star, who has battled drug and alcohol addictions, bipolar disorder, self-harm and an eating disorder for years underwent rehab in 2010 and in 2013. Now, Lovato is much healthier and is committed to ending the stigma against mental illness. In 2015, she launched the Be Vocal campaign as a way to encourage individuals struggling with mental illness to talk about what they’re going through.

“I think the more people vocalize what they’re going through—their experience or just simply educating themselves so that they can learn more about what they’re talking about—that’s going to be the key to creating a conversation about mental illness and making it more understood,” she told HuffPost. “There’s a lack of compassion for people who have mental illnesses and there’s a lot of judgment. Once you make people realize that mental illness can happen to anybody—and it’s not anybody’s fault—then I think they’ll become more understanding of what mental illness really is.”

Jennifer Lawrence

Photography by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Jennifer Lawrence opened up about her struggle with anxiety in 2013, telling Madame Figaro that she began experiencing symptoms as a preteen. “When my mother told me about my childhood, she always told me that there was like a light in me, a spark that inspired me constantly,” Lawrence told the magazine. “When I started school, the light went out. It was never known what it was, a kind of social anxiety.”

She eventually went to seek help from a therapist and turned to acting as a form of self-therapy. She also revealed to the New York Times that she manages her anxiety with the use of prescription meds.

Emma Stone

Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage

Oscar winner Emma Stone told Rolling Stone in 2016 that she experienced bouts of anxiety and panic attacks as a child. “My anxiety was constant,” she said. “I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses anymore–I could barely get out the door to school.”

She did reveal, however, that therapy and acting, specifically improv and sketch comedy, is what helped her work through it. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” she explained.

Chrissy Teigen

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My stoop buddy

A post shared by chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) on Apr 29, 2017 at 6:47pm PDT

Chrissy Teigen is never one to hold back, but she shocked fans when she penned an essay for Glamour in 2017 on her struggle with postpartum depression. “I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy. I blamed it on being tired and possibly growing out of the role: ‘Maybe I’m just not a goofy person anymore. Maybe I’m just supposed to be a mom,'” she wrote, later adding “postpartum does not discriminate.”

Months later, Teigen finally saw her family doctor, where she got her diagnosis. She began taking antidepressants. “I’m speaking up now because I want people to know it can happen to anybody and I don’t want people who have it to feel embarrassed or to feel alone. I also don’t want to pretend like I know everything about postpartum depression, because it can be different for everybody. But one thing I do know is that—for me—just merely being open about it helps.”

Troian Bellisario

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Thanks @coveteur I truly am a creepy eavesdropper. 😉 (📸 by @weston.wells )

A post shared by Troian Bellisario (@sleepinthegardn) on May 10, 2017 at 6:53am PDT

In November 2016, Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario revealed via a voting PSA that she struggled with an eating disorder when she was younger. She said it was early detection and mental healthcare that saved her. “If I had just been shunned to the side as not having ‘real problems’, I don’t know that I would be living today,” she explained. “I just want to make sure that everybody has the same opportunity for treatment that I have, and I think that we have to make sure that our government invests in those programs.”

Troian shared her story on her struggles with anorexia in her film Feed, which she wrote and directed. “It was not easy; it was like engaging with an addiction,” she told Interview magazine of revisiting her story, adding that working on the film was “like poking a sleeping dragon.” “One of the things I really wanted the film to explore was that once you have this relationship, once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away.”

And just like many others who suffer from mental illness, Bellisario said she feels like no one truly understands what she went through. “Still to this day, I couldn’t get anyone—even the people who loved me the most, even my boyfriend or my mother or my father—to understand what that experience was truly like for me,” she said. “It was about my eating disorder, and I found there were so many people who thought that it was about losing weight or being skinny, and I couldn’t quite get them to understand that it was about control on a very, very literal level.”

Gina Rodriguez

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One year after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, there is still work to be done. Thank you @ricky_martin for giving us all an opportunity to continue to contribute to the reconstruction of our beautiful island of Puerto Rico. #allin4pr #miislabonita ❤️🙌🏽 link in bio 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷

A post shared by Gina Rodriguez (@hereisgina) on Oct 26, 2018 at 4:12pm PDT

Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez got candid about her struggle with anxiety in a moving Instagram post. “I suffer from anxiety,” she captioned the video, which sees her makeup-free in a New York Yankees cap. “And watching this clip I could see how anxious I was but I empathize with myself. I wanted to protect her and tell her it’s ok to be anxious, there is nothing different or strange about having anxiety and I will prevail.”

Ariana Grande

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A post shared by Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) on Nov 6, 2018 at 7:11pm PST

In British Vogue’s July 2018 issue, Ariana Grande opened up on her experience with PTSD after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. “It’s hard to talk about because so many people have suffered such severe tremendous loss. But, yeah, it’s a real thing,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever know how to talk about it and not cry.”

In November 2018, the singer/songwriter dropped a single titled “thank u, next,” dedicated to all of her exes, including the late-Mac Miller (who died this past September of a drug overdose) and ex-fiancé Pete Davidson, which resulted in fans wondering who her therapist is. “Therapy has saved my life so many times,” Grande tweeted in response. “If you’re afraid to ask for help, don’t be.”

Shawn Mendes

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Je t’aime France ! 🇫🇷 x

A post shared by Shawn Mendes (@shawnmendes) on Nov 10, 2018 at 2:31pm PST

It may be hard to believe that Canada’s very own heartthrob has had his fair share of anxious episodes, but he has. In April 2018, the singer-songwriter told The Sun in an interview that he had seen a therapist a few times. “I found I was closing myself off from everybody, thinking that would help me battle [my anxiety], then realizing the only way I was going to battle it was completely opening up and letting people in,” Mendes said.

Said anxiety was chronicled in his single “In My Blood” (Lyrics: Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in, sometimes I feel like giving up, no medicine is strong enough, someone help me.)

“All pain is temporary, and the thing is with anxiety, and why it’s such a hard thing for people who don’t have it to understand, is that it is very random and it hits you at moments you don’t expect it. Sometimes it lasts two hours, sometimes it lasts a day and sometimes it lasts five minutes,” he said.

Sarah Hyland

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Velvet dragon scaled 🧜‍♀️ dripping in 💎 for the #goldenglobes @instylemagazine #instylewbglobes

A post shared by Sarah Hyland (@sarahhyland) on Jan 8, 2019 at 9:29am PST

Back in December 2018, Sarah Hyland opened up about experiencing suicidal thoughts after her body rejected a kidney donated by her dad. The Modern Family star, who has had a slew of health problems her whole life, appeared on Ellen in early January 2019 and spoke about her depression.

“After 26, 27 years of just always being sick and being in chronic pain every single day—and [you] don’t know when you’re going to have the next good day—it’s really, really hard…” she said.

“I would write letters in my head to loved ones of why I did it, and my reasoning behind it, and how it wasn’t anybody’s fault,” the 28-year-old revealed, adding that she was “very, very, very close,” to taking her own life.

When asked how she overcame her suicidal thoughts and depression, Hyland said that she confided in a close friend (“I finally said it out loud to someone… just saying it out loud helped immensely, because I kept it to myself for months and months at a time.”) who urged her to see a therapist.

[ultrasfcb-blog]

Mohamed Salah: Liverpool

Mohamed Salah: Liverpool

Mohamed Salah: Liverpool

Mohamed Salah scored twice for Liverpool in their 5-2 win over Roma in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final

“It was like being in a Stephen King story,” Maurizio Crosetti wrote in La Repubblica.

Which one he didn’t specify. There are so many to choose from but Hollywood remake means ‘It’ comes easily to mind.

Last week at Anfield, ‘It’ was Mohamed Salah or, to adopt the name used by La Gazzetta dello Sport in the aftermath of Roma’s 5-2 defeat by Liverpool: “Salah the ferocious”.

Italy’s sports press clearly enjoys a good horror film. In the player ratings Salah received nines across the board.

Il Corriere della Sera called his two goals “works of art”, presumably thinking of Lucio Fontana, the founder of spatialism.

The terror Salah wrought and the awe he inspired was one theme prevalent in the papers. Another was regret.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Roma knew Salah was a top player when they sold him last summer.

During his time in Serie A, the Egyptian was second in assists and chances created. He’d helped Edin Dzeko go from flop to Capocannoniere (Serie A’s top goalscorer) and enjoy the most prolific season of any Roma player ever, bettering strikers like Gabriel Batistuta and Rudi Voller.

But if the Giallorossi had known Salah was “Ballon d’Or worthy” as every Italian newspaper declared him to be following last week’s display, then it’s impossible not to feel a bit of seller’s remorse.

Neymar was supposed to be the player primed to break Messi and Ronaldo’s 10-year grip on that award. In Italy, Juventus’ graceful playmaker Paulo Dybala was proclaimed Serie A’s biggest hope and likeliest recipient of the prize. Not Salah.

Within the media and among fans, there is a sense of what might have been had Roma been able to tap into Salah’s potential in the way Jurgen Klopp has over the last nine months.

Improvement was to be expected. Salah is still only 25 and, together with Klopp’s style, the faster, looser, more anarchic Premier League seemed tailor-made for him. It was a good fit. You could project Salah would get better. But this much better?

Salah helped former Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko become Serie A’s top goalscorer last season. Dzeko netted 29 times in 2016-17, while Salah scored 15 league goals

Inter manager Luciano Spalletti was quizzed on this at Friday’s pre-match news conference on Friday. Did he expect his former Roma player to become one of the best in the world?

“He makes everything look easy,” Spalletti said. “Then there’s the job Klopp has done. I tried all year to get him to play more centrally and he kept going wide to get the ball. It seems to me he now understands what his starting position has to be and is drawing great benefit from it.”

Of course the fee Liverpool paid now appears cheap. It was made to look that way pretty quickly. Crosetti’s colleague – and the doyen of Italian sportswriting – Gianni Mura penned an editorial last week entitled “Selling him for €42m was not a [good] deal”.

But that wasn’t the consensus at the time.

It was considered an expensive risk. John W Henry felt it was a lot of money for a player with one year left on his contract and, as The Washington Post revealed last week, Roma’s president James Pallotta obligingly bought him lunch the day after Salah’s transfer was completed, thinking it was the least he could do.

Salah represented a club-record windfall and with the exception of Liverpool, there weren’t many other teams “banging down the door” to sign him, Pallotta told the BBC World Service.

You feel some sympathy for Roma’s sporting director Monchi, who now can’t do an interview without Salah’s name being mentioned. At the weekend he was asked if Salah is worth €200m? “We’ve spoken a lot about him,” Monchi replied.

It must be frustrating for the former goalkeeper. “I’ve explained it 300 million times,” he huffed in the mixed zone at Anfield. “If we hadn’t sold Salah we perhaps wouldn’t be here.”

Without the sale Roma would have struggled to meet their FFP obligations. The deadline to do so was 30 June, coming before the Neymar and Ousmane Dembele transfers that changed the face of the market forever. All of a sudden, player valuations went through the roof.

Monchi had actually dragged out negotiations for as long as he could. Liverpool’s initial offer for Salah pre-dated his appointment last April – the wheels were already set in motion – and with the player’s mind made up to leave, all that was left to do was drive as hard a bargain as possible within the time available.

In normal circumstances persuading Liverpool to up their offer from €35m to €50m [all add-ons included] would be framed a success. But the €222m PSG later stumped up for Neymar distorted perspectives.

The inflationary pressures were significant. Salah had hardly kicked a ball for Liverpool and the CIES Football Observatory was already valuing him at €88.1m. In March they reviewed that estimate in line with his extraordinary performances, adjusting it to €162.8m.

Mohamed Salah’s European club career Team Fee Dates Appearances Goals

Figures are in all competitions. His last game for Chelsea was in January, 2015, but he was still contracted to them until joining Roma on a permanent deal in July 2016.

Basel – Jan 12 to Jan 14 67 (40 starts) 13 Chelsea £11m Jan 14 to July 16 19 (10 starts) 2 Fiorentina (loan) – Feb 15 to June 15 26 (20 starts) 9 Roma (loan) – Aug 15 to July 16 42 (39 starts) 15 Roma £12m July 16 to June 17 39 (35 starts) 19 Liverpool £34m June 17 to present 48 (45 starts) 43

Salah has been missed in Rome. Cengiz Under and Patrik Schick have big futures and promise to become superstars but it was unrealistic to expect them to step up straightaway.

It explains why Monchi made a concerted effort to replace Salah with Riyad Mahrez, only for Leicester to dig in.

After the 0-0 draw with Atletico Madrid in September, Edin Dzeko admitted he felt the Egyptian’s absence. Salah set up eight goals for him last season. He would attract defenders’ attention and force them back, creating space for the Bosnian and Radja Nainggolan to do damage.

Until this weekend, Roma’s attack ranked fifth in Serie A with 20 fewer goals than this time last year. But Monchi’s general assessment is correct.

Selling Salah and reinvesting the proceeds allowed Roma to deepen a shallow squad and break new ground in the Champions League, reaching the semis for the first time in 34 years, when the competition was known as the European Cup.

The run is worth €82m in prize money and attracted Roma’s first shirt sponsor in five years, an arrangement that will bring in another €40m between now and 2021. Roma should also be back next year.

Saturday’s 4-1 win against Chievo – secured with intelligent player rotation – was a big step towards qualification and the riches the Champions League has to offer.

The focus now turns to another Romantada. The Giallorossi don’t need the Pope to work a miracle for them. They have done it before. It’s acknowledged in a motivational message attached to the walls of the tunnel at the Stadio Olimpico: “The fact it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Improbable only means that it can happen. I believe.”

Let’s not forget Roma beat Chelsea and Barcelona 3-0 at the Olimpico. Eusebio Di Francesco’s side are still yet to concede at home in the Champions League this season.

The trouble is, Salah is used to scoring here. For him, it’s like a home from home.

BBC Sport – Football ultras_FC_Barcelona

ultras FC Barcelona - https://ultrasfcb.com/football/3165/

#Barcelona

[365footballorg-blog]

An expensive risk who came with a free lunch - how Liverpool's Salah gamble left Roma regretful

“It was like being in a Stephen King story,” Maurizio Crosetti wrote in La Repubblica.

Which one he didn’t specify. There are so many to choose from but Hollywood remake means ‘It’ comes easily to mind.

Last week at Anfield, ‘It’ was Mohamed Salah or, to adopt the name used by La Gazzetta dello Sport in the aftermath of Roma’s 5-2 defeat[1] by Liverpool: “Salah the ferocious”.

Italy’s sports press clearly enjoys a good horror film. In the playing ratings Salah received nines across the board.

Il Corriere della Sera called his two goals “works of art”, presumably thinking of Lucio Fontana, the founder of spatialism.

The terror Salah wrought and the awe he inspired was one theme prevalent in the papers. Another was regret.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Roma knew Salah was a top player when they sold him last summer.

During his time in Serie A, the Egyptian was second in assists and chances created. He’d helped Edin Dzeko go from flop to Capocannoniere (Serie A’s top goalscorer) and enjoy the most prolific season of any Roma player ever, bettering strikers like Gabriel Batistuta and Rudi Voller.

But if the Giallorossi had known Salah was “Ballon d’Or worthy” as every Italian newspaper declared him to be following last week’s display, then it’s impossible not to feel a bit of seller’s remorse.

Neymar was supposed to be the player primed to break Messi and Ronaldo’s 10-year grip on that award. In Italy, Juventus’ graceful playmaker Paulo Dybala was proclaimed Serie A’s biggest hope and likeliest recipient of the prize. Not Salah.

Within the media and among fans, there is a sense of what might have been had Roma been able to tap into Salah’s potential in the way Jurgen Klopp has over the last nine months.

Improvement was to be expected. Salah is still only 25 and, together with Klopp’s style, the faster, looser, more anarchic Premier League seemed tailor-made for him. It was a good fit. You could project Salah would get better. But this much better?

<!–

Inter manager Luciano Spalletti was quizzed on this at Friday’s pre-match news conference on Friday. Did he expect his former Roma player to become one of the best in the world?

“He makes everything look easy,” Spalletti said. “Then there’s the job Klopp has done. I tried all year to get him to play more centrally and he kept going wide to get the ball. It seems to me he now understands what his starting position has to be and is drawing great benefit from it.”

Of course the fee Liverpool paid now appears cheap. It was made to look that way pretty quickly. Crosetti’s colleague – and the doyen of Italian sportswriting – Gianni Mura penned an editorial last week entitled “Selling him for €42m was not a [good] deal”.

But that wasn’t the consensus at the time.

It was considered an expensive risk. John W Henry felt it was a lot of money for a player with one year left on his contract and, as The Washington Post revealed last week, Roma’s president James Pallotta obligingly bought him lunch the day after Salah’s transfer was completed, thinking it was the least he could do.

<!–

Salah represented a club record windfall and with the exception of Liverpool, there weren’t many other teams “banging down the door” to sign him, Pallotta told the BBC World Service.

You feel some sympathy for Roma’s sporting director Monchi who now can’t go an interview without Salah’s name being mentioned. At the weekend he was asked if Salah is worth €200m? “We’ve spoken a lot about him,” Monchi replied.

It must be frustrating for the former goalkeeper. “I’ve explained it 300 million times,” he huffed in the mixed zone at Anfield. “If we hadn’t sold Salah we perhaps wouldn’t be here.”

Without the sale Roma would have struggled to meet their FFP obligations. The deadline to do so was 30 June, coming before the Neymar and Ousmane Dembele transfers that changed the face of the market forever. All of a sudden, player valuations went through the roof.

Monchi had actually dragged out negotiations for as long as he could. Liverpool’s initial offer for Salah pre-dated his appointment last April – the wheels were already set in motion – and with the player’s mind made up to leave, all that was left to do was drive as hard a bargain as possible within the time available.

In normal circumstances persuading Liverpool to up their offer from €35m to €50m [all add-ons included] would be framed a success. But the €222m PSG later stumped up for Neymar distorted perspectives.

The inflationary pressures were significant. Salah had hardly kicked a ball for Liverpool and the CIES Football Observatory was already valuing him at €88.1m. In March they reviewed that estimate in line with his extraordinary performances, adjusting it to €162.8m.

Mohamed Salah’s club career Team Fee Dates Appearances Goals

Figures are in all competitions. His last game for Chelsea was in January, 2015, but he was still contracted to them until joining Roma on a permanent deal in July 2016. In his last two seasons at Chelsea he had loan spells at both Fiorentina and Roma.

Basel – Jan 12 to Jan 14 67 (40 starts) 13 Chelsea £11m Jan 14 to July 16 19 (10 starts) 2 Fiorentina (loan) – Feb 15 to June 15 26 (20 starts) 9 Roma (loan) – Aug 15 to July 16 42 (39 starts) 15 Roma £12m July 16 to June 17 39 (35 starts) 19 Liverpool £34m June 17 to present 48 (45 starts) 43

Salah has been missed in Rome. Cengiz Under and Patrik Schick have big futures and promise to become superstars but it was unrealistic to expect them to step up straightaway.

It explains why Monchi made a concerted effort to replace Salah with Riyad Mahrez only for Leicester to dig in.

After the 0-0 draw with Atletico Madrid in September, Edin Dzeko admitted he felt the Egyptian’s absence. Salah set up eight goals for him last season. He would attract defenders attention and force them back, creating space for the Bosnian and Radja Nainggolan to do damage.

Until this weekend, Roma’s attack ranked fifth in Serie A with 20 fewer goals than this time last year. But Monchi’s general assessment is correct.

Selling Salah and reinvesting the proceeds allowed Roma to deepen a shallow squad and break new ground in the Champions League, reaching the semis for the first time in 34 years.

The run is worth €82m in prize money and attracted Roma’s first shirt sponsor in five years, an arrangement that will bring in another €40m between now and 2021. Roma should also be back next year.

Saturday’s 4-1 win against Chievo – secured with intelligent player rotation – was a big step towards qualification and the riches the Champions League has to offer.

The focus now turns to another Romantada. The Giallorossi don’t need the Pope to work a miracle for them. They have done it before. It’s acknowledged in a motivational message attached to the walls of the tunnel at the Olimpico: “The fact it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Improbable only means that it can happen. I believe.”

Let’s not forget Roma beat Chelsea and Barcelona by three goals at the Olimpico. Eusebio Di Francesco’s side are still yet to concede at home in the Champions League this season.

The trouble is, Salah is used to scoring here. For him, it’s like home from home.

References

^ Roma’s 5-2 defeat (www.bbc.co.uk)

BBC Sport – Football

An expensive risk who came with a free lunch – how Liverpool's Salah gamble left Roma regretful was originally published on 365 Football

[gossipnetwork-blog]

25 TV Events to Get Excited About in 2018

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/25-tv-events-to-get-excited-about-in-2018/

25 TV Events to Get Excited About in 2018

New year, new TV to look forward to.

Now that it’s finally 2018, it’s time to cut your losses with the fall shows you’ve already grown tired and make some room on your DVRs for everything the new year has to offer because there’s a lot to get excited about.

Kicking things off on New Year’s Day with the return of Arie Luyendyk Jr. as ABC’s latest Bachleor, we’ve narrowed down the 25 TV events worth getting excited about over the next 12 months from a surprisingly deep pool of worthy candidates. Seriously, there’s a lot of promising stuff coming our way. Read on and start programming your DVR!

ABC/Craig Sjodin

Bachelor‘s Big Winter

Kudos to the Bachelor franchise for trying something new in 2018. First, they went back a few years to the pre-Instagram days to find their newest leading man, Arie Luyendyk Jr., and we’re also being treated to what appears to be an international hot tub party known as Winter Games. It all sounds like exactly the fresh Bachelor air we need, and we can’t wait to see how it all goes down, starting January 1.

Freeform

Freeform Gets Grown-ish

It’s time for Zoey Johnson to fly the coop and strike out on her own…-ish. In this Freeform spinoff of Black-ish, debuting January 3, Yara Shahidi takes center stage as the eldest Johnson child embarks on her freshman year at California University with a diverse group of friends helping her navigate her first taste of adult life. Look out for guest appearances from parents Dre and Bow as Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross are set to make occasional guest appearances in the comedy, which hails from the mothership’s creator Kenya Barris. 

CBS

Star Trek: Discovery‘s Return

The spore drive is done for and the U.S.S. Discovery is…missing. The finale ended with Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and his team including Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) evading death and destruction at the hands of the Klingons, only to find themselves some place very unfamiliar. Could our heroes be in the Mirror Universe? Whatever happens, beam us up for more adventures on January 7.

VH1

Tyra Returns on Top

Sorry Rita Ora, but Tyra Banks is reclaiming her America’s Next Top Model throne. Banks is returning on January 9 to host the revived series on VH1 after only serving as executive producer on Cycle 23. This year, expect new terms from Tyra and new competitors: there’s no longer an age limit.

Showtime

Showtime’s Trip to The Chi

If creator Lena Waithe‘s Emmy-winning episode of Master of None, “Thanksgiving,” is any indication, her new Showtime drama is, hands down, one of 2018’s can’t-miss debuts. The Chi, premiering January 7, is billed as a timely coming-of-age story that will explore the humanity behind the headlines sensationalizing the South Side of Chicago. Expect this to be an early Emmys frontrunner.

The CW

A New Superhero

Luke Cage may have come before him, but Black Lightning feels like the first superhero series to finally truly speak to the Black Lives Matter movement. The CW’s latest DC Comics adaptation, starring Cress Williams as the titular hero and premiering Jan. 16, feels timely in a way that few of the network’s other comic book offerings have. If nothing else, it’s just refreshing to have a CW superhero who feels like a damn adult.

FX

American Crime Story Goes Glam

People v. O.J. was great, but The Assassination of Gianni Versace brings a new level of glamour and intrigue to one of last year’s most talked about new series with one of the biggest crimes fashion has ever suffered. Darren Criss plays the serial killer we never before knew we needed him to play, and Penélope Cruz is straight-up iconic as Donatella Versace. We are so there come January 17.  

VH1

Mama Ru Gathers More All-Stars

While some of the queens returning for another chance at the crown barely fit in the label of “star,” let alone “All-Star”—Aja, anyone?—our excitement at finally having RuPaul and her glorious queens back is off the charts. RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars 3 returns to its new network (VH1) on January 25 to see who will join the ranks of legendary All-Stars and All-Stars 2 winners Chad Michaels and Alaska, respectively. Who are we rooting for? We’ll never tell. (OK, we’ll tell. That crown belongs to Trixie Mattel. Don’t @ us.)

Mindy Tucker/HBO

2 Dope Queens Come to HBO

What’s better than listening to your favorite podcast? Watching it come to life in a series of HBO specials, that’s what! Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson bring their acclaimed podcast 2 Dope Queens to the cable network beginning February 2 for four hour-long specials taped before a live audience, tackling topics like “Black Nerds aka Blerds” and “Hot Peen” alongside guests including Jon Stewart and Tituss Burgess. 

Netflix

Netflix Explores Altered Carbon

Netflix is going big with this original series, an adaptation the classic cyberpunk noir novel by Richard K. Morgan. Set more than 300 years in a future where society has been transformed by new technology, consciousness can be digitized, human bodies are interchangeable, and death is no longer permanent, the sci-fi series stars Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs, the lone surviving soldier in a group of elite interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. Altered Carbon, dropping on the streaming site on February 2, looks expensive and confusing as hell. Count us in.

CBS

Big Brother Turns Celebrity

Already a staple in the U.K., Celebrity Big Brother is finally making its way across the pond for a special edition on CBS beginning February 7. Which of our D-list celebs will sign up to duke it out in the Big Brother house with Julie Chen narrating their every move? We haven’t the slightest idea and we can’t wait to find out.

Lifetime

UnREAL Flips the Script

Did you know that it’s been nearly 18 months since UnREAL signed off for season two? After that creative debacle, you may have pushed the provocative Lifetime series, a fictional account of the inner-workings of a Bachelor-esque reality series, out of your mind. But queens Constance Zimmer and Shiri Appleby deserve better, and it looks like the time off may have helped deliver a third series worthy of their estimable talents. After tackling their first African-American suitor in S2, they’re going the Bachelorette route this time around with Masters of Sex alum Caitlin FitzGerald assuming the role of Everlasting’s (the show within the show) new feminist “suitress.” Could Quinn and Rachel have finally met their match? Tune in on February 26 to find out. 

Good Girls Go Bad

What do you get when you take a Parks and Recreation fave (Retta), a Parenthood breakout (Mae Whitman), and a Mad Men diva (Christina Hendricks), cast them as three suburban moms tired of their lives, and have them rob a local supermarket. Why, the recipe for our most anticipated show of 2018, that’s what. Is it February 26 yet?

Netflix

A Queer Comeback

All things just keep getting better thanks to Netflix’s upcoming revival of the seminal reality series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Does the new Fab Five (from left to right, Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France) have what it takes to make us forget about Carson Kressley, Ted Allen and the rest of the OGs? Come February, we’ll find out.

CBS

Round Two of The Good Fight

It’s been a long few months without Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) dropping an eff-bomb on our screens. The first season The Good Fight was politically charged and intriguing and the real world hasn’t gotten any less crazy, so Robert and Michelle King have a lot of fodder for new episodes, beginning March 4. Plus Audra McDonald will be a series regular this year, so our hopes of a musical episode just got all the more higher.

ABC

American Idol Returns From the Dead

Did we really want a revival of American Idol so soon after its 2016 (supposed) series finale? Not even slightly. Are we planning to tune in on March 11 to see if Katy Perry was really worth her rumored $25 million salary? You betcha. 

NBC

A New TV Musical Rises

Glee meets Friday Night Lights this spring on NBC, with Moana (Auli’i Cravalho), Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and Rosie Perez (Rosie Perez) in the starring roles of this Jason Katims-produced high school drama set (where else) in a working class town. This one could either be one of the year’s biggest successes or biggest flame-outs. Tune in on March 13 and judge for yourself.

ABC

Roseanne‘s Return

Revival fatigue is very real, but we for sure will not be able to look away from the return of Roseanne Barr‘s iconic comedy Roseanne, premiering March 27, for two big reasons: 1. Curiosity about how the show explains away the series finale that had Roseanne Conner revealing Dan (John Goodman) was dead and she made the entire series up as a writer and 2. Laurie Metcalf. Metcalf is one of the best actors working today. Any chance to get weekly doses of her we will take.

Hulu

Handmaid’s Trip to the Colonies

Where do you go after being the most-buzzed about new series and winning a slew of awards? That’s what we want to know, The Handmaid’s Tale! Season two, debuting sometime in April, is already well underway and details are being kept under wraps. We do know there will be more Alexis Bledel—sorry, that’s Emmy winner Alexis Bledel to you—and previously unseen parts of Gilead. “What I can tell you, and I’m not joking one bit, is it’s knocking me out where this story is going,” Ann Dowd told E! News. “I literally read the scripts and I think, ‘Oh my god.’ The ideas are genius and so unpredictable and harrowing,” she said. “Plus you see the worlds that you weren’t exposed to before: the Colonies, what that whole world is; those who make it to Canada, what happens there; the pregnancy, how that is coming along. It’s a phenomenally well-written show.”

Bravo

RHONY‘s Extra Dose of Real-World Drama

Arguably the best Real Housewives series on Bravo (go ahead and try to say another is better), Real Housewives of New York City is set to return with last year’s top-tier cast and you know there’s going to be laughs—and drama. Luann de Lesseps was arrested just before Christmas and charged with battery of an officer, disorderly intoxication, resisting arrested with violence and crimes against another person. She’s now in a treatment center. Bravo’s cameras are just itching to start recording and we cannot wait to see what they capture.

John P. Johnson/HBO

A Return Trip to Westworld

Season one felt like nothing more than a prelude, an introductory course to this world where nothing is as it seems and everyone watching wised up to the twists down the road much sooner than anyone writing expected. But now that the robots have taken over, making the demented amusement park at the center of this HBO sci-fi/western pastiche a true free-for-all, we can’t wait to see what happens next when Westworld finally returns this spring.But it better involve Maeve (Thandie Newton) kicking some ass.

FX

Atlanta, at Long Last

One of 2016’s most surreal and delightful new shows, Atlanta feels like it’s been gone forever. Apparently creator and star Donald Glover was too busy being very famous and employable to give us more in 2017, so we’ll take whatever he can give us in 2018. 

Netflix

Robin Wright’s House of Cards Reign

Robin Wright has always been the best thing about House of Cards and now she gets to truly own the show for its sixth and final season. After allegations of sexual misconduct by Kevin Spacey came to light, the status of the Netflix series was in question. After deliberation, Netflix and Media Rights Capital said the show must go on¬—without Spacey. Wright’s Claire Underwood ended season five in power, now we get to see her wield it triumphantly.

The CW

Sabrina Gets Spooky

Inspired by the success of Riverdale‘s dark take on Archie Comics, WB and Netflix are teaming up to create the show of our teenage dreams. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (you know, the teenage witch) is already our favorite thing to binge and we know absolutely nothing about it yet. Even if we only get a cast in 2018, we are here for it. 

Sipa

Feud Goes Royal

After Feud‘s spot-on casting for Bette and Joan, we can’t wait to see who Ryan Murphy lands in the lead roles for the anthology’s upcoming second installment, Charles and Diana. We have our thoughts on who will fill the royal shoes of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, among others, but we’re sure that Murphy will still manage to surprise us. 

Which TV event are you most excited about for 2018? Sound off in the comments below!

(E!, Bravo and NBC are all part of the NBCUniversal family.)

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[artsoccupychi]

The Day Everything Became Crystal Clear

Recently, I had a very…bad…week. I thought I’d share a very personal story with you, in the hope that it helps you enjoy Thanksgiving with more gratitude.

(Gratitude is the highest vibration emotion ever recorded by ECG and EEG!)

My 17-year old son texted me, while I was in San Diego at a conference, that something was wrong with our much-loved cat, Charlemagne.

Charlie wasn’t yet 2 years old, and he was fine when I left. He’s never been sick. When I got home the next day, I found that his back legs were paralyzed.

The next day I took him to the vet, and she said she would run some tests, that it looked like heart disease and blood clots.

Thirty minutes later, the vet called me to tell me Charlie had suddenly just taken one deep breath and…died.

The next day, I went to court against my children’s father.

While we’d never been to court before, we’ve been to many legal mediations over 9 years, and I’ve incurred many thousands of dollars in legal bills.

To save money, I had released my attorney, and represented myself in court.

And the judge awarded me everything. Including my attorneys’ fees, since my ex-husband’s violation of court orders caused the legal fees in the first place.

But then, the judge, scrolling through the online court system, told me he couldn’t find the bill from my attorney, filed as an affidavit with the court.

Turns out, she forgot. So, my children’s father got to walk away from that large bill, and I was left holding the bag. All due to a technicality.

I wish those were the worst things, in my very bad week.

The next day, we found out that my new book, Vibe, had pre-sold well over 15,000 copies, prior to the week it published. The book project itself represented 18 months of hard work: landing the deal with Simon & Schuster, writing, and editing several times, and marketing it for months leading up to the excitement of publication date.

And that day, I learned that even though I outsold 9 of the 10 authors who made the New York Times bestseller list that week–even Oprah–my book somehow didn’t make the New York Times list.

“Things happen in threes,” I have said at several times in my life, including that week.

If I’m telling the truth, I may have thrown a little pity party. I felt like I shouldn’t have so many sad things happen to me, rapid-fire. I went to bed early.

The next morning, after the bad news of the NYT list ignoring my book, I was at tennis practice, and my teammate, Susan, said,

“Hey, congrats on your book. I was at a care facility last week, and I met a lady who is a big fan of yours. She was showing me your book and was all excited about it.”

I asked Susan where the care facility was, and what the lady’s name is. It turned out she was just two miles from my home. The next day, I stopped by, hoping to sign the lady’s book, and chat with her.

Merry, it turned out, is 63 years old, though her skin looks 35, as if she’s never been out in the sun–and she has a long, blonde braid.

She was in a twin bed with two other ladies sharing the room. She sits in an old, broken wheelchair, because she has no income, no pension, no husband, siblings, parents, or children—and the broken wheelchair she sat in was recently gifted to her.

Her eyes got wide, as I walked into the room, and she whispered:

“Is it you??”

It turns out, she didn’t have my new book, Vibe, at all, as I’d assumed. She wouldn’t likely know about it, since she has no access to social media, and has never sent or received a text in her life, doesn’t own a smart phone.

Her entire life is lived in a corner of a shared room, in a rundown care facility.

She picked up the 2007 first-edition, self-published version of my 12 Steps to Whole Foods course, next to her bed, and handed it to me.

She pointed at my photo, in the Intro, and said, “That’s you!”

“Yes it is,” I told her, “a long time ago!” She told me about the public lecture I had given, many years before. Her neighbor had offered to drive her to it.

Half the pages were torn out of the 12 Steps course manual.

She picked up a large, 3-ring binder, to show me where the rest of the pages were. She had been tearing out the pages, one at a time, cutting off the ragged edges with scissors, and putting each page in plastic sleeves, in the binder.

The 12 Steps to Whole Foods manual was extensively marked up with highlighting, careful notes in the margin in ballpoint pen, recipes circled that she wanted to try.

The 10-year old manual looked like it had been well loved, well used, dog-eared.

Only it wasn’t. Because Merry cannot cook. Merry can’t walk anymore, 26 years after her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis when she was just 37 years old.

She told me about her life. How she tries to get to the exercise room every day, to stand (or sit, when her legs won’t hold her) holding onto the rails of the vibration plate.

She told me that doing so wears her out, and after one of these “exercise” sessions, she sometimes sleeps for 36 hours.

She told me how she would love to eat a healthy diet, as she’d read in my 12 Steps to Whole Foods manual—but she would somehow have to get the ingredients to make a green smoothie. And a blender.

Reading that manual, and looking at the photos, for her, is like reading a travel book for someone who dreams, someday, of seeing the world beyond her back yard.

Merry told me that the only vegetables served at the budget-conscious care facility–alongside ham, pie with cool whip, and the usual cafeteria fare–are severely overcooked vegetables, to cater to the mostly elderly population in the care facility.

I asked her how I could help her. I left with a resolve to use my own resources to get Merry a large, daily green smoothie.

She told me, with determination in her voice, several times: “In just a few weeks, I plan to be leaving here.”

But, Merry came in, walking, 10 months ago—when she fell, and her landlady broke her own rib, picking Merry up off the floor–causing Merry to realize that now, finally, she needed a higher level of care.

But 10 months after walking through the front door, Merry’s health has declined to the point where she can no longer walk at all.

“I’m going to get out of here, though,” she told me, several times, resolve in her eyes.

When I left that day, I walked out into the parking lot of the care center. It is mid-November here in Utah, but we’ve had an amazing indian summer, and the sun was shining.

I could smell the decaying leaves all around me, a smell I’ve always loved. I stopped, by my car, struck with this thought:

I am walking across this parking lot. I just walked out of that facility. No one in there can walk out here.

I am standing out here in the sunshine. Where I could run, across this parking lot, if I want to.

And I’m going to get in that car, which is available to me all the time, and I’m going to drive it.

To enjoy Saturday night out with my girlfriends.

And because I have a job and access to cash and credit, I can buy myself dinner, and enjoy the evening doing whatever I want.

As I got lost in total awe and gratitude at my incredibly blessed circumstances, I noticed that, in the middle of the parking lot where I was standing, tears were rolling down my cheeks.

I threw my head back, and felt the sun on my skin. I took a few deep breaths, amazed and awed by my healthy body and mind.

Any vestiges of my pity party from earlier in the week melted away. I felt like the luckiest, most blessed, happiest person alive. I was flooded with compassion for another living being whose suffering was real and yet, she wasn’t complaining, and her vibration actually uplifted me.

I realized that my “problems” weren’t worth losing even a moment of happiness over.

I hope you take a moment to focus on the good, to show more love, to find someone to serve, and to remember what you have to be grateful for.

P.S. Of course you will want to know if I’ve adopted Merry and am helping serve her needs, and I am, don’t worry!

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