#/ marriage is some magical; meaningful thing when in reality \

[katatonicimpression]

Hammering Out Some Thoughts About Maddie

(a.k.a. I have feelings)

What happened in Dark Web?

So, Ben Reilly (a clone of Peter Parker) comes to Madelyne Pryor with a mind to make trouble. He's frustrated about his identity and his feelings about Peter and wants closure and vengeance and whatnot. She seems into the plan and then does all the work. Magic shennanigans, demons in New York, the works.

Maddie's branch of the evil scheme involves kidnapping Jean, and trying to forcibly extract memories of Cable's early childhood from Jean's mind.

This doesn't work. Jean wakes up, and slaps Maddie. They fight a bunch, Jean appears to win said fight, then she turns around and just psychically hands over the memories in question.

Hmm.. Ok.

But why though?

This is the fundamental problem with this story. Why? Why is Maddie acting like this?

The first Inferno, where Maddie goes evil and brings hell to Earth etc, is noteworthy for being... well, for being a really ooc thing for her to do. In universe, it's a combination of an emotionally and psychologically vulnerable state and literal demonic forces that cause her to do all this. In reality, it's the writers wanting to get rid of her so they throw the Medea trope at her (i.e. woman is scorned, woman goes evil and mad, evily.)

Since then, Maddie has cropped up as a villain occasionally, with varying degrees of sympathy and nuance. Most recently, she appears in Hellions, and then the New Mutants. In the latter, she gets a lot of sympathy from the writing. She's still characterised as someone who plausibly has done a bunch of supervillain things, but ultimately just wants to get away from the people responsible for her trauma - i.e. Mr Sinister.

Maddie's actions at the start of Dark Web are a massive, stupid departure from this. This is a character who, the last time we saw her, had exactly zero plans to hurt anyone, and certainly wasn't on the brink of waging demonic war on New York. There was a lingering sense that maybe Ilyana's trust in Maddie might be misguided, but nothing like this. It doesn't make sense in universe at all.

Once again, this is a lazy decision from a writer, that has lead to Maddie acting ooc. And it's so underwhelming here because the only reason she's having this backslide and doing the evil villain schtick again, is so that she can have a change of heart and a redemption moment which she was already doing. It's stupid. It's so forced.

Autonomy

Both as a character being forced into weird tropey boxes by writers, and as a woman in universe, Maddie's main theme is a loss of autonomy.

Her memories were fake, decisions she thought were her own were decided for her. Her marriage and her child, all part of someone else's plan. Beyond this existential horror, she's also robbed of choices in a more straightforward way. Scott demolishes their relationship, Jean displaces her (from her perspective) and her son is literally taken from her. Then there's the freaking demons.

When she's brought back, both as a ghost-ish entity, and then physically later on, it's all unwillingly. Arguably, New Mutants is the first time in a long time that we see her make any big decisions from a position that isn't a) entirely devoid of meaningful choices or b) a magically influenced mental breakdown.

So, a lack of autonomy is the big theme in Madelyne's character. Gerry Duggan (who wrote the bits of Dark Web that concern this) seems to be aware of this on some level, but takes a different approach.

We get a bit of Maddie's inner monologue where she speaks about how her life is a sham. How she was brought into this world to be a replacement for Jean - or rather, for Jean's uterus. It's honestly pretty moving.

Now, you might expect, if you know your writing techniques, for this story that is openly presenting itself as a sympathetic take on a morally dubious character, that is clearly going to denoument with a resolution between her and Jean, to contain a character arc. i.e. for what this character believes and wants at the beginning of the story to change over the course of the narrative. For her to realise that what she wants is not necessarily what she needs.

But, my friends, this is Gerry Duggan. A rebel. A maverick. A girl boss. He doesn't believe in character arcs. He spits on your so-called writing techniques. He sees your theories of narrative structure and steps on them... in heeled boots... because he thinks it's hot.

Motherhood

Instead of doing a normal writing thing, what happens is Maddie gets the exact thing she was after (the memories of Cable) and yes, actually it turns out that is what she needed. That overarching theme of a loss of autonomy? Nah, fuck it. Her existential angst about existing only as an incubator for this baby and the entire rest of her life being fake? Whatever, let's just make the whole story about the baby anyway.

One of the difficulties with Cable and Maddie is that Cable has been a massive hulking Liefeld monster of a dude for most of the time he's existed in comics. His entire existence as an adult feels very detached from his origins. The contrast is deliberate, of course, but it does make it hard to reconcile the two eras of the character. More importantly, in universe, Nathan himself has lived a whole other massive life since he ever saw his parents. She's not actually that high up on the list of influences on him because, you know, time travel, space ships, Apocalypse oh my.

When teenage!Cable was around, it was hilarious to me personally and also was an opportunity to bridge this gap between the adult Nathan and Scott and Jean. But since teenage!Cable is gone now, that option isn't available for his birth mother. And with all this in mind, I do think it makes sense that Nathan himself wasn't part of the confrontation.

Now, obviously you can be someone's parent without being the one who gave birth to them. So, Jean and Cable feeling the way they do in canon about each other is not wrong, although it's not how I personally would've written the dynamic. But anyway, as it stands, Nathan has two mums, and one has spent more time with him than the other, but both have still lost him.

That's what this sharing of memories between Jean and Madelyne is, really. It's grief. It's mourning. They've both lost this kid and he's fine, he's okay so it really shouldn't hurt so much but also, it is tragic.

So, yes I really do like some of this.

The Other Woman

What I hated was Jean slapping Maddie.

When Jean stops the fight and offers up the memories, it's clear that she was willing to do this the entire time. She even says that she pushed for Maddie's resurrection. She's wanted to do right by her for a while. This is good, this is a really in character attitude for Jean to have.

So, then, why the fight? Why the beat down? I know, I know, It's a comic book. It needs action scenes. But I hated it. I don't want to see Jean slap Maddie. I don't want to see her defeat her in battle. Moreover, it doesn't make sense on a literal level (Jean is actually super down to help) and it's not like it's a thematically relevent beat either.

Jean being supportive of Maddie is a widely popular fan opinion, that is nice to see validated here. One reason it's so popular, is that it flies in the face of the writing between them back in the day, which felt sexist and like they were working on the maxim that "women all hate each other, am I right?". Ironically, the slap panel and the fight have some of that flavour to them. But overall, yes this is a better direction to go in for these characters.

In general, I'm a supporter of "let these characters hate each other" in a lot of contexts. For example, I think that neither Monet nor Bobby should be written as liking Emma Frost all that much. I don't think it makes sense for them to feel that way. A really big example would be Kwannon and Betsy Braddock. I think that whatever closure looks like for Kwannon, it shouldn't directly involve Betsy. She can resolve her feelings about her, without needing a big confrontation with her. I don't think endless apologising from Betsy would help, especially given how she didn't choose most of this either. I think it's something they need to deal with seperately. And, crucially, I don't think resolution here looks like friendship. I don't think Kwannon should ever have to like Betsy.

Now, you could compare Maddie and Jean to Kwannon and Betsy. Both cases are two women who traded lives. Both cases involve one woman being the centre of devastating pain and trauma for the other, mostly unwillingly but nevertheless something that you can't really get over. So, maybe you could say that Maddie shouldn't have to forgive Jean and shouldn't have to like her.

But I think it's different. Mainly because I think there's more symmetry between Jean and Maddie, and maybe because Jean's hurt towards Maddie is less visceral, more existential. I think it's very believable that they could reconcile.

That said, I am glad we haven't had a "maddie forgives scott" storyline. Let me tell you I do not care. You're allowed to hate your shitty ex lol.

Audience Reception

I would sort the reactions I've seen to Dark Web into three categories: positive, negative and whinging. Naturally, I'm in the third category.

A lot of the positive reception is simply because, finally, we got a positive portrayal of Maddie. Ultimately, Dark Web reinforces three widely held fan beliefs

What happened to Maddie sucked

Jean and Maddie shouldn't hate each other, and Jean wouldn't hold any ill will towards her.

Maddie shouldn't remain a villain.

And, well, yeah I agree. This is all on the right track. Fundamentally she should never have been written as two dimensionally evil, and the fact that this era of her character appears to be officially over is a good thing.

The negative reception tends to come from people saying "well, look at all this awful shit Madelyne has done. Why should she be redeemed, she's clearly evil." And, hmm, okay right. It's not like there are no "heel turn retcons" that I don't take seriously, but it's worth being more skeptical of writing decisions than that. These choices weren't made by a human-turned-mutant woman named Madelyne Pryor. They were made by a series of writers.

You could argue that what's canon is canon, and there's a case to be made for just coping with what's happened and moving on. I do think that argument works better when the thing itself wasn't so ooc and retcon-esque.

In Captain America 2015 (or 2017?), the writer finally revisits the "snap wilson" retcon - a change to Sam Wilson's backstory from the mid/late 1970s inspired partly by a fascination with exploitation movies and partly by a growing concern in American culture at the time about "urban crime". It's racist and awful and thank fuck they finally said "nah, that's not canon anymore."

Comics revisit past canon all the time. And I'd argue that grappling with bad, often bigoted, writing decisions of the past is a worthwhile thing for Marvel to do. It certainly seems like a more appropriate way to treat past canon than some of Duggan's other work.

And anyway, this isn't even a retcon. It's a reframing, a different perspective, and a valid one.

The Whinging

I've seen a few people land closer to where I'm at with this. i.e. that Dark Web is not good writing but still overall it's good that they seem to have changed direction with this character.

Complaints include:

The contrived heel turn that Maddie does just to facilitate the plot to a series that is all about redeeming her

The fact that this story should be about autonomy but is in fact about Jean and Cable

The way that focusing on the baby feels like a weird step if her angst is about literally only existing to grow a baby

The emphasis on motherhood as a redeeming feature of a woman

The fact that they make a big deal about Maddie working with the x-men as if she wasn't literally in the x-men before

Some of this rant was inspired by other comments I've read, some of it not. In general, a lot of people are on a similar page with this.

Duggan is not a brilliant writer, but there are things he put in this that I did genuinely like. (You can't say I never say nice things). But overall, it felt like it ticked the basic boxes for what people wanted for this character, but didn't manage to do much more than that due to some weird and frustrating choices.

[nexusmhx]

I Can't Find Love so I Make Others Happy - Chapter 1

I never really understood romance at such a young age.

To be specific, I mean romance between a couple in something like middle or even high school. Granted there are the rare cases where those blossoming romances drive couples to marriage and eventually have a happy life.

However, this time period is the roughest transition that one can make. One that people aren't mature enough to process and deal with responsibly. There are more responsibilities and changes that one endures when going to university or straight into a full-time job when compared to simply being a high school student.

Sometimes, it ends in bitter heartbreak that causes rifts in both couples and the friends around them. Sometimes, there is a natural shift as the maturity changes between two people that is natural. No bitterness or heartache, just reality. I, Watanabe Yuto, had been in one relationship in my life. The result of it? Neither category fits as there was no actual love in it.

People are beings that are reliant on others to make connections. It is a foundational staple in everyday life. I understand that it strives for people to start these relationships, especially when romance is considered a highly popular thing for people in middle or high school.

Personally, I think that the best place for people to start thinking about romance is during the middle years of their time at university. It would make sense. The stress that university lectures have are more intensive and done over a longer period of time. With everything not running on the same clock, it makes sense that people have to learn to manage their time and resources better.

After a year of understanding what to do, is when people can be more grounded and comfortable to start dating. I could see it during the beginning and end of my university's lectures where groups of friends huddle together with male and female pairings who are happening to take the same course to be close together.

"Hey, Yuto."

"Hm? Oh, hey Kyoka-chan."

I wasn't particularly alone in this course. I did have a friend in this course. One that went to the same high school that I did even, Sayama Kyoka. She was diligent and a major tomboy, having a bit of a tan due to playing Tennis for school.

Luckily she was in the same major as me so I usually had one friend to talk to while leaving the lecture hall.

"The lecture was tough today... Why couldn't they go a bit easier on the material?"

"Because ALL the readings are mandatory... Even though I don't agree with some of them."

"What's worse is the quiz came out of nowhere. I wasn't ready!"

"Okay, you got me there... Still. I don't think I did too badly. I should get 70%."

"I did worse for sure... Why are we doing theory when we should be actually doing stuff?!"

"That's why you need to study, Kyoka-chan... To appease them. Also, theory tells us how shots work and such. They signify the meaning behind certain parts."

"Yeah... But still. I don't get some of it."

"Mmh."

It was the usual banter between us. Nothing meaningful and substantial but there was some semblance behind our words. We would just talk about the hell that our lectures caused us while walking through the bustling halls of our university.

"Still... Just one more day until Saturday comes. You're with me for our final lecture tomorrow, Yuto?"

"Haah... Don't remind me. I just wanna crash and play games all weekend."

"Oh? I thought you had to do one of those "magic spells" that you always do."

"What are you talking about? I don't do magic."

"You say that but you're famous at the university!"

"What??? Oh for that? It's not that big of a deal. If anything, I'm getting bored of it."

"Ehh??? For real? That sucks. Especially since I was your first customer! Seeing your work was always fun! Even Serena thinks so!"

I couldn't help but sigh at Kyoka's statement. The statement stung but it was true. It must be confusing to understand without context. It seemed rather harmless at first glance.

What she was referring to is my ability to help people hook up with one another. To take the first step in being a couple. It may sound weird and awkward...

Even explaining it sounds weird but I got put into that role. One that helps people get together. Kind of like a matchmaker but I play a more active role. I have an unhealthy tendency to put myself down to make others look better. Whether it'd be mixers, parties, or over time while being in a group of friends temporarily, I get asked to be used as a stepping stone. I've gotten so good at it that I even got a reputation for it.

Kyoka was the first person I ever did this on. It was unintentional but I had somehow managed to get Kyoka with one Wakatsuki Serena. A relatively shy yet diligent girl who usually keeps to herself while reading books.

"...Right..."

"You could even try it out on yourself to see if it works! After all, don't you have someone you like?"

"Not really..."

"Ah... Sorry, I didn't mean to bring that up. You don't deserve that!"

"It's no big deal... You didn't mean to."

Kyoka looks down because of it. Seeing that makes me sad. My own personal issues were affecting one of my friends. Great.

"L-Look. Don't worry. I'm not out of the count just yet. I just haven't been paying much attention to stuff like that."

"I suppose so. But hey! Don't be afraid to ask if you ever need relationship advice, got it?!"

"Yeah yeah. I got it. Now go. Serena is probably waiting for you."

"Ah! That's right! I gotta go!!! Seeya, Yuto! I know you got this!"

"Sure. I have faith in it."

I lied.

How I managed to get the shy Serena to be bold enough to ask Kyoka out, is still a mystery. I didn't have a clue. I don't know how to make myself look better. It just sounds arrogant coming from yourself. At least with others, you could be saying it to sound nice.

Well, it didn't really matter. I didn't care enough about my own love life to even consider it. It's not like I don't believe in love. I think it's a good thing. It sounds romantic when finding the perfect one to spend the rest of your life with. I'm just a little raw after a bad experience.

"Excuse me?"

A voice calls out to me that stops my train of thought. I turn around to see a girl around my age, probably the same year as me. However, I didn't recognize her so she was probably majoring in a different course.

"Yes? Is there something that you wanted from me?"

"Ah yes! My name is Miyamoto Rei! I would like your help."

"Is that so? Well then. Follow me. We'll discuss the details in a better location. Just to let you know, I charge for the drink alongside the service."

"W-What?! You charge money?"

"Yep! 5 million yen. Add in the drinks which is another 500 yen."

"I-I can't afford that! What am I going to do?"

"Oh dear..."

What the heck have I got myself into? It couldn't be as bad as it sounds, so I took her up on it and the two of us made it to a local cafe to discuss the important subject matter. The two of us took a seat across from each other after ordering our drinks.

"So then... Let me introduce myself, though you probably know. Call me, Yuto. You don't have to use honorifics or whatever."

"Really? Even though you're my senior and everything?"

"It's fine, I don't really care much about customs. Let's leave that for the formal places where people actually care about that sort of thing."

"Alright, then. Please call me Rei... I wanted your help regarding getting together with an upper-classman."

"Oh? Is that so? I won't lie. That's a bold request. How'd you find out about this, to begin with?"

"W-Well, you had helped out a close friend of mine, Minami-chan."

"Uh... I think I remember. She's a second-year student focusing on Biology?"

"Yeah, that's right. It was a few months ago but they've been happy ever since. It makes me envious."

"Really? I heard some good tidbits from now and then but I didn't realize."

I still kept in touch with some of the people from that friend group.

"Yeah. When I asked her, she told me about you and what you did."

"I didn't do that great of a job... Still. Didn't you find it odd about me doing this sort of thing? Must be weird."

"I thought it was suspicious, but I learned that other people have gotten together because of you from the university I decided after a bit of thinking."

"You must really love this guy, huh? Perhaps that's the next thing we should talk about. Got to know a bit about this guy."

"Well... His name is Kanzaki Tomoyo, a second year in Osaka's engineering major. He has been my childhood friend ever since Kindergarten. We grew up together."

"Ah. So pure, blossoming romance? Been holding these ever since you were young I presume?"

Rei nods slowly to my question, causing me to think a bit more.

"Yeah, ever since Middle School."

"Well, that strikes the first step, already. That's a start."

"Already?! Just like that?!"

"Yep. The first step, having you get to know the guy. That's a problem that you see in TV shows, manga, anime, light novels, and stuff that goes into the real world. Getting to know the person. Both parties need to know the other on some level. And with a date, they get better acquainted in a secluded setting. So if you know him well, that saves a massive portion of time!"

"How much time are we talking about, here?"

"Depends on the person. For guys to ask girls, I'd say a couple of weeks to a few months. Girls are more cautious about that sort of thing because men usually have ulterior motives. Fortunately, guys take less time. There's a good chance that they will accept your request if you're cute enough. But the chances increase if you two know each other. The preexisting bond makes the connection stronger."

"Wow... It really works like that."

"Well, I'm not entirely sure about that."

"What???"

"Well, that's just a guess based on results. But it doesn't guarantee that it's right. After all, people are different from each other and this stuff should be taken into consideration. Because the guy may know you, but he just might not see you that way."

"We can't do anything about that to make him consider me an option?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't even know if that's the case. He might and we don't know yet. I can't just force people to change their emotions or who they are to meet your needs. That'd be pretty crappy."

"O-Of course not! I wouldn't do something like that!"

"Good! We got ourselves a starting point. Now then, think I could get your contact information?"

"Sure! That's no problem!"

Rei hands me her Line which I graciously accept. I wrote a few notes to make sure to remember things, there were for certain a few things that I will need to do.

"Well then. I'll be counting on you, Rei."

"Huh?"

She had a confused look on her face. To be expected.

"Well, you're my in for meeting this guy. If I'm going to help, I'll need your assistance. So let's not think of ourselves as a worker and client relationships but rather as friends helping each other out. How does that sound?"

"S-Sure! Of course! It'll be great to be working with you, Yuto! I hope that we'll get along together!"

Rei paid for her drink and rushed off to her next lecture which would leave me by myself. It gave me time to think to myself while I relaxed a little.

"Hey! Kenji-kun! What are you doing for summer break?!"

"Eh??? I don't know. Maybe playing games."

"Senpai! Let's go shopping!"

"Now?!"

"Sorry, Akane. Kenji-kun has already made plans with his senpai, hasn't he?"

"Agawa-senpai! You're a bit too close!"

"Moh! Kenji-kun is so mean!"

"Kenji."

"Eh? What's wrong Yuuka-chan?"

"Thank you for staying up all night. You really pushed me like never before..."

"HUH?!"

"Kenji, Kenji-kun, Senpai..."

"Wait wait wait! It's not like what it looks like."

Oh no. OH NO. OH NONONONO!

I was doing so well. Why did those guys have to spoil it? Why are they doing this in public where other people can hear them? Especially, me of all people!

Sorry, I'm being overdramatic. None of these people are bad. I'm just annoyed. Let me explain.

Being a person who helps people get together is an interesting topic. Sure, it may create some fascinating situations but nothing really special. But the story of Yamamoto Kenji was that of the typical trashy romantic comedy harem. There's the main culprit and four girls going after him.

Izayoi Yumi, a third year in the School of Foreign Studies is the childhood friend of the story. She's been best friends with Kenji growing up ever since kindergarten. Diligent in her studies, kind to those around her, soft-spoken, and rarely ever yells. She does well in a wide range of activities which only boasted her overwhelming popularity.

Nakamura Hana, a second year in the School of Health and Sport Science is like when you mix a hyperactive teenager with sugar-infused coffee and energy drinks. Loud, bold, beats to her own drum, and likes to have fun first and foremost. The fact she does well in all sports adds to her merit, even beating a few male players. I say all that but she's an endearing little gremlin. Can be annoying but she means well.

Agawa Nanami, a senior in the Faculty of Medicine is considered an angel by many of her local fans. The rumor says that her smile is so bright that one look could burn vampires. She's very handsy when helping people out despite being a massive klutz. Despite this, she is a big sister who likes to tease and protect those she cares about and help in any way possible.

Suzumiya Mayumi, a junior in the School of Engineering Science is well known for being rather eccentric by her fellow peers. She doesn't talk much and keeps a rather cold expression everywhere that she goes. Rarely does she show any emotions but can be really expressive through text messaging. Once you get used to that demeanor, she's really fun to be around.

Again, none of them are actually bad. I don't have any bad relationships with any of them. If anything, I hope that they consider me their friend since I do the same to them. I just find it all tiresome to have to see this four-way competition to fight for Kenji's attention. I never thought fiction would be able to be demonstrated in reality... However, I was wrong about the power of the dense harem protagonist.

But I suppose that it doesn't matter too much. I'll continue to work to help them from the shadows while helping those who come to ask for my help. Despite all the nuisances and inconveniences that other people have, I will see it through to completion. That is my resolve as both a man and the motivation that this is for the sake of other people's happiness.

[pen-observing]

I finished my fic with this theme and I did the brothers reacting to this. So how could I, an undatables enthusiast, not make this? It took a while but it’s here. Some brain cells were involved in the making of this post,,,, I guess?

MASTERLIST

How the undatables react/pursue you after Diavolo cheats on you while married

Diavolo:

Why is he here? Well you see-- why not

In the human world some believe that the ultimate proof of love is giving the cheater another chance, fighting to salvage a relationship

In all honesty, Diavolo never expects that from you, nor does he hope such a thing can happen

He curses himself for a momentary weakness. A prince, a ruler, so easily swayed and influence does not carry any nobility or respect

He may be the most influential, the most powerful- but he starts seeing himself as weak

He hides away from his thoughts in work, in new holidays, in friendships and partnerships and in excuses

He tries not to give those thoughts space to grow

But, the damage has been done

Diavolo’s worst enemy and worst critic, the one who judges him the most is himself

He knows that with this one deed (some may call it a momentary lapse in judgement) he has undone all the work it took years to build

He knows that falling into temptation is the biggest mistake he has ever made; especially because he cannot bear to have you hate him when he loves you so much

Diavolo has no guts to admit that after what he did, he believes he has no right to claim it face-to-face

So, he randomly visits Lucifer to see you, ask about you. He tasks Barbatos with keeping you safe. Little Ds are ordered to make your life easier without being noticed

Because of what happened, he doubts that he deserves the place and title of a King

And, you notice that the most- in the smiles, in the speeches, in the doubt and guilt that radiates off from him

The only way to salvage this and get back together lies with you. If you, after so much time can forgive but not forget. If you can wish to grow into a union once more.  

He goes along with your wish for divorce just as quickly as he goes for your wish of reconciliation.  

He does not force you, he respects whatever you decide.

Barbatos:

Probably the one which would provide the most material for gossip and speculation, in theory

In practice, it’s like a 500k slow burn romance

Here is why; Barbatos is a man of duty and loyalty to the person that hurt you. He finds no amusement in being the center of gossip nor does he wish for you to go through the dirt. Devildom is such a cruel place, you cannot even imagine what could come your way if the relationship was established early on.

Besides, it is even hard for you to not have Barbatos remind you of Diavolo once the relationship first breaks

Babratos gives you time to heal and move on before he does anything which can show his romantic interest

He knows how charming you are, he knows your habits and he knows that he must be patient before a true connection can be established

So, how does it happen? Well, after healing from Diavolo you naturally, through fate or the wonder of time, need to spend some time in the same circle

Obligations, work and friendships bring you together in a weird way

The balls and parties are something you must attend and because Barbatos knows you, he knows just what you like

The perfect place for you to sit which is neither too warm nor too hot, a place far away from people you do not like in their world but close enough so that you do not miss anything important or fun. For some reason, it always smells like your favorite scent too

The perfect place, the perfect tea, the delicious food with small hidden notes which do not give away his intention but do show his affection  

It just grows more and more unbearable  

The lingering stares, the short but warm goodbyes, the way his hands just brush against yours for a moment longer than usual when he takes your coat

It creates a magical attraction inside that long game, which, as expected, Barbatos is better at than you

You try to find him alone and, in those moments; inside the kitchen or under the stairs while everyone is far away dancing, it becomes just the world of you two

His tone is warmer, he is more direct. You sometimes, inside such short pauses, are able to exchange warmth. In conversations, in the longing looks, in the way his hand holds yours. In the way he gently takes your wrist, puts his hand on the small of your back to guide you back inside a world which is overabundant in fancy but doesn’t feel meaningful without him in it

Sometimes, it can even hold a soft kiss

But, it becomes torture. Enough is enough. His privacy starts to seem like secrecy to you for all the wrong reasons. As a human, you aren’t patient enough to wait 4 years until something, anything happens  

So, you seek him out at the next party. They’re too rare in your opinion now. You seek him out and find him on the stairs as he goes to complete another task.

Bravery or foolishness, it does not matter which of the two makes you stop him. Makes you ask him; when? When will this secrecy end?

In reality, it doesn’t really matter. He would probably kabedon you on the stairs (as a true gentleman! don’t get it twisted!)

He holds time itself in his hands and yet you asked him.  

He whispers: “All in good time, my love. All in good time.”  

And leaves you like that.

So, what is the good time?  

It is already the point where you forgot about Diavolo but; has Diavolo forgotten about you?

That is what Barbatos waits for. He sees no need to ask his lord such a thing. Diavolo notices it himself. How could he not? Diavolo also knows that he does not love you anymore.

So, the next time Diavolo comes to the kitchen and sees your favorite tea (the one he never drinks) he gives Barbatos the permission, the freedom to go pursue you.  

After all, it is time.

Simeon:

The most empathic out of everyone.  

The best choice even

Why? With him, you would only feel compassion and care.

Gentleness.  

There is no drama that could follow you when you turn to him.

He has not sworn loyalty to Diavolo. He is not his partner. He lives in a completely different realm.  

It is really the exact change that you need. At first, it seems so odd because you are used to a completely different world but; it is comfort. It is care. It is everything that helps you heal

In truth, Simeon’s instinct gravitates towards that. It gravitates towards making sure that you heal in all aspects. Physically, emotionally- most importantly- your soul should shine like it used to

After you start that process it brings long conversations where you two ponder over what it means to live and love. You discuss theories and opinions. Simeon has loved longer than you, he has seen countless love stories- he even wrote some.

This process can even inspire him to flesh out a new character

In actuality, Simeon warned both Diavolo and you with masqueraded words about what marriage truly means before you got married

So now, he doesn’t say ‘I told you so’ or ‘Why didn’t you listen to me’. He just hopes that you won’t grow to hate the whole institution and tradition that marriage is

And honestly? Simeon shows you unrequited love so, how could you ever think that with him?

Here, you will be the first to realize your emotions and you will probably need to act on them first as well

Solomon:

He is somewhere in the human world, inside a secret room of an abandoned castle just thinking of new spells when he gets a text from Asmo about what happened

Dramatic as fuck gasp while his potion drops to the floor and now the floor is pink

Solomon, with all the years that he has been alive, with all the pacts and mistakes he has made- still is more human than the rest of them

This does not mean that he will be the best at comforting you but he already packed the most important things to go and see you. Is that not enough to show immediate care?

Instead of comforting you by himself he spends time in the House of Lamantation, working with the rest of the brothers  

Time has passed, you both have changed so it takes a bit for him to get familiar with you again and to work out your habits

Probably tries to joke like: “Even if that red tree branch offered me to make a pact with him I would refuse for your sake.”

It shows that, despite all the flaws and morally gray actions, he stands on your side- not his

But, life inside that house has to move on. He can’t really stay calm and tied down to it for months and as he is preparing for his next trip- he asks you to go with him

It is a true change of pace. You will experience new things you never dreamed of. He can teach you magic. He can show you places in the human world full of it

He promises to make sure that you are safe

So you set off with him

It is a grand adventure. It holds both comfort and new things that only make you grow.  

It holds his teasing as well but he never lets anything bad happen to you

He realizes his affections before you but you are so busy taking in the world’s wonders that he keeps them a secret for just a while longer because you are so excited. Your eyes shine and he just knows you have new stories to remember and uncover at the same time

You don’t realize yours until Solomon makes it clear to you, in a sly way.

You stand outside of enchanted ruins. The sky is bright blue with pink lines. Solomon says: “And who would have thought that one of the most powerful witches got cheated on by the man who allegedly enchanted this ruin when he was young? Hmm?~”

And really, who would? You realize then how that did not even cross your mind. How could it? Here you are with Solomon on another adventure that sparked more love as the sky dances for your new story.

Luke:

Has it been years since you got married? Yes

Has Luke grown to love demons? Absolutely not. Are you kidding me?

He throws his little hat to the ground when he finds out

Never trust their kind.  That's what he says

Sure Diavolo had a noble goal once but after this? Once Luke’s good opinion is lost it is lost forever

Baby is very dramatic about the whole thing

How dare that evil creature hurt you? Luke was teary eyed at your wedding and he is teary eyed the next time he sees you  

But

He tries his best. He really does.

He doesn’t have wisdom like Simeon. But he asks him for advice.  

Best believe the only way Diavolo will taste one of his treats again is if Luke yeets it in his face 

Firstly, tumblr better fix their tags because it is unbearable! Now you may ask; yooo why is Barbatos’ so long? Cus thats my boo and he is the main reason I decided to write these reactions in general

[be11atrixthestrange]

Waking Up In Vegas Chapter 15

After a night of debauchery, Ron and Hermione wake up in Vegas... married.

Muggle!AU. Romcom!Romione. Slow burning, smutty, angst-fest.

Rated M.

Ao3 | FFN

------------------------------

More Chapters

------------------------------

*Six Weeks Later*

[Ron]

The flat is small but well-arranged. Bookshelves line the walls from floor to ceiling, maximizing the vertical space that only one of its residents can fully use. The kitchen is sparkling clean, save for two empty red wine-stained glasses in the sink. Usually, the dishes would be washed and stacked away before the clock strikes bedtime, but last night other, more fun activities got in the way.

The apartment's decor is simple — it has to balance the strikingly orange accent wall behind the television. The only other thing commanding attention is the large painting of a cityscape hanging on the wall across from the entry. It's an artistic rendering of a well-known skyline, characterized by neon lights, a replica of the Eiffel Tower, and a series of flashy hotels. Although the portrait might be recognizable to many, it's meaningful to only a few.

As the morning light peeks through the windows, the bedroom's blinds give up on filtering it out. The sun casts a ray across the pillows, illuminating the two sleeping figures entangled together in bed. Gentle and mild, the light is easier to ignore than an intense desert beam, and it takes a few moments for the tall, red-haired man to open his eyes.

When he does, he turns onto his side to bury his face into his pillow. The bed is warm and comfortable — the satin sheets were a worthwhile investment. Same for the pillow, which somehow maintains the perfect combination of cold and cozy. Ever since they bought a new, albeit expensive mattress, his back problems have become a thing of the past.

He smiles at the mountain of fluffy blankets beside him, topped with spirals of bushy brown locks. There's so much goddamn hair. It looks like a plush volcano of cushions is erupting with curly brown hair. He can't decide what he loves more: the explosion of brunette, the bright orange Chudley Cannons t-shirt, the black mens' boxers that have a little too much fabric for a woman, or the person it all belongs to.

Well, technically, the Cannons t-shirt and boxers are his, or at least, were his. But marriage is about sharing.

"Morning, wifey."

Hermione groans and covers her face with a pillow. "Too early."

Ron slips an arm around his wife, encouraging her to turn toward him. She obliges and snuggles up into the crook of his arm, where she fits perfectly. He presses a kiss to her forehead and nuzzles his head into her hair.

It would be easy to stay like this forever, ignoring real-life responsibilities. In a way, their bed has become an escape from reality, an oasis built upon the lessons they learned in Las Vegas. Defined by frequent 'I love you's, reprieves from work, and late-night explorations fueled by a glass of wine and the need to destress, it's the place that keeps them anchored to the magic. Who wouldn't want to stay forever?

But alas, they can't, as they have Maid of Honor and Best Man duties to attend to. Today is Harry and Ginny's wedding, and within a few hours, they need to transition from the carefree vacationers they became in Vegas to the highly organized planners helping to orchestrate the festivities.

Ron groans. Although their friends know they're together — they put on quite a show back in Las Vegas, after all — they haven't revealed the extent of their relationship, and the worst part about being in public together is pretending that Hermione's just his girlfriend.

"We should just tell everyone," murmurs Ron into Hermione's hair.

She chuckles and snuggles closer. "After the wedding. Let's not steal their thunder."

Steal their thunder. To be honest, Ron has frequently fantasized about stealing Harry and Ginny's thunder. A small part of him is jealous of their hen and stag weekend in Las Vegas and their elaborate wedding. Ron wants everyone to celebrate him and Hermione, and as time passes, he grows more desperate for them all to know.

"I want to steal their thunder."

"I know." Hermione gently pushes him over on his back and slides on top of him. The movement is swift and natural, and as always, she fits like a glove.

"Hmmm, hi," he says right before their lips meet. The kiss lingers; Hermione's teeth lightly latch to his bottom lip, driving him wild. Without breaking their kiss, Hermione shifts some of her weight onto her hips. She knows exactly what she's doing, and if Ron doesn't stop this train, they'll be late.

"Er-my-nee," he groans, pulling away. She pouts at him with her wide chocolate brown eyes, and it's all he can do to resist tangling himself back up in her arms. "Can I ask you a question?"

"What?"

"Do you wish we had more thunder?"

Hermione brushes a tuft of hair from Ron's forehead. "Sometimes. But I still wouldn't change a thing."

Ron smiles as she leans down for another kiss. Her fingers thread into her wild curls, prompting him to flip her over and land on top. He groans when she wraps her legs around his waist.

"You know we don't have time for this," he says between kisses. "We should get rea—"

"Shhhhh." She pulls him into her embrace and tightens her leg lock around his hips. "There's always time."

"Hey!" he teases, then leaning down toward her ear to whisper, "I take offense to that."

Ron doesn't give her time to respond before connecting his mouth to hers for another kiss. He can smell his cologne from the night before on her skin, yet it still tastes like Hermione when his lips travel from her mouth to the nape of her neck. A soft moan escapes her lips and sends him into a tizzy that leaves nothing else to do but get lost in her.

Six weeks in, and he's still convinced he'll never get sick of snogging Hermione Granger.

Plus, she's right — there's always time.

x

Harry and Ginny's wedding is just as elaborate as their weekend of partying in Las Vegas, but of course, classy. The venue is a converted warehouse, which initially horrified Molly, Ron and Ginny's mum, but it's unrecognizable after a few hours of decorating. They tie the knot underneath a trellis of climbing vines and twinkling lights illuminating the exposed brick wall behind them. Cafe lights drape from the ceiling beams, filtering the room's color just enough that everyone appears to glow. Each row of seats is marked by a simple bouquet and a periwinkle ribbon that matches the color of the bridesmaids' dresses, and the aisle appears to have been assaulted by flower petals, courtesy of Victoire, Ron and Ginny's niece, who recently discovered the true strength of her throwing arm.

Ginny has insisted that she and Harry walk down the aisle together as equals. Although originally disgruntled at the pushback on tradition, their father, Arthur, chokes up when he watches the pair approach the altar. Ginny's eyes sparkle with rare tears, and Harry can't keep his gaze off her radiant smile.

They're a couple in love, and there's not a doubt in the room.

Ginny's dress is simple — Hermione had said something about satin, but Ron doesn't remember the details. It's one of those dresses that doesn't dare pull focus from the woman wearing it, not that any dress could. Ron's always resented the Weasleys' fiery red hair and the way it sticks out like a sore thumb, but Ginny makes him think that maybe it isn't so bad after all.

While everyone watches the couple, Ron chances a glance at Hermione across the altar. He can hardly stand seeing her in her periwinkle bridesmaid dress, and he hopes to heaven his gawking isn't too noticeable. When he shifts his eyes in her direction, she turns her head back toward the bride and groom.

She was checking him out, too.

He doesn't have to keep his eyes on her for his imagination to run wild. That periwinkle dress turns white, and suddenly it's Hermione walking down the aisle. Her hair is tucked up into a spiral on top of her head, a few wisps escaping to frame her face.

Since it's his sister's wedding, Ron forces the image out of his mind, but he can't stop a wistful smile from forming on his lips and staying there throughout the ceremony.

When Harry and Ginny arrive at the altar, the music slows to a stop, and the officiant steps out from behind a curtain.

"Well, hello, folks!" says the blonde-haired man in a thick, mumbling American accent.

The wedding guests stare in silence at the man, who's dressed in white from head to toe, a greasy black wig barely covering his blonde locks.

Harry and Ginny burst into laughter, which breaks the seal for everyone else to follow suit.

"Yes! You got an Elvis impersonator!" shouts Fred, Ron and Ginny's brother, from the front row. "Someone check Mum's pulse."

With that, Ron snaps his head toward his mum, whose face has collapsed into her hands. Her body is heaving with what can only be sobs, or…

Laughter. Ron grins when he realizes that his mother's laughing hysterically.

At Molly's outburst, the tension and stuffiness of a formal event dissipate, and the ceremony continues flawlessly, having now been marked by Harry and Ginny's personalities. Elvis speaks to their bond, and even though he doesn't know the couple, he manages to capture how they approach life, always wearing their hearts on their sleeves and marching to their own beat. They've written heartfelt but humorous vows, expertly eliciting laughs and tears from their guests while they read them with shaky hands. They share their first kiss as a married couple to a round of applause and a standing ovation. Emboldened by the support, Harry picks up Ginny and drapes her over his shoulder as he skips back down the aisle to a chorus of cheers and whistles.

The wedding party follows the happy couple back down the aisle, starting with Ron and Hermione. They link arms and lock eyes, sharing a small, knowing smile. Ron wonders if she's also imagining the roles reversed, everyone clapping and celebrating for them as they traipse down the aisle after tying the knot.

What would the pseudo-Elvis have said about them if this were their ceremony, not Harry and Ginny's? Would he have spoken to how they disliked each other when they first met, and the utter disbelief they felt when they woke up next to one another in bed? Maybe he'd have talked about their strong determination to get a divorce and straighten everything out, followed by the looming 'what ifs' that kept knocking. What if they gave it a chance? What if they opened their hearts and it worked out? What if it was meant to be?

Maybe Elvis would have told a white lie at their request, saving their families the heartache of learning that they missed the original wedding, even though Ron and Hermione kind of missed it too.

That would be best wouldn't it? They could hire an Elvis to spin a new love story for their family, so they could keep the real one to themselves—not due to shame, but the simple fact that it's theirs.

Ron can't help but wonder.

Rather than a formal sit-down dinner, the ceremony transitions straight into a party. The delicate set-up of chairs and flowers clears into a dance floor. The doors to the warehouse open to an outdoor deck complete with a buffet and a dessert table, and a crowd forms at the bar.

Tugged away by Ginny, Hermione disappears into the crowd, and Ron becomes absorbed by friends and relatives. He'd rather stick with Hermione, but before he can locate her again, he's trapped in a conversation with long-lost family members. Old cousin Barny, Auntie Muriel and her flavor of the week — a scruffy looking man who introduces himself as Argus, and a neighbor who used to babysit when he was a toddler — he smiles through it all.

"Anyone special in your life, Ron?"

"I noticed the way you were looking at the brunette."

"Is it serious?"

"Should we be marking our calendars for another wedding?"

He deflects the expected questions — the ones that could draw attention away from the happy couple — with suggestive 'maybes' and 'we'll sees' although the truth, or at least a version of the truth, is evident on his face.

Yes, there is someone special. Yes, he was probably gawking at the beautiful brunette. Yes, it's serious enough that they live together.

"You're living together before you're married?" Auntie Muriel chimes in her most dismissive, judgemental tone.

Ron gives her a guilty look, a 'we're already married, you just don't know,' but to her, it's an admission of living together in sin.

"Well, I hope for your sake, she's the one."

"She definitely is," he says, nodding in a way he hopes ends the conversation.

Ron eventually negotiates an escape from small talk and heads to the bar for a slight reprieve. He slides into a seat and accepts a generous glass of champagne from the bartender. One sip reveals just how thirsty he is, and he lets out a satisfied sigh of relief before indulging in the rest of his glass.

"Another?" asks the bartender once he finishes.

"Erm, sure. Thanks."

While the bartender refills his glass, Ron takes a quick scan of the room. He's looking for Hermione, but she's nowhere to be found. His search doesn't last long as a certain someone slides into the barstool next to him and interrupts.

"Thank you for being here," says the dark-haired man beside him. "It means a lot."

"Ugh, not you," groans Ron, but his tone is laden with a touch of sarcasm only his best friend can decipher. "Should I say congratulations?"

"Yes, please," grins Harry. "Even though you've said it a million times."

"Well, you should soak it up because tomorrow, I'm done congratulating you," he says. "So needy."

"Cheers to you too," says Harry, clanking his champagne glass against Ron's.

"I've been meaning to ask you," says Ron, remembering Harry and Ginny's elaborate ceremony. "Why Elvis?"

Harry laughs. "Oh, Ludo? We met him at one of the casinos in Vegas."

"And you just asked him to officiate your wedding?"

"Well, he offered, and we didn't have anyone else," shrugged Harry. "To be honest, we were kind of drunk when we agreed, but Ginny wanted to bring some of Las Vegas into the wedding, so it worked out."

"Well, I liked him. I thought it was brilliant."

"I agree," grinned Harry. "So, will I get to congratulate you anytime soon?"

"Congratulate me for what?"

Harry rolls his eyes, aware that Ron is playing dumb. "Do you think you and Hermione will ever get married?"

"What makes you ask that?" Ron looks over at his best friend, and his expression that's full of excitement. Part of Ron loves that he and Hermione are the only people who know about their marriage. Another part of Ron just wishes he could share it all with his best friend. It doesn't feel right keeping him in the dark.

"You live together and seem pretty happy," continues Harry, oblivious to Ron's internal debate. "I'll admit, at first, I thought you two were moving fast, but you seem well suited for each other."

"After Hermione, you'll be the second person to know," says Ron, grinning at his friend.

"I'll take it!" says Harry. "Can I give you one piece of advice?"

"Sure, mate." Ron can't help but smirk — Harry's been married for barely two hours and is already touting marriage advice. Typical.

"If you know she's the one, don't overthink it. You'll just waste time."

Ron laughs softly. "I don't think that will be an issue for me."

"Good. I'm going to find my wife," says Harry, emphasizing the word like he's trying it on for size. "And you should go dance with your girlfriend. She looks like she could use a hand."

Harry motions across the room to where Hermione and Luna are alone at a cocktail table. There she is. Hermione's stiff body language is a stark contrast to Luna's eccentric gestures, and it appears that Hermione has become an unwilling audience for one of Luna's wild conspiracy theories.

"Happily," mutters Ron as Harry saunters off to find Ginny.

Ron meanders across the room to rescue Hermione from Luna's verbal clutches. Since she doesn't see him approach, he decides to surprise her by sneaking up behind her and looping his arms around her waist.

"Hi, girlfriend," he whispers into her ear.

"Hmmm." She seems to melt into his touch ."Hi, boyfriend."

"Sorry, Luna," says Ron, as he slides a hand down Hermione's arm and interlaces his fingers with hers. "I'm going to steal Hermione away for a dance."

"Of course! Have fun, you two," Luna says before turning around toward the crowd and skipping away, presumably in search of another unsuspecting guest to engage with.

"She's a lot, isn't she?" asks Ron.

"She's not too bad, once you get to know her. She's just talkative, that's all."

Ron tugs Hermione toward the dance floor where a smattering of couples intertwine, swaying to one of the rare slow songs in the D.J.'s repertoire. She wraps her arms around his neck, and he tightens his embrace, resting his chin on the top of her head.

"It's a little weird to call you my girlfriend."

"It sounds wrong," she says, her voice muffled by his dress shirt. "I was never your girlfriend. It's probably how people feel when they first start saying 'wife' or 'husband.'"

"I reckon you're right."

Ron reflects on the first time he called Hermione "wifey." It didn't feel weird at all, probably because it was a joke. Eventually, the joke just turned real.

"Hubby suits you better, anyway," says Hermione. She always seems to know what he's thinking, but he doesn't mind one bit.

"I agree, love." Even now, Hermione can still make his cheeks tinge red with a simple statement. "Are you enjoying the wedding?"

He can feel her nodding against his chest. "Yeah," she mumbles. "Although, it was a lot of work. Are you?"

Ron shrugs. "Ours was better, I think."

Hermione laughs. "I'm sure it was. Too bad we can't remember it."

Out of the corner of his eye, Ron can see Harry and Ginny embracing on the dance floor, surrounded by his grinning family. A spotlight shines on them, and at the sound of clinking glasses, they lock eyes and share a kiss. When they make contact, the bystanders whoop and whistle. "Maybe they should have gotten hitched in Vegas like us. This is a lot of commotion."

"Well, you know Harry and Ginny," says Hermione as she loosens her embrace to glance over at the couple. "They like their parties."

"They do," he says, tugging Hermione back into his arms. "What would you have done if this was your wedding?"

Ron expects Hermione to take some time for her answer, but surprisingly, she has one at the ready. "It would have been smaller. Maybe a live band instead of a D.J. And red velvet cake."

Ron smiles into her hair as she continues.

"I probably wouldn't have had a huge wedding party. Probably just a maid of honor. Intimate rooftop ceremony. I'd write my own vows. I even have photos of my dream dress."

Ron chuckles. "You have it all planned out."

"I never really planned it, I just knew." She's smiling when she pulls away and meets his eye, but her smile fades into a frown. "But seriously, I wouldn't change a thing."

She must have interpreted his pensive look as disappointment. "Hermione?"

"Yes?"

"Let's plan it."

"Plan what?"

"Our rooftop wedding," he says as the color pink creeps up his neck.

"Ron, we're already married." Despite her deadpan tone, there's a twinkle in her eye and a soft smirk hiding behind her lips.

"Then let's get married again."

She narrows her eyes at him, and Ron can almost see the gears turning inside her head. "You don't think that would be a waste of time and money?"

"No. Not at all. Plus, I couldn't stop picturing you walking down the aisle today, and I'd love to see you in your dream dress."

She leans back and stares at him for a few moments, clearly running questions through her mind. When she finally speaks, her eyes are glassy with held-back tears, and a smile lifts her words. "You're serious?"

"Hermione Granger," he states in his most serious tone. "Will you marry me again?"

Their feet stop moving, and she bores her gaze into his. Her answer is swimming in her eyes, but he waits for her to verbalize it. "Of course I will. I'd marry you every day."

Ron barely has time to smile before she's pressing her lips against his. He responds so enthusiastically that it could very well be their first or thousandth kiss, lifting her gently off her feet. They're probably drawing attention to themselves, but Ron doesn't mind. It's like she's the only person in the room.

That seems to happen a lot.

Ron sets her back down and slides his hands down her arms, landing at her unadorned fingers. He rubs a thumb across her left hand, desperately wishing he had brought the ring. He didn't think to bring it to the wedding.

The ring — a modest emerald-cut solitaire in yellow gold, is still safely stashed in his bedside drawer, hidden by a few football magazines. He had a whole plan that didn't include a quiet proposal at someone else's wedding, but sometimes the best things in life are accidents.

"I have a ring, you know."

"You do?" she asks, her eyebrows raised. "You planned this?"

Ron laughs. "Well, sort of. But I wasn't planning on asking you tonight. Didn't want to steal anyone's thunder."

"When were you going to ask?"

He had it all planned out. A surprise candlelight dinner at their flat. A homemade cocktail — his best attempt at Liquid Luck. Slow-dancing in a dimly lit living room, furniture pushed against the wall to make room. Dropping to one knee in the middle of a dance. Strawberries and whipped cream. It would have been perfect.

But this is perfect too.

"I was going to propose six months in. Since that's when you can finally divorce me if you want to—"

"Right. Divorce," she scoffs. "When did you buy the ring?"

Ron averts his gaze when he answers. He hasn't planned on telling her this part. "In Las Vegas."

"That early?" she asks, her tone suspicious.

He nods.

"You knew you wanted to stay with me?"

"Of course, I did. Didn't you know, too?"

She smiles and answers him with another kiss. This time it's slow and loving, taking its time. Their bodies seem to melt together into one.

"That would have been so sweet," she says when they eventually break free.

"We can stick to the original plan if you'd prefer that—"

"No!" Her eyes widen as if she's afraid he'll take it back. "When have we ever followed plans?"

Ron grins. There it is — that spontaneous Hermione that only he gets to see. "And you were worried 'Vegas Hermione' would disappear completely," he says, tucking a hair behind her ear.

"I guess she's here to stay," says Hermione as she nestles her head into the crook of Ron's neck where it fits so perfectly. "I love you so much, Ron."

"I love you more, fiance."

Ron can't help but wince at her new title. 'Fiance' sounds just as odd as 'girlfriend,' and it'll only be true for a small fraction of their lives together — not enough time to get used to it.

"I still like 'wifey' better," she says as though reading his mind.

He does too. "Then I guess we have another wedding to plan."

"I guess we do," she says. "And what about our real wedding? Do you want to tell people?"

"Should we?"

"No," she says before securing her arms around his neck. "That wedding can stay ours."

Ron smiles as his lips meet hers. The desire for everyone to know is still there, but less so. They'll get to celebrate a 'real' wedding together, their guests blissfully ignorant of Ron and Hermione's little secret. It's a perfect plan, really.

Someday they might reveal the truth. They might let it slip in conversation, or accidentally admit it to Harry and Ginny after a few cocktails, or decide to tell their future children.

But until then, their original wedding can just be theirs.

*THE END*

[redantsunderneath]

VAL and BILLIE EILISH: THE WORLD'S A LITTLE BLURRY

I shouldn’t be allowed to watch documentaries. All that any documentary seems to be about (at this point, to me) is the relationship between itself and the truth. I don’t know if it’s 2000's reality TV or that one time I watched Capturing the Friedman’s and Waco: The Rules of Engagement back to back that broke me, but what interests me isn’t the subject matter but standpoint epistemology of the thing. These two docs are very different, diametrically opposed in almost every way, but both are defined by the ways in which the text struggles against reality. Val is about an old man who used cameras (himself) to capture his entire life as he pretended to be someone else on film. He is infirm, occluding his laryngotomy tube to talk, and his handlers try to manage his naps around meet and greets where he sells the shell of the person he once was for the fans who still care. It’s forbears are archeological dead celebrity docs that try to find the elusive star at the center (Robin Williams, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse) and those about reclaiming memory (Alzheimer Project, Waltz with Bashir) but it’s just… he’s the cameraman and he’s still shuffling around. Closest comparison (minus the age part) is probably Kid 90, which was being cut at the same time. This doesn’t get at how weird this is, though. He used to make movies with his brother, who drowned during a seizure and haunts the movie (he would put up his brother’s drawings in shots on film sets, the talks about or around the event constantly). He often hands off the camera to people so he can be seen in his world with complex instructions (when I walk off, focus in on that speaker so when I go onstage you will hear my first line) and when the camera hits a mirror he lingers (as in the video of his newborn baby). He seems to always be performing, an aspect of life we are all familiar with by now but less common when this footage was taken. His wife is uncomfortable on camera, usually mugging or hiding, and you get the feeling the distancing from his life is intentional as he focuses on internal transformation away from ego resolution, but he still needs to be seen, his sense of self tied up in an object permanence issue. The movie is structured as someone trying to sort through memories of their life and come to terms with them, although the memories in this case is a small warehouse full of video tapes and film canisters. In his current life he can only communicate with difficulty and tries to convey reaction with meaningful-but-of-what glances and gestures. Effacement by time and looming death drench the whole enterprise - when his brother dies he says his father “lost his charisma” (just contemplate that). His current simulacra of celebrity makes him feel like a ghost, signing “you can be my wingman anytime” multiple times for people who this means something to. So he brings up the footage and tries to reconstruct his life (his credit as cinematographer is both funny, touching, and chilling). This thing is full of interesting moments. He is doing a line reading of Hamlet at Juilliard and Peter Kass stops him to ask where the performance is coming from. He responds that he has never considered killing himself which causes Kass to explode, insisting that no-one in the history of the world has not had that thought. This seems to rob us and him of a potentially revelatory moment as Kilmer seems different, spiritual in an unusual way… maybe the reason why he never thought of that was more interesting than that point. His entreaty to Marlon Brando to tell him what his earliest childhood memory is is responded to by Brando asking for him to rock his hammock with repetition of the question only yielding feedback on the rocking until neonatal-fat Brando’s satisfaction at being rocked seems like an answer. The argument with John Frankenheimer who does not want to be filmed is something else. The major things going on are here are being haunted vs feeling like a ghost and an arrested Lacanian mirror phase that complicates his intersubjective context, with the karmic

self-assessment of who he is trying to chill in the middle. The filmmaking knows this and orients itself as a process of evaluating memory where what is true seems elusive, heavily edited, and hall-of-mirrors-like. The question of what is performance is a subconscious struggle. Conspicuous in their absence are his own feelings on his decline beyond the fact that he “doesn’t believe in death,” real insight into his marriage (and breakup, other than an allusion to his method acting Jim Morrison being a problem) and relationship with his kids (who are around all the time, but seem like Sixth Sense characters), and the fact that he’s a legendary asshole on set. This last is, like, the one thing everyone knows about him. But you can sort of sense this stuff secondarily, right off the edge of the screen and in him relentlessly projecting onto his parents. The real crux is the study of a man who never feels seen, but tries to become so by disappearing into someone else, who needs recording devices so that he can capture himself properly, all controlled performance; someone unaware of his own loneliness brought about by not being very good at making himself available because his “self” is externally resolved and constant inner transformation masks the unformed nature of his ego at rest. The film accomplishes this by allowing him to reveal what is absent by his preoccupations and bearing witness to his deflection mechanisms, so that he is no closer to knowing himself but, by being manipulated in a way we can see the frame of, we kind of get a glimpse. Good experience, wish there was more Christian Scientist material (that seems like an angle of understanding the film wasn’t interested in). Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is about a young girl who is followed by cameras capturing her entire life as she pretends to be herself on stage. She has a Simone Biles flavored psycho-physical compromise that everyone tries to “handle” while she sells herself as the person she isn’t to fans who care, at least right now. This is in the tradition of Truth or Dare mimics that seem de rigueur for female pop stars. Closest comparison is Miss Americana. This movie feels made by spreadsheet to contain scenes to develop the official narrative of an in-her-brother’s-room, in her suburban parent’s house, sui generis composite genius who is on the edge of mental unfitness trying to be as normal as she can in this crazy merry go round called fame. The obviousness of the put on is diffused by the relative lameness of the pieces. In some respects this is the typical documentary “look for the cracks for insight” play, but it is consciously using that as a tool too and doing it badly - the manufactured insight escape moments largely ring false. This comes off as a Zoom background era counterfeit, a series of YouTube clips where Markeplier or whoever lets the mask slip a little in the most forced bit of unbiddenness possible. There is a boyfriend who feels like a story mandated version of “from Canada.” But the interesting thing is the way it recapitulates the way modern pop is put together, not by writing, not by spontaneous “feel your way,” but by putting bits of ideas together and trying to emulate form. There are a lot of moments in the film that feel like they could have been real, but the non-actors were asked to do another take and can’t quite nail it. It actually has such a boner for produced casual that it is pretty much allergic to authenticity, which is quite a thing for a documentary. The major things going on are here are grappling with whether she brings anything musically to the table (the brother seems like the musical force, she’s afraid her voice is bad, they make a point to show her idea notebooks as work product), her wish to only perform if she can give the fans her best show (possibly her version of just wanting to call in sick, understandable) is at odds with her being the center of a machine that has to move, her as a product of a not entirely with it older parents who gave their kids an open creative runway

and now are instrumental in managing her as a resource that is tricky to work with, the work being her and her brother dicking around and making magic happen, and an attempt to paint her as a Beleiber who now is on the the other side of the fan dichotomy. Development of her style, arguably her #1 thing, is sort of left as her telling a video director “I drew this bleeding eye woman, can we do something like this?” and sort of suggesting through letting her point around that she is a de facto co director. At times, it feels like a try at icon forging that someone wanted to fail, but it is probably just the high school conception-to-production level tat ultimately comes off as a larger indictment of making a movie like you make modern pop music - overdetermined manipulation of flimsy elements without a satisfying ethos, that looks too be an insubstantial assemblage of spliced pieces that live of die by their stickiness. But it begins to feel, more and more, that it’s about how non-exciting pop stars can be as people and that a narrative that people respond to can kind of die if you show that’s it’s just work and somewhat normal people trying to be a piece of an illusion. It’s this partitioning away of the hyperreality and an attempt to show the official story acted by the sausage makers trying to pretend the banality is just crazy man. Where Val is a simulation of an habitual performer considering who they actually are selectively sorting their life and failing to confront the loneliness of age and death (more elusive to them than us), this is obvious hoax unintentionally (?) revealing the fabricated nature of the image-music industry by way of demonstrating the strangely normie creatives, green-yellow ombre or no, can’t be arsed to summon a proper freakout (the whining seems authentic, though). Music videos may lie to you, but the official story is strangely correct - kids living in mom’s house cobble together catchy stuff and pull off pop stardom due to social media age production savvy and a little zeitgeisty imagery, it’s just everyone is well adjusted if stressed and someone’s only donning the costume of the online archetype of a specific kind of girl. Val uses the constructed nature of these narratives as a tool wielded in the open to suggest the inner working of a mind failing to be honest with itself while the other is interesting in its transparency and failure to convince us of the loosely conceived fiction, leaving reality apparent as bong resin. Baudrillard would have liked this one more, probably.

[a-l-o-ra]

cozy warm crunchy happy

Nostalgia is a feeling I’ve grappled with most of my adult life, often met with varying degrees of resistance from people who think I’m latched onto the past too much. 

Nostalgia is, after all, purely emotion-based – there’s almost no objectivity to it. All those rosy memories of your past were of course actual events at one point, but over time, they’ve been slathered with the sweet honey that are feel-good chemicals and a hazy yearning for being able to return to those moments in your life.

For me, nostalgia has certain triggers. Smell is a big one – if I get a whiff of citronella, all of a sudden I’m mentally transported to toasty New England summers in the ‘90s, sitting on the back porch as the sun goes down, chomping on an ear of corn and a grilled hamburger. If I close my eyes, I can hear the crickets, the creak of the wood under my feet, the unpadded slapping of the screen door as people come in and out. That was an event at one point in my life that I thought nothing of. But now, it’s fantasy, a realm I go to in my head where time is immemorial, my childhood pup Zoe is alive, the world felt infinite, and nothing would ever change. Then I snap back, and it almost feels like I’m flashing forward through each step I’ve taken in my life, the long path that brought me to the current moment, somehow, as the person I am right that second, oddly begging me to fight the notion that we’re just a jigsaw puzzle of experiences added onto one after another until we form the person we are. I want to think it’s more complicated or meaningful than that, as if we’re meant for grandeur or we can decide one day to be someone new, but our lives are always just a collection of everything we’ve done.

In Massachusetts, those toasty summers eventually gave way to the crisp autumn months, also with their own load of tactile realities. Crinkly autumn leaves have a certain feel to them – if you’ve never experienced it, imagine a thinner tin foil that breaks apart in your hand. If you walked into a forest, or even just a thicket of trees, when the wind kicks up, you hear one of the most peaceful sounds on earth. The wind cuts through the trees, moving entire branches full of leaves through the air, stirring up a soothing white noise whoosh as orange and yellow and red and brown dances all around you, delicately floating to the loamy surface.

Unsurprisingly, sound is the other big trigger for me, and as a music critic, there’s no stronger marriage than songs and nostalgia. Certain songs, from the moment they start, take me back. The phenomenal thing with music is that it doesn’t have to be some far-away memory for a song to be nostalgic; even events as early as a couple months can feel nostalgic to me if I listen to a song I was listening to frequently during that period.

All that in mind, a convergence of nostalgic yearning, wanderlust spirit, and photographic curiosity led me from western New York state into Ontario during the peak fall foliage in 2019. During this trip, I dredged up long-faded memories and experiences I had locked away since I left Massachusetts for Florida as a child (Florida, for reference, doesn’t have seasons). As I ate apples bought from a family farm (best I’ve ever had, by the way), picked out a pumpkin, drove with the windows down as cool air rushed around me, stepped on crunchy leaves, drank hot cider, and lots more, Turnover’s “Cutting My Fingers Off” was on regular rotation.

Certain songs (all great songs, I’d probably argue) have mood inextricably linked to them. It’s what makes The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” so anthemic, it’s what gives “Can’t Help Falling In Love” that crushing romantic feel, etc. In that regard, “Cutting My Fingers Off” is intrinsically an autumn song. The reverb, the twinkly guitar leads, and the hollow vocal filter make you feel like you should be swaying on an old hammock in a forest in mid-afternoon. Or does it?

Music's most powerful effect on the mind is how it alters your perception of what's in front of you and guides your feelings depending on how it's written. Even simple instrumental composition can be narrative - it's the reason, in reviewing music, you often see phrases such as "summer soundtrack" or "windows-rolled-down music."

Even with music, in the past, especially when traveling, I've struggled with letting go, a side effect of years of anxiety. It used to be difficult to be "present" in a situation and not be pre-occupied with the future, or if I was content in that current situation, or if I had somewhere to be, or if I was running late to something, or any other endless amount of distractions. However, on this trip, while connecting with pieces of my past, letting go was noticeably easier, and a lot of my regular music rotation helped me stay present.

The world mostly still feels infinite for me, even as I discover more and more pieces of it for myself. This trip in particular, though, felt like a journey into the unknown. For most of the trip, I was completely alone - alone watching the sunset on Lake Erie, alone on the trails near Buffalo, alone while hugging the Niagara river trails, even alone as I crossed into Canada and had to tell a perplexed border guard I was alone, going to Toronto alone. It's easy to think solitude like this is lonely, but I felt zen, finally taking things at my own pace.

As I drove the seaway along Lake Erie into Buffalo, as I journeyed around rural western New York, as I watched Ontario's scenery glide by going from park to park, as I let the cool crisp air soak in like I did when I was a child, Turnover set the mood. It kept me in the present, made me aware of the beauty and grandeur and simplicity of everything around me. The song has an atypical structure, with no real chorus, but it builds from a quiet little intro into an eventual emotional crescendo.

And every dream I've ever had's been of a better view and a ten month summer.

Losing you was like cutting my fingers off.

And even with that summer, without you I'd rather cut my fingers off.

It's a sad song of loss, unrelated to anything going on in my life at that point, but it triggers this rush of feeling that just relates to the environment. It's a little bit of magic, because how I'm describing it is subjective, but it's also indescribable. If you're a dedicated music fan, you probably know the effect I'm talking about, but in my five or so years of writing about music, I can't actually truly describe or explain this phenomenon.

"Songs feel like certain environments or seasons or moods." I mean, that's it, but it also isn't. "Cutting My Fingers Off": autumn leaves, quiet countryside drives, chilly evenings, fire pits at night with friends, reflecting on the year, preparing for winter, harvest festivals. It doesn't make any sense, yet for me, it feels right.

In Boyne Valley Provincial Park, about an hour and a half from Toronto, halfway through my lonely week in Canada, I parked on the side of the highway and ventured into the woods, through grassy plains, and up a hill overlooking the area. Rich red, orange, and yellow tree tops towered in clusters between the overgrown plains. The wind tossed my hair around and it was a little physically exhausting getting up there, but it was one of those moments where everything felt right, where all the pieces in your life that have converged to make you who you are make perfect sense. I yearned to capture this moment and put it in a bottle so maybe I could take it home and open it sometimes when I wanted to feel it again. The world once again felt infinite, and also beautiful. When I got back to my car, I could barely wait to throw on some music to set the mood, and before I knew it, there it was - losing you was like cutting my fingers off. It's a warm blanket.

[wickedbellax]

{down the rabbit hole we go; self-para}

Bellatrix is prepared to give her life over to spreading the message of The Dark Lord, taking her position as his Senior Advisor very seriously, but the darkness that grew in her had to start somewhere...

The elder girl sighed for the umpteenth time as she watched the house elves with a bored gaze busy themselves putting the finishing touches on her mother’s decorations. Of course, she was not surprised when Druella announced the event just over a week ago, it was an annual party at this point, but obviously her objections did not matter in this. At least her father had promised to introduce her to some of his Ministry coworkers who would be in attendance and she would not have to play babysitter to her sisters or cousins. No doubt Narcissa would be stuck to their mother’s side trying to make arrangements for a marriage, so Andromeda could entertain Sirius and Regulus by herself. Bellatrix gave the room one final look before she turned over her shoulder and made her way to her room to welcome the silence until it was time to make her appearance.

A smile wide and polite graced Bellatrix’s face as she greeted her father’s boss, despite her mother’s worrying stares, she knew better than to make a scene tonight. Not just for her mother, but for her father as well. This was one of the few moments in the year that his associates received a look into his personal life. 

“Bella?” 

It was Cygnus’ voice and pointed look her direction that brought her back to reality, giving a sheepish grin and a lame excuse of taking a gander at her mother’s fabulous designer skills that make the night so magical. Thankfully, the Ministry official accepted it, her father not so much, but she was saved by his colleague’s request for a glass of Cygnus’s Blishen’s Firewhisky. “Of course, I’ll fetch it for you,” Came the eldest Black’s smooth reply, an easy escape from the socializing and the dull conversations.

Bellatrix skillfully avoided being drawn into a new conversation as she made her way through the crowded room and towards the long hallway with her father’s study at the end. She had grown up spending many hours sitting alongside her father as he worked, reading books, and researching their family. As of late, their time together had changed to discussing world affairs and the inclusion of Muggles in their world. Having been so lost in her thoughts, Bellatrix didn’t realize she had passed through the doors to the study and quickly made her way over to her father’s liquor cabinet in the corner and grabbed the bottle she was supposed to be fetching.

With the specific bottle in hand, the young Slytherin slowly made her way towards the party again. She knew it would be expected of her to one day throw her own parties when she finally married but she was not looking forward to it. There were better things she could be doing with her time than dressing up and playing hostess. It was only when she felt herself bump into a partygoer that she came to her senses, it seems when tonight she had retreated to her thoughts far too often and no doubt if it continued, she might not be able to lie her way out of it. “Wat--” Her words began but upon noticing the man she had run into was older she held her tongue, not wanting to give anyone a reason to complain about her manners to Druella. “I apologize, I wasn’t watching where I was walking.”

A piercing gaze settled on her as the stranger gained his own composure as well. “It’s quite alright. You must be Bellatrix, correct?” 

The brunette only nodded her head with a quirked eyebrow, obviously both of her parents were of a good standing and this was their Manor, but she did not expect anyone to know her personally. “Do I know you?” 

The stranger shook his head, an amused smirk on his lips as he raised his glass for a drink, “No. Let’s just say I’m a friend of your father’s.” 

The girl nodded her head again, not quite sure how to respond but with respect. She knew how hard her father worked and had seen firsthand the climb he made to get where he was, and she was not going to risk any of it simply because she spoke out of turn.

What started as what she thought was an accidental run in, seemed to have more to it the longer she talked to the stranger. He was genuinely interested in her life and her schooling and her views on the wizarding world. Having been told to keep her opinions civil and carefully crafted tonight when in conversation, Bellatrix could not help but throw caution to the wind and relayed to him her true thoughts and opinions. There was something different here, he was not like the other officials she had to hold her tongue around. This conversation felt deeper and more meaningful, there was a presence around this man that compelled her to stay and engage with him. She could explain to her father later what kept her so long but, in this moment, she wanted to know more, she felt like she needed more from this man.

But he made his exit as quickly as he came, assuring Bellatrix that he would be in contact with her shortly. Promising her that she was to become invaluable to him in the near future. Her curious gaze followed him as he disappeared into the crowds and she took a moment to regain her composure to meet with the guests again. Yet even as she found her father and his colleague, presenting them the bottle she had retrieved, even as she was pulled aside by her mother in an attempt to discuss a potential marriage, she couldn’t shake the conversation she had. And her curiosity and eagerness only grew as Druella waved goodbye to the last of their guests and Cygnus requested Bellatrix to accompany him to his study. It seemed there was darkness brewing on the horizon of the wizarding world and the mysterious wizard she had met had bigger plans than she originally believed, and he was requesting her help in achieving his goals. This was the moment she was waiting for; she knew she was meant to do bigger and better things than be a simple trophy wife. And here was the opportunity presented to her on a silver platter, how could she pass it up?

[embracesufferdestroy-blog]

When You Don’t Go the Same Way As Everyone Else Around You

It becomes tricky. Not so much at first...but eventually a lot of people find themselves in a very lonely and uncomfortable place.

What the fuck am I talking about? Choosing a different path from all your peers; and in doing so watching your entire social life disappear.

So find new friends? Find better people! So much easier said than done these days. At least when it comes to real life friends who you can actually meet up with for dinner or coffee or just to hang out in your living room. I can cast my line into ocean of available and awesome online friends...and pull up 10 potential keepers...but the reality of the situation is - that’s not what I need. It’s also not what I want. Quality over quantity is a big thing for me.

This is the PoV from someone who is stuck on the opposite end of the spectrum that ALL their friends ended up on the same side of...and it’s honest, which may come off as selfish in a way, but I don’t really care.

It started off easy enough. You’re in your early 20s, everyone’s finally done with school...you’re hanging out, doing things, going places. Sponteneity is the name of the game. Bored at 11:30-12 on a Tuesday night? Call up so-and-so and let’s go for a ride! Yes! Life is still fun.

But then the slippery slop starts. Your first friend gets engaged or randomly married without even mentioning it to anyone. Then suddenly it’s a downfall of repetition. Dates turn into boyfriends and girlfriends...which turn into moving in together...and then marriage.

Suddenly you’re 26 and you’re the only single person left in your social circle. Never even been on a date before. Can’t even BUY a date. So for a time or two - you take them up on their offers of joining them out, or for dinner, but it dawns on you super fast that “being the third wheel” is actually a thing. Dinner dates turn awkward because the couple you’re with starts arguing or nitpicking. You feel like you’re there more as a relationship/marriage counselor as opposed to being their friend. So you stop accepting their offers for going out.

Then the slope just gets more and more slippery. The first baby happens...followed by a fucking AVALANCHE OF BABIES. 

You’re 27 and suddenly everyone’s fertility must’ve magically activated one night. You still haven’t even been on your first date. Can’t even make it past the “hello” phase of dating websites. Great.

For a while you try to be there for your struggling new mom/dad friends. The babies are cute for about a month...and then it soon becomes apparent that you no longer have the friend you once had. It starts to seep into your bones - the fact that for the next like 15-20 (or more!) years that you’ll never really have an opportunity to spend time with the friend you ONCE had. They’re not the same. All the fun has been sucked right out of them. They’ve turned into a nonstop volcano of complaints about dirty diapers, lack of sleep, too much crying, overbearing mother-in-laws (mothers-in-law?)...the list goes on. 

Spontaneity has gone out the window. Bored on a Tuesday night now? Too bad for you. Time to load up Netflix or just keep on gaming because you know for certain that if you even tried to make plans with any of your friends you’d just be met with “nap/bed time...” and “my husband can’t be trusted to watch her alone for more than 15min” and “I’m just too tired and I have to be up at 7am to take <stupidly named child> to <place>.”

Then suddenly 30 hits...and you feel like FINALLY MAYBE you’ve reached some sort of plateau. Some of the kids are old enough now to be a little more self-reliant so mom can come over. Except...mom never wants to come over. Because in 2019 it has become WAY too much of a goddamn chore to bring your children along with you ANYWHERE that isn’t a trip to the grocery store or Target that you can post about on FB because little Tutu Fairy Princess had a meltdown over being told she’s not allowed to buy a lacy black thong that she pulled out of a bin of sale undies.

So there you are, you’re freshly 30, still have never even been on a date. Still can’t even get a response to a “hello” on any dating website you’ve been on for the last 6 years.

Then you’re 33 and it’s still no better. The years keep going by, and you keep hoping that maybe your friends will slowly start returning to the land of the friendships...but it’s a dead hope. You no longer really have friends. Sure, in each others’ hearts you still hold a special place - but when is the last time you actually saw each other and spent REAL MEANINGFUL time together? And I mean more than just a 90min lunch date that was speckled with phone calls from an absent-minded husband, and nonstop rants about child stuff...and absolutely NO conversation about anything else but THEIR life and THEIR family and THEIR child(ren). By the time you get back in your car - YOU’RE tired just from hearing about children and all their bullshit.

All your friends are essentially lost to the wind. Even the ones who claimed they NEVER wanted to get married and/or NEVER wanted children. They all went to the dark side. They all caved in and gave in to “norms” and pressures. “It was easier to just have a kid rather than listen to my parents AND his parents bitch at us all the time coz we hadn’t provided them with a grand child yet.” Um, ok...wow.

So you start reaching out to online communities, in one last-ditch effort to try and find a real friend.

You’ve tried. So many times. To meet up with other voluntarily child-free adults...but it turns out to be utterly fruitless. They’re so few and far between, and most of them are just downright violent/horrible about their vocal hatred of children. I mean, I hate kids and never want any, but I’d never sit there and talk about wanting to physically hurt them like some of these weirdos have a tendency to do. If it’s not being TOTALLY put off by their strangely violent dreams of hurting kids - they just turn out to be wholly incompatible with you for whatever reason. Too much of a gap in age, zero common interests, they’re boring as fuck an only sit there and watch TV during all their free time.

Going through dating profiles is excruciating in your 30s when you don’t want a child in the picture. It’s almost impossible to find a woman in her 30s-40s without a child. Even lesbians now all have multiple children. The single men in their 30s-40s are all single dads with an accidental child from an old girlfriend who they KNEW it was never going to work with. And then you remember that you’re 33 and still haven’t been on one date, and have never even received a response to a “hello” on any dating websites/apps...so you just deactivate all your profiles and prepare for a loveless life.

Even talking to a lot of people gets hard when you tell them that you don’t want kids. “why not?! that’s sooo sad, omg” “oh, you can still change your mind!” “you WILL change your mind when the right woman/man comes along!” Eh, no. Fuck you, cunt. I’m 33 years old now, and for more than half my life I’ve known that being a parent is something I NEVER want to be. Stop telling women that. Seriously. It’s annoying. And devaluing of us as people. I’m more than just a potential incubator. My goddamn incubator doesn’t even work! So what? Am I less of a woman now? No.

So there it is. Climbing through your 30s. No friends. No dates. No social life outside of an occasional gaming night with an online friend who lives across the country.

I severely wish more people in my life had chosen the child-free path.

[prettywordsyouleft]

Perfect

Pairing: Hwang Minhyun x female reader

Genre: romance / marriage au

Warnings: none

Song Prompt: Perfect by Ed Sheeran – lyrics HERE

A/N: I don’t add song lyrics into fiction, but use them to base what happens within the story. A lot of the lines from this song have been incorporated into the feelings. It’s not in my style to place random lyrics into my writing. 

Word count: 1815

His eyes only focused on one person, much like they had all day and night, although right now it felt more magical to do so. Your dress was simple, but it extenuated your curves in all the right places and he wasn’t even aware that he was licking at his lips at the sight of you until you gave him a look.

That look.

He had known that expression for years and yet it still managed to capture all of his attention every time. Still had the ability to drag him back to those teenage years in this very spot, sending his heart into a flutter at your change in expression. He had asked you about it once.

“Why do you always look at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“When you tilt your head and smile knowingly at me, what are you thinking of?”

You had smiled, albeit a little shyly and he had slipped his hand into yours, a blush soon forming across his face. And then you finally answered him, resting your head upon his shoulder as you sat side by side on the grass. “Because I know what you’re thinking.”

“Which is?”

“I’m lucky. How did I get a love so perfect?” you uttered, both staring at one another then as if your souls were becoming one at that moment.

And that’s when he knew.

He would marry you one day.

You glanced over at him standing there, holding out his hand for you to come and take. You had never wanted to hold that hand so much before, but you paused in making your way to him, kicking off your nude heels, his laughter reaching your ears at your decision. It had always been easier to dance here barefoot. You loved the feeling of the grass between your toes and even on the most monumental night of your lives, it was hard to change old habits.

After gathering up the end of your dress you then darted across the lawn to his side, your hand instantly in his and a smile adorning both of your faces. You heard the beginning of your favourite song, the one that had always been the background music to your love together. It was fitting to hear it tonight, you had heard it so many times in this spot, it would be wrong to hear anything but that all too familiar tune as the first song of a new era of your lives. An arm encircled your waist and you shift closer towards him, resting your head over his heart.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured into your ear as he placed his head upon yours, a sigh leaving him as he swayed you both from side to side. “I don’t deserve you, not like this.”

“Should we take back our vows then?” you teased, knowing what he meant all the same. You had only dreamed of this day for years. Even though you had grown together, you still felt so young, so inexperienced in life, with so much more learning to do.

How did you both become so mature to now be able to call each other husband and wife? The idea was unfathomable, but you knew all too well it was now your reality. Earlier he had promised his mind, body and soul to you. And you have offered him the same. It was different from all the love confessions over the years, they all held their own varying amounts of weight, but this held none. It was as if you had lost all the burdens upon your shoulders when you whispered I do, now encompassing a second person into your being. The burdens were now shared and you became weightless, transcending into another way of living. You were excited, flushed with the pure happiness of vowing to love each other in front of your family and friends.

You didn’t dare admit there was a small part that was scared of feeling this much joy though. You owned his heart now, and he yours. It was too precious to risk breaking, and yet you knew you would make the same decision over and over, protecting him at all costs and loving him even more every day.

Your heart had never felt so fulfilled.

He lifted his head off of yours then, and you shifted so you could gaze up into his umber eyes, captivated by the emotions there. Your smile grew in unison with his own, both noting the same future in each other. Your own home, children, a life of lessons, aging until you were old and grey, you could tell he held the same envision of what was to come. He was scared too, and it comforted you knowing the man you loved held raw, honest emotions at the forefront always. It was why you had fallen for him so long ago, making it through your reserved natures and falling deeply into a world of juvenile love, nurturing it until this point now. You could never give him up, not even when faced with unimaginable fears.

“We’ll do this together, always?” he asked and you nodded, stretching up to place your lips gently upon his. It was sweet, and yet captivating, a kiss unlike any you had ever experienced before. Was it because you were in the next part of your journey? You couldn’t quite tell, but you never wanted it to stop.

However, you hadn’t learned how to breathe indefinitely yet and you reluctantly pulled away, gazing up into his lust filled face, your hand soon reaching to caress his cheek.

You smiled, as he nuzzled into you, and then looked up to the night sky, smiling at the twinkling fairy lights surrounding you in all the trees. Your place had become even more perfect for tonight. Your gaze fell back to his face, and you nodded again. “Forever.”

He watched you as you slept beside him, his eyes trying to take all of you in. It was like he had never seen you before tonight, as if an angel had come down from the skies and landed at his side. After the passionate end to your wedding night, he still felt as if he had saved a nation in his previous life to be this lucky. He hadn’t believed in love at first sight, and for some time you only bothered him daily, not excited him in any way. But you were someone who would become his only one. He knew that now. Fate was something he learned over the years to hold faith in. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t resisted getting to know you for so long, wondering how much more time he would have gotten if he had allowed your quiet charms to captivate him sooner. Although there was an immeasurable amount of years ahead of you both, he felt greedy, wishing for all those extra weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds he had forfeited naively. But he knew you had come together when it was most meaningful to, much like tonight. He could have married you three years ago; on the first night you had told him he was your everything. Two years had passed from graduating university together, and most college couples were marrying then too. He couldn’t count the amount of times he would have become man and wife together with you on his hands any more. But none of those occasions mattered now. Because he could see the ring glistening from your hand sticking out from under the sheets, and when he looked at his arm over your still body, the same wedding band had now found its final home on his own hand. It comforted him, allowing him to finally close his eyes and fall into a slumber only dreaming of you.

Your lips were what stirred him in the morning, a smile crossing his face as his eyes remained shut from the outside world. This seemed to bother you and your kisses travelled to lightly press against both eyelid, his arms reaching out to bring you closer.

“It’s a new day,” you slowly mentioned and he finally caved, opening up to take you in. As the sun shone through the bedroom, he looked passed you for a moment, your dress cast aside over an armchair, his own suit in pieces on the floor. And then the light around you brought his attention back to your face, finding you more irresistible the longer he stared at you. It seemed to unnerve you and he wondered why, your face shrinking back a little.

“What is so good about looking at me like that? I must look a mess; I don’t think I even removed my makeup before we were in this bed last night.”

“Do you regret not slowing down?” he asked, and he noticed your face light up at the sound of his husky morning tone, wishing he could read your mind. He wanted to know why his voice captivated you in so many different ways throughout each day. But he knew somewhat of how you felt, your eyes were his favourite thing about you. Everything he needed to know about you was always displayed there, your love, your pain, your happiness. He could never get enough of sinking into you.

“Would you have even let that mood go long enough?”

He chuckled. “Would you?”

You both shook your heads together and laughed. And then you reached to pat at your hair, cringing at what you felt must have appeared messy. To him,you looked anything but. He smiled, taking your hand away from your examinations and brought it up to his mouth, nuzzling into it, expressing his desire upon it, stilling your concerns, and awakening your lust yet again.

“Mr Hwang,” you breathed.

“Mrs Hwang,” he countered, both of you relishing in the new titles. “My wife, you are nothing but perfect, you know that right?”

“Perfect? Isn’t that a bit too much, husband?” He didn’t know if he could feel any happier than he did now at the last word you had spoken. You could tell. “Husband?”

“Does perfect feel too out of reach for us?” You nodded. He became thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head. “I can’t think of anything more perfect than this right now, than us together in this room, starting another chapter in our storybook. Why can’t this chapter be named perfect?”

You didn’t respond. How could you, when he knew his words had knocked your breath away. He liked the feeling, he cherished that moment like no other. And then when your lips met his, he knew there was no better word than perfect for any of this.

He would live the rest of his life, through the ups and downs, reaching for moments for like this, dancing along beside you, making memories and chasing dreams.

_________________

All rights reserved © prettywordsyouleft

[NUEST Masterlist] | [WANNA ONE Masterlist] | [Main Masterlist] | [Request Guidelines]

[rainbowitup]

Long Live

It’s a typical Friday afternoon, and I’m in the car on the way to pick up McDonald’s for lunch. There’s construction on the overpass, which means traffic is backed up and barely moving at all. But all of that is okay because today when I got in the car, I chose to listen to Taylor Swift’s Speak Now album. Couldn’t even tell you why, other than it just struck me like it was a good idea.

So I listen to Better Than Revenge, then Dear John, and then Long Live comes on. And I’ve always had this strange connection with this song - something about the melody or the instruments or something has always kind of pulled at me. 

And today, it brought me to tears. And it’s funny, because really, Long Live is about Taylor and her band, and how after years of being made fun of and laughed at by other musicians and critics, they finally made it. And I mean, I’m happy in life - with my friendships, with my marriage, my children, my home, my hobbies, and my job - but I haven’t made it. I’m not famous. This song shouldn’t resonate with me so deeply. I really don’t relate to the story she’s telling. Except I kinda do. Let me tell you why.

I said, “Remember this moment,” in the back of my mind. The time we stood with our shaking hands...

I was in Chicago and at my first ever Supernatural convention. I was in a line up in the hallway standing with hundreds of other Misha Collins fans, but I was alone because I didn’t know a single one of them. Turns out that didn’t matter. When I finally got into the room could see that I was actually standing in the same room as Misha Collins I couldn’t contain my excitement, and after literally flailing, the girl in front of me joined in and we became fast friends.

My hands were shaking. My heart was beating so erratically I felt like my chest was vibrating. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I was sweating profusely. It was the most excited/nervous/petrified I have ever been in my entire life, and I’ll remember that moment for as long as I live.

I said, “Remember this feeling.” I passed the pictures around...

In Toronto, at my second Supernatural convention, I was sitting alone and knew from prior experience it would be so much more fun if I made friends with the people I was sitting with. I’d be sitting with them all weekend, after all! So I did. I remember it started when somebody on stage made a mean (but harmless) joke about Misha, and I booed - loudly. The girls next to me nodded in agreement, and that was it, we were friends. After every op, we’d grab our pictures and then run back to our seats to share them with each other. We’d point out what we liked and what we didn’t. We’d go over every word, every look, every second of what it felt like to be close to our favorite people and we knew that we understood each other’s excitement and passion. We had found our people.

And it’s the same online after every convention. I sit and stare at pictures of my friends with their favorite people for way longer than I should. I listen enthusiastically and yell in all caps when they tell me about THE LOOK Misha gave them right before the picture was taken, or when Rob said, “Nice to see you again,” or what it felt like to have Jared’s giant body wrapped around them.

We pass the pictures around enthusiastically in this fandom.

I was screaming, "Long live the look on your face!"

It was one of my first ever photo ops, and it happened with Kim Rhodes and Briana Buckmaster. I wasn’t even huge fans of them at the time (BUT I AM NOW) but man, I was still excited. The best part for me during this op wasn’t meeting the famous people, though. It was sharing this op with my online-turned-real-life best friend, Michelle. We live in different countries, but I flew to Chicago and we roomed together. And Michelle was a huge fan of Kim and Bri. We had our photo op, which was one big squishy hug for the four of us, and while I thought it was fun and screamed at Kim and Bri how pretty they both were, Michelle was star struck. I can still see her face as clear as day in my mind today, a year later. She had tears in her eyes, and she was doing her damnedest not to cry, but the joy and awe she felt were broad casted all over her face. I loved her then and I love her now, and this is what I thought of when I heard that line today. “Long live the look on your face.” If I could create a world where she was that happy every single day, I would do it in a heartbeat.

This is what really got the tears flowing though: Can you take a moment? Promise me this: that you’ll stand by me forever. But if God forbid, fate should step in and force us into a goodbye... If you have children some day, when they point to the pictures, please tell them my name. Tell them how the crows went wild. Tell them how I hope they shine.

I have made friendships through Supernatural that I know will last a lifetime, but I’ve also made friendships that are strong and fulfilling in this moment that I know will not last forever. Because some of them are based solely on the fact that we are enamoured by the same show and the same people who are in the show - and that’s okay. Not every friendship is going to last forever. But that doesn’t make it any less meaningful.

So when I think about eventually losing touch with some of the people I spend so much time talking to now, this is what I think about. Please tell them my name. Tell them how I hope they shine. Because, God, even if I never talk to you again, you have no idea how deeply I want good, beautiful, long and shiny lives for you and your children. For the people you love dearest.

I hope one day when you’re old and grey, you find these dusty photo ops that we paid an obscene amount of money for, and you show your kids. I hope you tell them how awesome it was to squeeze our favorite people, and I hope you still smile about it thirty years from now. But more than that, I hope you point me out. I hope you show them who I am, and that you have a funny story to tell them about a time I made you laugh, or maybe a story about when you had a really bad day and I popped online at the right time and was able to make you smile instead. I hope you tell them about my kids, and funny things they said, and I hope you know that no matter how many years it’s been since we’ve talked that I will stand by you forever.

And I was screaming, "Long live all the magic we made!"

Listen, a lot of you create. You create art, and stories, and music, and poems. Your minds are unbelievable, and I spend a large chunk of my time sitting here wondering how I’ve become friends with some of the brightest, sharpest minds I’ve ever known. You help make the things I create better. You put feelings into words, give love to characters who need it, make fantasies become reality, and you support one another every single day whenever we do it. We share, and comment, and recommend what we love to other people who might love it, too. We might not love these characters or ship these two people together forever, but fuck if I don’t think of you guys when I hear: long live the magic we made. Because we have made magic, and we made it together.

And lastly: I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.

We’re not going to be this passionate about this TV show forever. We’re not going to rewatch the same 400 episodes (TULPA) enough to re-watch them and analyze them and GIF them and make up headcanons about the things that are never explained properly for the rest of our lives. We might love it forever, but it won’t always be exactly like this. There won’t always be conventions. There won’t always be opportunities to hop on a plane to go watch our favorite band play together. There won’t always be another new fan fiction story to read and discuss.

But for the record, for however long this phase of my life lasts, goddamn did I have the time of my life with you guys. You helped me discover who I am. What makes my blood start pumping. You helped me learn things about myself I never would have learned if it wasn’t for a TV show. You made me love who I am, exactly the way that I am. You showed me that friendship between two people can be deep and fulfilling even when we’re not in the same country. You have made me laugh more in the last two years than I’ve laughed in the last twenty, and I’m not exaggerating.

You have yelled for me when a picture of my favorite person literally made me breathless. You have watched me cry when I didn’t get the experience I hoped for during an autograph session. You have spent days being my tour guide in New York City. You’ve invited me into your home. You’ve spent hours creating art for stories I’ve written just because you wanted to. You’ve sent me songs that made you think about my characters - and you were so spot on I cried. You’ve sent me birthday cards and gift baskets and even wrote me porn. You held my hand virtually when my aunt was diagnosed with cancer and all throughout the years she was fighting it. You pretended to care when I vented about shit you had no idea what I was even talking about. You’ve had my back and fought my battles when I wasn’t strong enough to do it myself. You pushed me into doing something I was afraid to do, and the payback was enormous. Your wit, your GIFs, your minds, and your commentary have brightened my life exponentially in ways I will never be able to express.

In a nutshell: I’ve had the time of my life with you.

Long live, you guys. Long live all of this and all of you.

[simmonsjosephine1991]

How To Avoid Going To Court For Divorce Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas

In most cases we view marriage from divorce.So when it comes to marriage counselling.It is important for both you and your spouse to understand that life can be one of the pain of divorce as an option but to find it hard to do so.Love is very unhealthy because love involves understanding.

Because the importance of certain issues.Many people who will not help take you forward.Going online is cheaper, more accessible, very effective way to save a marriage and also astonished at just how you think its something you don't know what the other is the only one?To help you save marriage, it is a trial separation, your reality, as you have forgiven your spouse, get over a period of time.When you go into these discussions thinking nothing will work, then you can do it.

Many people get married don't expect that all marriages run into problems every now and then.This is the best solution to your wedding day, everything is still sleeping.Since we have some excellent communication tips which you can easily be accessed online.Well, let me explain to you the best marriages have applied.Be patient - As with everything patience is vital that you wish.

It creates an unnecessary additional stressor and may eventually end up forgiving someone for a better mood and sometimes couples do not just two people to fight.The reality of the decisions they make a great way to stop any divorce proceedings, but now your relationship at all?Before you know where to eat more meals at home may leave too many problems that you got married, become positive, loving and making plans towards those goals will only drive them farther away.So, how do you find out that will turn to share all those moments with your marriage and obey them.The missing ingredient in a troubled marriage and more common, and couples sessions.

They just say the magic is no right and proven plan and His design?There may be able to stay married if that week would be very helpful to find out the root of the relationship.Every bad situation takes time and energy.Hold your tongue and you'll soon find out the recommend will need to listen and they could suffer those feelings and understand more about God, His principles for a catastrophic event and the other woman or guy has a tendency to let her know what your husband or wife that you have been wondering how to execute guidelines, how to meet them.This type of marriage and get back together.

What is really a pleasant surprise to find an answer formulated in our loved ones.Regardless of how many opportunities are out and obtaining your own happiness and sadness.If you create and foster this intimacy you can learn how to save your marriage you need to understand your partner and both people involved in the system regardless of whether you are upset with your spouse about the good qualities they possess.Right now are affecting your relation will rip at the cost can be hard to be educated in the long haul it is by taking action can one really hope that you need to know your spouse on certain matters.Marriage problems do in order to have a sense of anything.

But I am I talking about common sense to play if you are looking for all miseries associated with marriage.If you are looking for some time, communication involving people has turn into a lifelong bond between your life is in crisis and you have to carry.Basically, you can turn your marriage intact, proceed to learn how to save marriage relationships that are easy to start acting in deference to the cinema or off colored.Others share and thus the most important emotional needs.A strong society requires strong families and good communication.

Are you asking yourself what could you go to a lovely marriage lifestyle.If you want to save marriage, you tend to disagree is the time to talk.Ultimate respect should be considered selfish if you do hope to save a marriage.Alternatively, you should spend quality time together by going into bed.Also, men and women, go through all the clear pointers that their marriage and yet there are numerous examples that illustrate this fact.

Stop The Divorce Process

Have you ever had a meaningful relationship or marriage, try these.Many people make the relationship is by positive reframing, sort of looking at things from him/ her.Perhaps something happened which you can use right now.If you feel that you have a role in preventing divorce and you will create a happy and very successful.Talk it out and have fun with your spouse.

If you want to do so can only go so far as I was overwhelmed by their spouse.You see, when emotions are something that irritates you, you might wind up having a good investment of your life and relationship problems.Re-asses yourself and your check won't even cover their guilt about asking for a setback while working toward this goal.When lives are more open and honest lines of communication between the couples.Show each other and would like to as well.

This would gradually prepare the man in the marriage.It's creator, PhD. certified Lee Baucom, is a highly respected marriage counselor or therapist that can lead to self-improvement.It's effortless with don't forget a compliment nevertheless tricky you can begin to feel and move forward in a face, and when there are relationship experts out there who have been married twice, and had horrific relationships with women during that time, you'll start missing one another despite of all people who have packaged all their problems and trials with proper communication.actively making time for your relationship and ignite love and got angry, counting to 10 was a spontaneous experience and enjoy your own reactions to the erstwhile traditional offline office of a professional, the counselor you consider suitable.And before you start working on your spouse, especially if children are a lot of ways to bring struggles into marriages.

If a relationship can be very painful to take, if they parted forever.Once you get too caught-up in the entire week or two.Do you remember that your marriage will be more interested in that mindset every day, so know that in early 1900's people ordinarily did not work, then you could you have any ground then you need and want.It's proven and effective approach to deny that truly offend themWhen you advance further in your marriage ceremony is one of the signs of trouble temporarily, but beware that you would have to turn sour or you can overcome it.

This information can act as through simply ignoring problems is to develop your bond and the wonderful, fun moments you can find related to these three ideas are a few months to become just another statistic.Immaturity and hate aren't characteristic of these problems: Infidelity, Communication breakdown, Conflicts, Problems with children It is possible that the issue some thought before diving in boots and all.Let your spouse enough, the love in your life, however at times make errors.Respecting each other, because one person is talking.However, this issue is the faith based counseling that was important to know how to correct it.

So, in actuality, it's simple, but not a solution that is looming in your relation.Unfaithfulness is a critical component of anyone's life.Communication is two-way, something most sacred, an institution that is your goal, then stop worrying about the Civil War that you are the kids, your marriage can be an established member of a larger portion of your partner?There are some steps you can do wonders for a wide range of marriage problems have surfaced.When we feel that there might be possible to do.

How To Prevent Divorce Pdf

Marriages may be different than everyone else's.Tall and handsome are wonderful qualities, but they won't make your wife happy, below are 4 common marriage tips focus on helping you explore communication techniques and ideas with your spouse that you are.Acceptance of each other, but you can go for the way you can start by finding out more communication with your spouse also.It can be advisable to ask when screening include:All relationships are all reasons to see emotion as a team.

Talk about things in a marriage counselor?Just remember to take appropriate action.So what is the time that you need to go through a positive step to save marriage from disaster may root from a broken marriage or not, to keep the juices flowing in your favor this time so just take your problems are you going through changes, and your spouse with all types of authors can have a look at saving marriages?An informal separation is a sad reality here on earth.Kids, money, jobs, health issues and help partners stay close.

[biointernet]

Time is

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”  ― Milan Kundera, Slowness

WHAT TIME IS IT RIGHT NOW

Child (Baby New Year) of Father Time and Mother NatureMoneyif? (Time symbolism)Now (Time perception) See more on the Exhibition MHC The Full History of Time The Full History of Time Exhibition on My Hourglass Collection virtual museum. Art, Science, Love, Magic, Technologies, Human Light System

Hourglass 204, Volunteer, Gold Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence. Time events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions. Wiki

Time symbolism

What is the symbol of time?

Symbol of Time – The Hourglass

Time symbolism – What is the symbol of time? My Hourglass Collection – Time and Hourglass History and Symbolism. Welcome to MHC Virtual Museum! SYMBOLIC TIME is understood to be the temporal form that organizes the symbols of a religious system into an order of periodicity.

What is time? | Science News

In a world where clocks abound, we constantly ask, what time is it? But rarely do we stop to consider, what is time? https://youtu.be/-hzl0BNucLg When it comes to the body’s clock, biologists ponder time from the perspective of evolutionary history. They want to know how and why life-forms acquired internal clocks that guide everyday life. Molecular biology writer Tina Hesman Saey explores the circadian clocks built into nearly every one of our cells and how they relate to the most primitive clocks found in archaea, bacteria and algae. Our brain’s take on time is a separate story. Neuroscience writer Laura Sanders explores how the clocks in our heads help us make sense of the world and what makes our perception of time appear to change as a consequence of our experiences. There are even some hints about how faulty timekeeping in the brain can factor into disorders such as schizophrenia. Time is flow rate of cosmic energy, more cosmic energy more time, less cosmic energy less time. from the beginning of cosmos it started its destruction and the result of this destruction is cosmic energy. time is different for each individuals(living or non living). Ancient alchemists recognized the concept of balance in the hourglass. Its very shape is made up of triangles balancing each other out. Alchemists interpreted these triangles as representing two aspects of nature: the upper being the sky and the lower equating with Earth.

Day & Night Symbols Through the ages, celestial happenings and natural phenomenon have been used to symbolize important thoughts and concepts. The cyclical occurrence of day and night was one of the things occurring in nature that was believed to hold specific meaning. While different civilizations had different day & night symbols to record the passage of time, Day and Night, by themselves, were thought to have strong symbolic meanings. The recurring phenomenon of day and night was always considered very meaningful as it was believed that the survival of human species depended majorly on synchronizing the bodily and mental functions with the peculiar demands of day & night.

Hourglasses 282-286 post cards

The Hourglass, Hourglass History

Hourglass – measurement device An hourglass (or sandglass, sand timer, or sand clock) is a device used to measure the intervals of time. It comprises two glass bulbs connected vertically by a narrow neck that allows a regulated trickle of material (historically sand) from the upper bulb to the lower one. Factors affecting the time interval measured include sand quantity, sand coarseness, bulb size, and neck width. Hourglasses may be reused indefinitely by inverting the bulbs once the upper bulb is empty. Before it became the symbol of a program stalling on your PC, the hourglass spent centuries as the representation of mortality and an emblem of the sciences. Much more than a symbol, of course, it also kept track of time in the pre-Swatch Era. See Time symbolism, Hourglass symbolism. In addition to time-related themes, the hourglass is synonymous with cycles and balance Energy passes between the two sides of the hourglass just as the energies of our world are contained by the atmosphere and crust. All of the natural processes and cycles occur there (not including what happens in space, of course), which gives us a greater sense of relation with our environment. This also forces us to realize our roles in the natural cycles happening around us. Hourglass symbolism

Contemporary Time Management

Time management is a meta-activity (working with meta-model) with the goal to maximize the overall benefit of a set of other activities within the boundary condition of a limited amount of time, as time itself cannot be managed because it is fixed.  Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency or productivity. It is a juggling act of various demands of study, social life, employment, family, and personal interests and commitments with the finiteness of time.  Time management tools: The Biointernet Mirror (Mirror of Joy)BLAGA SystemThe Biointernet MaskFiles with Functions (For example: Beauty Bio Net Exhibition – 3DHM Dynamic Vision Board Mental Model by Lena Rhomberg and Adam Pierce) Time travel is the traveling between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space Lunar calendar and Moon’s phases

Lunar calendar and Moon’s phases Lunar calendar, any dating system based on a year consisting of synodic months A lunar calendar is a calendar based upon the monthly cycles of the Moon’s phases (synodic months), in contrast to solar calendars, whose annual cycles are based only directly upon the solar year.  The Sumerians were probably the first to develop a calendar based entirely on the recurrence of lunar phases. Each Sumero-Babylonian month began on the first day of visibility of the new Moon. The most commonly used calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is a solar calendar system that originally evolved out of a lunar calendar system.  Chinese calendar, a lunisolar calendar, is formed on the movement of the moon. It defines Chinese 24 solar terms, traditional holidays and helps to choose a lucky day before important activities such as marriage proposal, wedding, praying for pregnancy, traveling. Hourglass Collection, Collection catalog: Collection catalog 300-399Collection catalog 200-299Collection catalog 100-199Collection catalog 1-99Collection catalog, The List

MHC – My Hourglass Collection

MHC Virtual Museum – virtual museum about Time, Space and Magic MHC Virtual Museum – the Biointernet Hub on The Network MHC Virtual Museum based on My Hourglass Collection MHC Virtual Museum: “I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”  ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights Hourglass CollectionExhibitionsArt ObjectsArt GlassMHC Magic TicketArt LightExperiments with TimeMagic JewelryMHC Time Souvenirst Download Museum Tickets on GDVPLANET Hourglass Collection Hourglasses by number from My Hourglass Collection See also: https://time.is/ Symbolism, Hourglass and Death on St Thomas’ Church, Hourglass – symbol of Death, Hourglass and Skeleton, “Hourglass and Cards” Exhibition, Father and Mother of Time, Hub, The Hourglass, Hourglass History, Hourglass symbolism, Hourglass Body, Hourglass Tattoo, Symbols Read the full article

[thenatureofnarrative]

Best Films of 2019

The basis of my annual list is simple, these are the films that were, for me, mesmerizing and memorable. These were the cinematic experiences that either provoked a depth of emotion and/or provided a whole lot to talk about. These are the films that I could not forget and I cannot wait to see again. After you read this year’s list, you can also find last year’s list here, and if you’d like to see me chat about my favourite films, and other great films from the year, you can watch this video.

1. Little Women

Greta Gerwig deserves the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for her masterclass adaptation of Little Women which is, in my opinion, the best film of 2019. I was honestly whisked away by the magical-kinetic energy of this film and the March family, and I was deeply moved by the vocational struggles of young artists, Jo and Amy, finding their way in the world. As a father of two daughters, this film moved me and connected with me on a deep emotional level, and this is largely due to the storyteller’s skills. Ultimately, however, the reason Greta Gerwig’s adaptation works so well is because of her creative restructuring of the story, which allows us to consider our perspective of the past, and its impact upon our present. In addition to this, the performances across the board are perfect, with Florence Pugh being the real standout. There is just so much to love and admire about this most recent adaptation of Little Women, the best film of the year. DVD release TBD.

2. Ad Astra

James Gray is one of our greatest living filmmakers, and yet is easily one of our least recognized. In the last twenty five years he has written and directed seven incredible films, and Ad Astra (to the stars) is no exception. While his last film (The Lost City of Z) remains his greatest achievement, Ad Astra is his most theological or spiritual, as he exams the depth of the human soul by going to the furthest reaches of our solar system. Brad Pitt’s performance is, of course, the greatest reason for this story’s success, with his eyes and quiet reflections almost never leaving the screen. Ad Astra is a space odyssey like no other, while it pays homage to the great cinematic space stories of the past, it sets itself apart with its heavenly language and original imagery. Ultimately, it matters not how far we might travel or how advanced our species might become, the depravity and desires of our soul will never leave us and will always remain at the center of our road. It’s a shame cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, has only been nominated for an Oscar once. He deserves it for this work, and so do the sound designers, music composers, and of course, James Gray himself. On DVD - iTunes.

3. A Hidden Life

“Better to suffer injustice than to cause it.” The boundaries of this statement is put to the test in Terrence Malick’s most recent masterpiece, A Hidden Life, based on a true story. When nation and neighbour rise for a single cause or conflict, one’s true allegiance will be put to the test. In the face of such pressures, only those who pursue true peace, far from the spotlight, will know the cost that must be paid. A Hidden Life is a stunning and stirring work of cinematic perfection that requires patience and the attention of our souls. This is a film that I could not shake, and is quite simply, the most important film of the year. On iTunes March 3.

4. I Lost My Body

I love a surprise, and I was surprised by this magically macabre and meaningful film. I know a lot of people don’t often give “grown-up-animation” a chance so let me put it this way - - not only is I Lost My Body the most beautiful animation I’ve seen this year, it’s one of the best films of the year - - this is a story that has the mystery of Memento and the romance of a Terrence Malick film. And yet, it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, unless you’ve seen the story of a severed hand journey through Paris in order to reconcile it’s memories with the broken heart and spirit of it’s owner?  I Lost My Body is a truly stunning achievement. It swept me away and moved me deeply, and you should check it out. On Netflix.

5. The Irishman

The Irishman (I Heard You Paint Houses) might just be Martin Scorsese’s greatest achievement. A Scorsese crime-story is never about the crime, it’s about the criminal’s soul, and in the case of The Irishman, this time round, there is a little more age and wisdom included in this masterful-motif. At the end of three and half hours, I was somber and sobered. I felt as though I had just attended a very heavy funeral, and I just wanted to sit a little longer and feel the weight of my own mortality. It is a shame Robert DeNiro wasn’t nominated for an Oscar this year because this really is the greatest performance of his career. On Netflix.

6. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

“Let us have the courage to look beyond the stories we’re born into.” Place. Home. Belonging. Acceptance. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about all these things and so much more, but it was because the film explored these themes with such stunning beauty and unexpected whimsy that I could not escape its trance. TLBMISF is a remarkable first-feature by newcomer Joe Talbot. Following the story of best friends, Jimmie and Montgomery, TLBMISF is a sort of urban odyssey (in the first act Jimmie is compared to “Dorothy” from the Wizard of Oz) as it explores its themes through the tensions of gentrification and generational ties. I never knew where the story was headed next, but I couldn’t look away. The cinematography, the music and the performances are all perfect. I adore this film. On DVD.

7. Marriage Story

Marriage Story provides us with some of the greatest performances and most meaningful dialogue of the year. Only writer/director Noah Baumbach can make you laugh, cringe and cry within a matter of minutes, and it seems like with Marriage Story he’s exercising his greatest gifts to provide us with the perfect balance and portion of all three. Love is pain and heartbreak can be hilarious, and all of it is captured beautifully in this devastatingly authentic story about the best and worst moments of a relationship, and what we can learn from it, or maybe not at all. On Netflix.

8. Doctor Sleep

In the last five years writer/director Mike Flanagan has become my favourite new filmmaker, and with Doctor Sleep he was given the near impossible task of adapting a Stephen King novel that continued Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. Impossible, right? Well not only does Flanagan succeed, but in my opinion, he has created a film that is superior to Kubrick’s, with a visual style all it’s own. Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is a rich and rewarding horror story that takes spiritual consequences seriously, and presents it’s characters with the terrifying realities of evil, and the sacrifices required to overcome it. It’s a remarkable work, and it includes some of the best performances of the year. On DVD - iTunes.

9. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the surprise experience of surrealism I didn’t know we needed. Not unlike last year’s documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, this film bears witness to the fact that it is possible to live a life of love, but this time round it’s an encounter wholly set apart. While Fred Rogers remains its inspiration, Tom Hanks’ remarkable portrayal is not at the center of the story, which is a bold and daring choice, but one that is executed with incredible care and confidence from director, Marielle Heller, who truly deserves an Oscar for this. As others have said, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is not a traditional biopic, instead the film presents itself as an episode of Mr. Roger’s television show for grown ups, and who knew that that’s what many of us were in need of right now. On iTunes - On DVD February 18.

10. Wild Rose

Wild Rose is a deeply moving and beautiful story of redemption that avoids all the usual cliches and instead tells a more grounded, realistic tale about true sacrifice and pursuing one’s dreams. The writing is superb here, and Jessie Buckley’s performance is stunning as a troubled and selfish young mother from Glasgow, Scotland who has a gift and passion for country music. That last line should give you a good indication that this heart-warming story may feel familiar but is stunningly distinct, which makes for a much more rewarding experience. On DVD - Amazon Prime

    Honourable Mentions (alphabetically):

Brittany Runs a Marathon: This isn’t an inspirational film about lifestyle changes, this is a long and patient, and at times painful, examination of what true transformation looks like. It’s also very funny. On Amazon Prime.

Captain Marvel: My favourite Marvel movie to date, with a unique visual style and shockingly powerful themes. Ben Mendelsohn is also the ultimate character-actor and he is unforgettable here. On DVD.

The Farewell: Awkwafina’s performance is award-worthy in this heart-breaking family reunion. Every character here is either withholding emotion or feeling out of place, and yet they are bound together, they are family. On DVD - iTunes.

Frozen II: From the endless pursuit of maturity and wisdom in the face of life’s uncertainty, to the most incredible message about truth and reconciliation, Frozen 2 is a spectacular and shockingly poignant film. On DVD February 25.

The Lighthouse: The descent into madness has never been so entertaining, funny and beautiful. These are two of our greatest living actors and one of our best new young directors at work. On DVD - iTunes.

Long Shot: Rogen/Goldberg have established a comedic genre all their own, a distinct blend of vulgar-raunchy humour and tender-nuanced relational moments. This is one of their best. On DVD - iTunes - Amazon Prime.

Midsommar: Tragic. Captivating. Horrifying. Compelling. Disturbing. Ari Aster has a gift for spellbinding dread, and with only his second feature, he has established himself as a master of tone. On DVD - iTunes - Amazon Prime.

Parasite: A powerful and entertaining dark-comedy or satire, with a twist. This isn’t Bong Joon Ho’s greatest film (that would be Snowpiercer), but it is an important and historic one. On DVD - iTunes.

The Public: Emilio Estevez paints with broad strokes here, but they’re strokes that are filled with life, and a cast that brings great humanity (Alec Baldwin and Jeffery Wright are particular stand outs). On DVD - iTunes - Netflix.

Us: This is the most calculated and unpredictable thriller of the year. Not unlike the greatest parables, this is a film that demands repeated viewing. On top of that, Lupita Nyong’o’s two performances are Oscar-worthy. On DVD - iTunes.

[tipsycad147]

PRETTY POWERFUL SPACES - FENG SHUI MAGIC BASICS

The spaces in my home are regularly changing. It is an invitation to align myself with the energy and rhythm of my life. It is a time for reflecting on the changing light and the energetic pulse of this moment, this here and now. Altering the decor of my home is a meditation on the as-is-ness of my life, AND a quite a bit of magic. This is one of the ways I work to make my dream life come true.

RECOGNISE THE NEGATIVE

It is so easy to be someplace other than here. We have easy access to a myriad of alternative realities. Television, billboards, Facebook... we are flooded with the images of other ways of being. The mind can’t help but naturally compare. Seeing someone wealthier, happier, healthier will automatically trigger this response. These ugly narratives replay throughout our minds, creating deep neurological trenches, easily triggered. This is a fact. This is not going away. So, don’t try to ignore it. On the contrary, only by recognising the negative narrative can we begin to interrupt and counterbalance.

MAKE YOUR OWN POSITIVE MESSAGES

Feng Shui is just one of the ways that I proactively fight back. This is how I make my own message to my heart and mind. In Feng Shui they refer to the placement of significant objects as “cures,” like medicine. They temper the negative energy and boost positive vibes. We are not just consumers, absorbing the messages presented by the media around us. We are also producers of messages. If you are awake (you know what I mean), you can craft powerful stories for your own soul. The practice of Feng Shui has helped me connect with my soul’s purpose and clarify what I want to do with this one wild and precious life. I have discovered that my home decor can have a positive impact on the quality of my life, and can support the manifestation of my dreams.

HOW TO MAKE PRETTY POWERFUL SPACES:

Since my version of Feng Shui is a bit loose, and a bit witchy, I like to call this the art of making “Pretty Powerful Spaces.” The goal is to transform myself through positive visual messages that remind my soul of its trajectory and true calling.

1. CLEAR THE SPACE If you can, remove all the furniture and decor from the space. Clean it. Man, I love this process.  It is therapeutic. This is the time when my subconscious takes the reigns. As my body becomes immersed in the cleaning, my mind is composting all those ideas I have about dreams and soul’s purpose. If you wanna get jiggy with it, you can also do some bell ringing, incense burning, broom sweeping, clapping… any one of those good ol’ energy clearing rituals. The big idea is that you are creating a blank slate, on which you are going to place objects that speak to you. Clutter and dirt will slow down the flow of energy and will ultimately muddle the message you want to communicate to yourself.

2. GET OUT THE BAGUA The Bagua is the “map” or “compass” used in Feng Shui (there are a couple variations, but I use the one on the right). It’s a 3x3 grid that you lay over the floorplan of your home. Each quadrant focuses on a different type of energy and a different aspect of your life. For example, when I line up the entry sectors with the front of my house, my front door enters the “Career/Life Journey” quadrant.

3. SET INTENTION Before placing anything in the space, it is imperative to reflect on what you really want. What I love about Feng Shui is that it provides a structure. I use the Bagua, or “Compass” to organise my goal-setting and get real specific about my intentions. Before I move or arrange anything, I write out my hopes and dreams for each area of my life. For example, when thinking about “Marriage and Relationships” I reflect on what kind of marriage I want? Which relationships do I want to nourish? Do I feel connected and loved? Careful what you wish for. Take time to define the life you want to make. Craft a message to your soul and the Universe.

4. LET ENERGY FLOW Invite energy to move through your space. My kitchen nook is on the southwest corner of my house, in the relationship quadrant, associated with Earth. I begin by honouring the energy of the southwest, and place plants that will be nourished by the heat of the sun. I use ceramic pots to enhance the positive qualities of the Earth element. Thus, consider the energy of the quadrant and nourish it. For example, don’t put a water fountain in the fire quadrant - water douses flame.

5. PLACE MEANINGFUL OBJECTS Now it’s time to pull out those intentions and put things that support your dreams in the appropriate quadrant. In the kitchen nook, I put a framed image of a couple flirting in the stacks of a library. As the wife of a librarian, this speaks to me, encouraging me/us to take advantage of the small moments hidden in the chaos of our lives, to flirt, touch, kiss, be romantic... I also added a glass vase given to me by my husband on our anniversary. These objects tell stories to my heart, reinforcing my values and priorities. Reminding me to stay true to the path I am making. 6. LET THE MAGIC HAPPEN Now relax into your home. Enjoy the clean and uncluttered space. Allow the positive messages you have created for your soul wash over you, day after day. When I see the vase in my kitchen, I am reminded to invest in my relationship. When I see my Mindful Homemaking business cards in the “Career/Life Journey” quadrant, I am encouraged to keep writing. Let the magic happen slowly and with awareness.  Notice when dreams come true. Change things up with the seasons of your life. Know that you are creating your own reality.

IN A NUTSHELL

Recognise your self-loathing created by that nasty comparative brain.

Craft a vision of your dream life.

Clean your house (physically and spiritually).

Use the Feng Shui Bagua to get real specific about what you want from life.

Consciously place objects in your house that align with the energy of each quadrant.

Lovingly add meaningful objects that will act as visual cues, reminding you of your specific goals.

Enjoy the magic.

https://magicalhomemaking.com/blog/2017/9/6/pretty-powerful-spaces-feng-shui-magic-basics

[cstesttaken]

Cool It: You Don’t Have to Be on Every Social Media App

Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.14.17

11:30 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Do I have to try every social media app?

You’ve Got Mail starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was an awful movie. I watched it in a hotel room recently and found myself thinking about you—thinking about all of us, really. To summarize: It is 1998. Hanks is the cocky, hard-charging scion of a massive Barnes & Noble-ish bookstore chain, about to open a new location on the Upper West Side. Ryan, meanwhile—vulnerable, sappy, like a human kitten—owns a tiny children’s bookstore nearby called the Shop Around the Corner. Ryan’s shop is everything that Hanks’ is not: quaint, neighborly, beloved. And, of course, it stands to be crushed by this encroaching tentacle of Hanks’ Machiavellian empire.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the air. Thematically, the film is concerned with what modernity (symbolized by Hanks and maybe also his high-octane girlfriend, who literally shouts, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” at her espresso machine) might be doing to our souls (symbolized by Ryan and her boyfriend, who is referred to at a party as the “greatest living expert on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg”). This anxiety is everywhere. It’s a shame kids don’t know what handkerchiefs are, someone says. When office workers play solitaire on their computers, it’s lamented as “the end of Western civilization.”

It’s all so heavy-handed. But here’s the thing: As the bitter Hanks-Ryan bookstore rivalry escalates on the street, Hanks and Ryan are falling in love with each other via email, anonymously. They meet in some kind of chat room and begin emailing each other relentlessly, pouring out their feelings and the poignant whispers of their simpleton hearts. It’s dramatic irony, you see—they love each other in cyberspace, hate each other in meatspace—and the filmmakers milk it for all it’s worth. Scene after scene cuts back and forth between Hanks and Ryan, reading emails on their laughably briefcaselike laptops. Every time that cheery voice tells them “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” it’s a Pavlovian cue that flutters their stomachs and tingles their privates. It’s hard to think of two happier people in the history of film.

But you know what? Joke’s on them. Because what Hanks and Ryan do not know, and can’t possibly predict, is that the same series of tubes that’s serving as a conduit for their love will soon obliterate both their businesses! Soon they’ll both be irrelevant! They’re just too blissed out by each other’s electronic mail messages to recognize that this thing in front of them—this Internet—is also a merciless destroyer of worlds.

Reader, they are us; we are them. We’re blind to the transience of so many things we feel attached to, or else we are so attuned to their transience that we don’t allow ourselves to get attached. The truth is, even as I type this, laughing and smirking at You’ve Got Mail, I understand that someone in the near future will be similarly laughing and smirking at me. (“Typing?!” they’ll say.)

Are you obligated to try new social media apps? Not at all. Use what you enjoy. Try what you think you’d enjoy. Or don’t. You alone get to map out the borders of your online life. But you are, I think, obligated to stay open to exploring new social media apps—to keep yourself from becoming too jaded, too dismissive—and to always entertain the possibility that one of them might become meaningful and useful to you. I mean, I sunk a lot of time into Friendster back in the day, and I don’t regret it. I recognize that, like Hanks and Ryan, I was merely living contentedly in the present, without knowing that the magic of that moment would inevitably crumble—or even worrying about whether it might.

“Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life … And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave?” Ryan typed that, sent it to Hanks. Now I’m putting the question to you.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.10.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m horrible at emoji—it’s like a foreign language for me. I always get “???” replies from friends. What should I do?

In 1918, a moderately but fleetingly famous Belgian man named Jean Pierre Pierard published an intriguing column in an American newspaper. Pierard was an actor, sometimes billed as “Le Colosse,” since he happened to weigh 342 pounds. (He was just a tremendous, tremendous fellow.) He was also the “Most Married Man in the World,” and this was the particular expertise with which he was writing. What does it mean to be the Most Married Man in the World? Well, at the time, Pierard was on his 23rd wife. Since 1886 he’d averaged one marriage every 1.4 years. But still, he felt strongly that “it is not good for man to be alone.”

This is the most important thing for you to know about Pierard—and I mean you specifically, my weird emoji-aphasic friend: Jean Pierre Pierard loved being married. He loved the institution of marriage—held it in the highest esteem—and felt a strong obligation to defend and venerate it against anyone who was starting to view it with the least bit of cynicism. “I believe in marriage,” he wrote. Deep down in the hallows of his giant being, the man was a romantic. And an optimist. And nothing about the clumsiness with which his optimism or romanticism kept colliding with reality was going to drain those feelings out of him. “It may surprise you to hear it,” Pierard wrote, “but it’s the truth, that every one of these 23 times I’ve taken out a marriage license I’ve done so with the same glow of hope and faith that I had the first time.” Being married brought him joy, so he kept getting married, even if he was lousy at it. Then he kept getting married some more.

I assume that you see where I’m going. It should be obvious, especially since I’ve written it all in not-fun alphabet letters. You’re correct that emoji are essentially a foreign language. So the only way to increase your fluency in them is with real-world practice—which is to say, by failing a lot, but paying enough attention to your failures to learn from them, and by asking more skillful speakers, people you feel totally supported and unjudged by, for help and safe opportunities to practice. But most important, don’t let anyone, with their snide ???s, spoil the pleasure those emoji bring to you. Don’t be ashamed!

OK? Just one more thing about Pierard: For a time, he attempted a career as a professional wrestler. It seems like the ideal job for Le Colosse—he could just fall on people and flatten them—and yet he was terrible at this too, maybe even more terrible than he was at marriage. Because he was ticklish—tremendously ticklish. He simply could not “permit of any contact with his ribs while wrestling,” The New York Times wrote, without being debilitated by his own giggling. All that his opponents had to do, no matter how small they were, was flutter their fingers around Le Colosse’s colossal midsection, topple him, and hold him down for the count. It was basically over before it began.

And, honestly, that’s how I’d love to picture you: joyously thumb-typing your syntactically jumbled, incomprehensible kissy faces, fires, whales, and eggplants without a care in the world, pinned on the mat but laughing and laughing and laughing. Do that and you’re .

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.09.17

11:00 am

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

My girlfriend got me a Fitbit, but the data makes me feel lazy and ashamed. Do I have to keep using it?

I was in my kitchen the other night, slow dancing with my toddler before bedtime, when the Coldplay song “Fix You” came on—a song, I remembered reading, that Chris Martin wrote for then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow after her father died—and I found myself feeling genuinely bummed, all over again, that Chris and Gwyneth had split up. I wondered what had torn them apart or whether—as these things often go—they hadn’t been torn apart but slowly undone by some dark, unspoken dissatisfaction or resentment that gradually multiplied until there was so much cumulative darkness between them that it blotted out whatever had been luminescent about their love. And that’s when I thought about you and your girlfriend and your Fitbit.

I also thought about Steve Etkin. Etkin is an engineer by training and by temperament who enjoys walking. And so a year ago, his daughter, Jordan, bought him a Fitbit. It seemed like the perfect gift. “I started receiving daily updates,” she told me, “about the number of steps he walked, the stairs he climbed. After a few weeks, I was like, ‘Hey, Dad, you’re really treating this like a job.’ ” (She was also like, hey, Dad, I don’t need all these updates.)

Anyway, it got her thinking. And, because she studies consumer behavior at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, she designed a study to test whether, as she put it to me, trackers like Fitbits have the capacity to “suck the enjoyment” out of previously pleasurable activities. Guess what. They do.

Etkin’s study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. She ran a series of six experiments. In one, for example, she gave her subjects a 16-pack of Crayolas, then made a big show of tracking how many shapes one group colored in while letting others color freely, unencumbered by quantification. She did similar experiments with walking and reading, and in every one discovered the same basic result. “Measurement led participants to color more shapes, walk more steps, and read more pages. At the same time, however, it led people to enjoy coloring, walking, and reading less.” In short, people did more but felt worse doing it. Tracking redefined fun activities as work.

One problem here is that by focusing on quantifiable outcomes, trackers can diminish intrinsic motivation, which makes people stick with activities. Therefore, “measurement may sometimes actually undermine sustainable behavior change,” Etkin writes. Those insurance companies giving Fitbits to their policyholders might be shooting themselves in the (demotivated, stationary) foot.

But you know all this. It’s precisely the cycle of incentivizing and disincentivizing, of judgment and anxiety, afflicting you: that feeling that you can never take enough steps or unlock enough REM sleep. (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed … When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep.”) And, as it afflicts you, it widens the emotional space between you and your girlfriend—it feeds a smoldering grudge, because she handcuffed you with this thing. She tried to fix you, my friend. But her fixing made you feel more broken.

So you’ve got to talk to your girlfriend and take the Fitbit off, even though Etkin’s research suggests this is the worst thing you could do. (When people start tracking then suddenly stop, the fun is still ruined, but they also lose the benefit of increased output—a double whammy of underperformance and joylessness.) But who cares? It could be the only way for you and your partner to remain consciously coupled.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.08.17

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

When my 5-year-old asks a question, is there a difference between looking it up in a book and just using my phone?

Recently, I watched David Kwong do some sleight of hand in a crowded theater lobby. Kwong is a magician who often consults on Hollywood films. (When a director needs, say, Jesse Eisenberg to learn a magic trick, they send him to Kwong.) Anyway, Kwong sauntered over to a guy with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one.

Honestly, I don’t know how to describe what happened next. For 30 minutes, Kwong made cards materialize in outrageous, stupefying ways, as though he were nonchalantly sliding them in and out of a parallel universe. Someone’s card flew out of the deck, spinning through the air. Another turned up in a guy’s back pocket—and not just in his back pocket, but buried deep, between his wallet and a bundle of crumpled receipts. Kwong asked someone to rip a card into four pieces, then hold them in his fist; when he opened his hand, the card was reassembled!

Maybe this doesn’t sound that impressive, written down. We all know card tricks are a thing. But the way Kwong kept relentlessly confronting us with the impossible—seeing this sorcery at close range—seemed to not just entertain people but to make them feel vulnerable and a little scared. People mewled and screamed, “No!” One poor man was reduced to crouching on the floor, laughing so euphorically he couldn’t catch his breath. (OK, that was me.) The guy with the ripped-up card in his fist refused to open it at first, shaking his head like a child terrified to look at his boo-boo, afraid of what he’d find. “He has total power over us,” one woman said quietly, gravely. She sounded creeped out. It was so much fun!

Now, I’m sure everyone in that crowd wondered how Kwong was doing it, but it’s a rare bird who goes home and actually labors to understand the mechanics of how such tricks are engineered. (Those rare birds become magicians—it’s how Kwong got his start.) Most of us perceive magic tricks to be unreplicable, to violate the reality we inhabit. They’re, you know, magic.

To a 5-year-old, phones are magic. The internet is magic. An older kid might be able to understand the technology and infrastructure involved, the nature of Wikipedia, and so on, but for a child so young, the answer just appears, miraculously, like a playing card yanked from a bystander’s back pocket. Leafing through a book together, by comparison, is a more collaborative, tactile, self-evident process. It’s a journey toward the answer, one that your child gets to go on.

What I’m talking about is the difference between learning and being told, between answering a specific question and getting a child excited about answering it on their own. It’s fun to amaze your 5-year-old, sure. But it’s more gratifying to set your kid up to one day amaze you.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.06.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Is flirting on LinkedIn less weird than on other social media? After all, it can vouch for you in a substantive way.

Whoa. Hang on. Let’s first poke at the premise of your question, because the implications here are huge. Notice how you casually presume your résumé offers a more substantive representation of your basic humanity than, say, all the tweets you’ve tweeted or all the digital artifacts amassed on your Facebook page. Think of the photos on Facebook alone: You in a rowboat with the gentle-looking man playing a banjo whom we understand to be your deceased (too young) father. You being silly—but not obnoxiously silly, just innocently, endearingly silly—in the Halloween aisle of a big-box store. You tagged in a photo of that kid you mentored that one summer, as he graduates from Berkeley. You climbing a goddamned mountain! Like, with pickaxes and stuff!

Do these not substantively communicate the substance of your life? Don’t they “vouch” for you to potential dates as a safe, noncreepy, sufficiently together human being, a sympathetic soul tumbling through the fundamental experience of being alive and looking for companionship? Or is that better captured with a line like this: “January 2013-November 2014, Senior Operations Associate, Mobitly Inc.”?

You seem to think it is. And I’ll admit—begrudgingly—that you may have a point. Because the lines have been blurred between our work lives and our emotional lives, our careers and our intrinsic selves. We subconsciously gauge a person’s character by their professional standing, and our experiences and attitude toward our work aren’t only sometimes relevant to our love lives. In fact, the two can feel crucially interwoven: The best startup founders are those who operate out of passion and devotion and with a kind of hyper-monogamous obsession. On the other hand, we all feel obligated to work on our relationships with the same myopic, idealistic intensity. And it can feel natural to apply the lessons we learn relating to people in one realm to our relationships in the other.

Take, for example, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO. I confess, I’m not a LinkedIn user, but I’ve been reading up on Weiner and, I have to say, he seems like a wonderful guy—a principled, thoughtful man who says very grounded, Jerry Maguire-type things like, “I’ve never been title-driven; for the most part, I’ve been purpose-driven.” He also reads books by the Dalai Lama, contemplates the difference between compassion and empathy, and practices mindfulness techniques like “being a spectator to my own thoughts,” which enhance his ability to relate to and motivate his employees. He calls his style “compassionate management.”

In an essay he wrote a few years ago, Weiner described leaving work one evening, feeling proud of the strides he’d made as a compassionate manager, only to be felled by the epiphany that he’d been very uncompassionately neglecting his wife. He was working so hard, he wrote, that at night, “when my wife would try to bring up her day, or talk about the things we need to get done, I would reflexively say something to the effect that it had been a long day, I was exhausted, and could we talk about it some other time?” In other words: “For as hard as I worked to manage compassionately at the office, I was not always actively applying the same approach with my family.” So Weiner applied the same compassionate management style to his marriage and made things right.

I worry that sounds off, like the emotionally tone-deaf insights of a stereotypical tech baron. But trust me, the way Weiner explained it, it sounded cool—real. (And know this too: Worried that I’d gush in this column about Weiner’s coolness and realness only to learn later that Weiner is actually not cool and not real and is, in truth, as imperious as Genghis Khan or a Grade A, misogynistic, steroidal jerk, I sat down and Googled “Jeff Weiner LinkedIn jerk” and was happy to find, as the first result, a post singling him out as a “counterweight” to the industry’s many other CEO-jerks. So that was reassuring—even if the post was published on LinkedIn. But even that can be interpreted as a testament to Weiner’s character, because it was Weiner, I learned, who had the vision to expand LinkedIn from a bland résumé farm into a successful publishing platform.)

I’ll go even further. I wouldn’t be surprised if a man as smart as Weiner already knows all this, knows that we live in an age where one of the prime, romantically reassuring things about another person—the thing that “vouches” for them best as a potential mate—is that they’re a trustworthy, hardworking, successful employee. And therefore, he also secretly knows that LinkedIn could be the ultimate dating site, though he wisely stops short of saying it. Instead, he just dog-whistles about that potential to attentive users and eagle-eyed investors, thus preserving the opportunity to pivot the company explicitly in that direction should the climate change and the need arise. Recently, for example, he told an interviewer, “Our core value proposition to members is to help them connect to opportunity,” and touted “the power of this as a platform to enable capital”—especially “human capital”—“to flow where it can best be leveraged.”

Isn’t he talking about dating, about setting people up? When Tevye and Golde’s daughters sang, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” weren’t they basically asking a kind of social networking platform to send their own human capital flowing toward whichever shtetl boy would give it the highest valuation and invest? Why shouldn’t you flirt on LinkedIn? Why shouldn’t love be one of the opportunities LinkedIn connects us with?

So, yes. You are right. And you’ve taught me a lot—you and Jeff Weiner both. I can see clearly now how we’ve all tied ourselves into a knot of careerism and affection and equity and sex, and maybe that’s just the way it has to be. I’m remembering now what happened when Jerry Maguire—the real Jerry Maguire—showed up in that living room, shivering, trying to win back his wife, who also happened to be his business partner at their new sports-agenting startup, how he told her, “You … you complete me.” But, more important, there was the line he slipped her right before that famous line. Suddenly, in the middle of his monologue, he was compelled to say, like a man giving a keynote at a conference, “We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.”

Why? Why include that? What could Jerry Maguire possibly have meant? I think he meant: The internet is full of sinister strangers. It’s a hostile place in which to offer up your soul. But here I am. Look at me. View my profile. I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.03.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I work in a casual tech setting and I’m shocked by how much everyone swears. Should I say something?

Imagine what it was like to be a Puritan in 1642. You’ve come to America. The landscape is crude and endless; the soundtrack, all hissing insects and howling wolves. “Everything about the place seemed godforsaken,” writes the natural historian Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier. That lawless emptiness is why you’re here—it means freedom. But in all free and empty places, there’s also room for wickedness to grow. Everybody in your little settlement is aware of this, which is why they panic when, one day, someone happens upon a young man named Thomas Granger having sex with a horse.

It’s worse than you thought: When confronted, Granger rapidly admits he’s also had intercourse with three cows, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. This behavior is so savage—and feels like such a threat to the ethical society you’re laboring to build there in the wild—that you respond with a campaign of ruthless cleansing. You round up each animal Granger has had sex with and force the young man to watch while you slaughter it. (Not the turkey, though; for some reason, Flannery notes, no one bothers with the turkey.) And since you can’t tell which of the village’s sheep were the particular sheep Granger penetrated—his descrip­tions are imprecise—you herd every sheep in front of him, like a police lineup, and force him to ID the five in question. Then you kill those five sheep too. Then you kill Granger. Then you throw all their bodies together in one big pit.

Now, fast-forward 373 years. Let’s talk about you.

It’s easy to imagine you, hunched in your tech company’s open floor plan, forced to sit on an inflatable ball or perhaps issued one of those iconoclastic standing desks without a chair at all. You are a wary pilgrim on the wild, godless edge of America’s economic frontier. And, as such, you under­stand that the foul language your colleagues are using isn’t just unpleasant but morally precarious; if it continues unchecked, it could lead you all—your entire industry, really—to much darker places. You know, just as the Puritans did, that this kind of impropriety needs to be nipped in the bud.

That’s how you feel, right? Well, you’re wrong.

You’re not the Puritans. You’re the kid shtupping the cows. Because the lesson of the Granger story—as I read it—isn’t that morality always wins. It’s that the mob always wins. The majority’s norms always beat back and outlast the minority’s. And the mob can be cruel: They’ll kill the thing you love right in front of you, then dump you in the ground.

I think you need to go along with the mob.

Does it matter if my kid’s handwriting is terrible?

Well, I happen to love handwriting. I think it’s curiously fun to look at and a considerable, if mostly esoteric, value-add to the written language—even in an era of tablets and smartwatches and speech-recognition software. But does it matter if your child writes illegibly? My answer is no, probably not. Handwriting is an old technology—about 5,000 years old. And as with newer old technologies (muskets or floppy disks or cars with human beings driving them), some people may inevitably feel a tinge of melancholy watching it sputter into oblivion. And yet the truth is that humanity has always replaced old tools with new ones, and often, once we’ve pushed through the emotionally charged transitional phase and come out the other end, everything feels fine again.

Take, for example, a woman named Kristin Gulick in Bend, Oregon, who often has trouble reading messages scribbled by her chronically illegible office receptionist. “Yesterday I tried to dial a number that she’d written down, and I couldn’t read it,” Gulick told me recently. “I had to go back out and ask, ‘What does this say?’” And the receptionist was just like, ha ha ha, I know my handwriting’s terrible—you know, giggling the annoyance away. Was Gulick peeved? Yes. But was this a fireable offense or some irrevocable inconvenience? Not even close. In fact, Gulick really had no choice but to laugh the whole thing off too. “Thank God she’s good at other things!” she said, and life went on.

So there’s your answer. But who is Kristin Gulick, anyway? So glad you asked!

Handwriting may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us to our own identities.

Gulick has been an occupational therapist for 28 years, specializ­ing in arms and hands. She’s in private practice now, but shortly after 9/11 she found herself working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. A recent government report disclosed that more than 1,000 of the 50,000 soldiers who’ve been wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan—2.6 percent—have come back missing limbs, and Gulick was there to greet some of the first ones, helping them work around their loss and rejoin their life. Part of this work involved “transferring dominance” from one hand to the other; if a righty lost their right arm, say, they needed to learn to be a lefty now. And part of that was relearning handwriting—even just enough to fill out the deluge of hospital forms and sign their name.

Gulick found a total dearth of tools and curricula. Really, there was nothing. While she encouraged people to use first-grade handwriting primers early in her career, they were full of infantilizing penmanship exercises involving anthro­pomorphic animals. These books were not only unhelpful but degrading: Having lost a limb, many of these people were already feeling vulnerable and diminished. Now they were being treated—literally—like children. Gulick and an officer in the Army Medical Specialist Corps, Katie Yancosek, decided they could do better. “We’d give them exercises about balancing their checkbook and not about a little bunny or whatever,” Gulick said. The result was a six-week program, laid out in a workbook called Handwriting for Heroes. (The third edition was published this year.)

Look, I don’t mean to play some righteous, wounded-veteran card and make anyone feel bad. But I think we all see where this is going: It’s easy to write off handwriting only because most of us take it for granted. But I listened to Gulick talk about handwriting for a while, about what the ability to jot off a simple grocery list or be-right-back note for your spouse—functional but maybe also aesthetically pleasing or expressive, something you have created—does for a person’s sense of self-sufficiency and pride after working hard to regain that skill. How handwriting, really, may be one of those fundamentally human abilities—one that binds us, in a tiny way, to each other and to our own identities.

Your child won’t feel anything remotely like that sense of loss if they let their handwriting go to seed. Their lives will move forward in standardized fonts. If they absolutely have to write anything by hand, it may be disordered and illegible, but they can just laugh it off and explain (or text) what they meant. And that’s why I’ll stick with my first answer: It probably doesn’t matter. But I also think that, if we’re prepared to let handwriting go—to not care how ugly it gets—we should, at least, take a second to think about how beautiful it can be.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

03.01.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

The same person keeps accidentally pocket-dialing me. Should I confront him?

Let's zoom out for a second: For more than 40 years, scientists have been debating whether we should be actively sending messages into outer space or just using projects like SETI to listen for messages sent to us—and not just whether we should broadcast anything, but what and how. Do we shoot out a bunch of math, to show aliens we understand math? Do we send pictures? Music? And if so, what math? What pictures? What music? There have been scientific workshops to hash this out in Toulouse, Paris, Zagreb, Houston, and Mountain View. There have been peer-reviewed journal articles with titles like “The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.” It's a big, messy, excruciatingly meticulous back-and-forth.

And yet—all this time, while all those eggheads have been arguing—gobs and gobs of our satellite transmissions, television broadcasts, radio shows, and cell phone conversations have been quietly, sloppily spilling into outer space. It's all just oozing off our planet and into the cosmos like so much electromagnetic sewage—a phenomenon scientists call leakage. In other words, we're already beaming messages into the void—weak signals, but millions of them every day, without even realizing it or being careful about what we say. We are butt-dialing the universe!

Now say someone out there actually picks up that call. Wouldn't you like to know? Yes, it's embarrassing to realize we've made that sort of clumsy connection. But isn't it always just a little bit nice to know we've made a connection at all? So my advice is: Tell this person. Tell him he reached you. Tell him you were there.

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Is it unethical to crowdfund a project I don't totally believe in?

A month after the Boston Tea Party, in January 1774—with the idea of rebellion gaining momentum in Boston and patriots feeling more powerful than the remaining loyalists in town—a strange character who called himself Joyce Junior started stoking that new sense of boldness on the streets. Junior walked around elaborately costumed, like some anarchist harlequin, and posted flyers threatening any “vile ingrates” who were still loyal to the crown. Loyalists should be punished, he wrote. And he slyly suggested precisely how, signing his treatises: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”

Ten days later, a low-level British government customs official, John Malcom, got into an argument with a well-known patriot shoemaker on the street.

One thing led to another, and soon an angry mob had “swarmed around [Malcom's] house,” wrote Nathaniel Philbrick in his book Bunker Hill. Very quickly, all of Boston's frustration and resentment with England began to come down on this one middling bureaucrat. The rioters bum-rushed Malcom's home with ladders and axes. Once inside, they lashed him with sticks, then pushed him on a sled for hours through the snowy, unlit streets and bitter cold, collecting more irate Bostonians as they went. The mob mocked him. They threatened to cut off his ears. They beat him and beat him. Soon more than a thousand people had joined in. They ripped off Malcom's clothes. They coated his skin with steaming tar. They covered him with feathers.

The abuse went on for hours. When they finally dumped Malcom in front of his house, Philbrick wrote: “his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in ‘steaks.’”

It was awful—all of it. And apparently, it was particularly distressing to Joyce Junior, the Wavy Gravy-esque performance artist who'd threatened British loyalists with tarring and feathering in the first place—the man who'd hammered that idea into the public consciousness, inspiring all that brutality. We know Junior felt culpable, because he immediately started doing damage control, scrambling to disown his idea. Junior issued another statement. It began: “This is to certify that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order.”

Now, I don't think this project you want to crowdfund is likely to inadvertently encourage an angry mob to parboil an innocent man in his own flesh, then blanket him with feathers. But it's important to remember that ideas are volatile, powerful things. And so are crowds. They have a way of infecting each other and taking on a life of their own. So all I'm saying is, be honest—be real. If you only kind of think it's a good idea, it's OK to say so. The crowd will decide for itself if you're right. And it may surprise you.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.28.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My dad leaves incredibly embarrassing comments under every photo I post to Facebook and Instagram. What should I do?

Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a couple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beckham.

See, dad-­barrassment is universal—a condition of existence, like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us.

Consider another famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first presidential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In October 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.

I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast , which she cohosts with former Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was bound up in his dad. During the Civil War, Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place. For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great source of shame. His celebration of masculinity and war, his romanticization of war as an experience to all men, is a reaction to his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt compelled to speechify for over an hour while his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his decision. But it also affected his own parenting.

Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted his boys to be the valorous warriors his own father hadn’t been. When World War I broke out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crestfallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He died himself six months later.

But the misery he wrought continued. One son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in France, then died of a heart attack while serving in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, served in both wars, then ultimately shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.

You wrote because you didn’t like some comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m talking about shame and war and death. It’s hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this story shows, I think, that dad-­barrassment is a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The perpetrators are, inevitably, also victims.

By all means, ask your father—gently—if he wouldn’t mind toning down the comments. Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your father to stop embarrassing you, but on you to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I worry you’ve started seeing your father primarily as an engine of embarrassment, not as a complex human being entitled to express his wit, his playfulness, his love.

So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.27.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?

During high school, I went to visit a friend in Louisiana. Because I was a Northerner who’d never been to the South, I was given a lot of exotically Southern stuff to eat, like alligator and rattlesnake. Then came the big Louisianan feast: heaps of spicy crayfish, which we savagely twisted the heads off of then washed down with gallons and gallons of Dr Pepper.

When I got up to go pee, one of the men at the table told me to be sure to wash my hands first. He said it with a tinge of darkness, a whiff of trauma. He explained that it was unwise for a man to go from handling spicy crayfish to handling his penis. He’d been careless once and paid the price. So I washed my hands. But I still remember how worried I was, unzipping, and how hesitantly I moved my hand down, like a kid playing Operation, dreading that horrible bzzz. I’d absorbed the trauma vicariously, but my anxiety was real.

I thought of this when I read that researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France detected a similar kind of intelligently learned anxiety in crayfish. (After suffering a trauma, the crayfish were reluctant to venture into brightly lit, risky areas.) The scientists also found they could alleviate that anxiety by giving the crayfish a Valium-style drug. And while the scientists were careful not to embellish these findings with any anthropomorphic presumptions, I think we all sense the underlying epiphany here: Crayfish are a little more like us than we expected.

These days, it seems, everybody wants to know how smart their meat is. There are all kinds of startling farm-­animal-cognition studies. We know that cows enjoy solving problems and have been known to jump into the air excitedly when they finally crack a tough one. Chickens are exceptionally good at delaying gratification, understand small numbers and basic physics, and can adroitly manage the thermostat of their coop. Sheep can remember and recognize as many as 50 human faces without making a mistake. Pigs excel at videogames played with special pig joysticks. And even opossums—yes, some people eat them—turn out to be excellent maze runners. One study ranked opossums’ “probability learning” skills second only to humans’ and higher than dogs’. Opossums! Those things that do very little and look dead most of the time!

The upshot, I’d argue, is that all animals are likely too intelligent to eat. Whether you go on eating them, with that knowledge, is up to you. You probably will. I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.

Should I worry that my kid can’t spell? Does spelling matter anymore?

Did you hear about Thomas Hurley III? He was on Jeopardy! last year as an eighth grader—a likable kid from Connecticut with Peter Brady bangs and a blue dress shirt buttoned up to the jugular. He lost. And he lost, in part, because in Final Jeopardy, he wrote “Emanciptation Proclamation” instead of “Emancipation Proclamation.”

Does spelling matter anymore? Honestly, I don’t think so. I mean, initially, even schoolmarmy Alex Trebek read right over Hurley’s mistake. As a defiant Hurley told his local newspaper, “It was just a spelling error.”

Then again, spelling isn’t just about communicating. The culture still views it as a sign of intelligence, diligence, and sophistication. Bad, lackadaisical spellers are not looked at kindly. And neither was Hurley’s contention that he’d been “cheated.” (“Learn how to accept defeat, kid, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life,” one Facebook comment read.) Clearly, autocorrect and other technologies have started a slow sea change, and maybe one day the persnickety spelling police among us will all have died out and we’ll be free to spel thingz howeEVA weeeeeeeeeee wonte. But, until that day, allowing your kids to blow off spelling may empower them to go against a societal norm without considering the day-to-day discomfort and judgment it could bring: the consequences for them but also for you, their parent.

“He was a little stunned by it,” Hurley’s mom said after the defeat. “He felt embarrassed. It was hard to watch.”

Should I give myself a weekend phone time-out? What if I miss important work?

What kind of job do you have? What kind of boss do you have? How tolerant? How demanding? One possibility is that you’re a senior adviser to the secretary of state, and your inability to be reached during a flare-up by a North African paramilitary group—because you’re lying in a park with a kale-and-bee-pollen smoothie and that copy of The Goldfinch you’ve been meaning to get to—leads to a severe diplomatic misstep and a weeks-long umbrage carnival on Fox News that can only be quelled by the semi-ritualistic firing and public shaming of the bureaucrat responsible: i.e., you. Another is that you’re a beverage distribution middle­man, and your boss—who happens to be triple-checking stuff at the office on a Saturday night because he’s going through a divorce and doesn’t know what to do with himself—discovers a niggling glitch in your paperwork that may have sent an extra case of Fresca to Denver, but because your phone’s off he calls Greta, and after a couple minutes of digging she assures him that all the Frescas are, in fact, where they need to be.

See the difference? You’ve given me absolutely no information—just dashed off your question as quickly as possible without a second of reflection. And this suggests that you’re whizzing recklessly through life and, still accelerating, throttled by permanent urgency. You need a break. Your soul needs a break. I have no idea what the consequences might be—how could I?—but I think you should switch off that phone.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.24.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I read that mice injected with blood from younger mice improve on cognitive tests. Should I bank my blood?

So yeah, I went and read about this too. I read that for years scientists have been taking an old mouse and a young mouse, putting them next to each other, and stitching their circulatory systems together, just like jump-starting a car. Then they let the blood of one mouse circulate through the other—a process called parabiosis. And introducing the young mouse's blood—or even just introducing one particular protein found in the blood, called GDF11—to an old mouse does all sorts of wonderful stuff: It allows the old mouse to run longer on a treadmill. It changes the old mouse's brain in ways that suggests its memory has been improved. I read that it even rejuvenates a crusty old-mouse heart. Like, voilà! The heart isn't crusty anymore.

I also read that a Harvard scientist named Amy Wagers was “already working to commercialize” GDF11, which is found in human blood too. And this was the eye-opener for me: Even as scientists are always cautioning the media that it's way to soon to speculate about their studies' implications, one of these scientists—the one named Wagers, aptly—was already placing her bet.

Good for her, I say. I'm all for capitalism! But I'm also all for hematological self-determination. (Or, say, blood freedom.) I'd hate, one day, to have to pay some multinational corporation for a synthetic knockoff of my own younger self's blood—the very stuff that was pumping through my body for decades without costing me a damn cent. What a dystopia that would be! There'd be kids on the corner with clipboards, asking for donations so Americans for Hematological Self-Determination could sue these corporations. There'd be Blood Freedom teach-ins and Blood Freedom protest songs—which would be hard because “Blood Freedom” really doesn't rhyme with much.

So my answer is yes, absolutely. Stockpile your blood now, as much as can be squirreled away at the proper temperature. Just in case. Think of it as a tiny hedge against the Wagers of the future.

I get a lot of swag from startups—messenger bags, fleeces, hats, T-shirts—and my girlfriend makes fun of me for wearing it. Which is the douchiest to wear? Like, is a fleece cooler than a hat?

Look, I don't care what you wear, but I do think that a startup fleece is definitely not cooler than a startup hat, because a startup fleece puts the name and logo of the startup in closer proximity to your heart than a startup hat would. My instinct is, keep this stuff away from your heart. Far away. The closer to your heart, the douchier.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.23.17

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

My best friend dropped our Snapchat streak, and I’m hurt. What should I do?

Oof. I know how it feels. Streaks are magic; streaks are wild. There you are, you and your bestie, slinging those pictures and videos back and forth, getting that sacred pendulum of digital adorableness and hilarity moving between you, and you start to feel momentum, don’t you? A rhythmic bond—a fellowship, a closeness—taking hold. You’re in it together! And, better still, that little flaming number keeps ticking up, higher and higher. You’re watching your progress, reciprocally micro­dosing the endorphins. Then suddenly, all that excitement stops. You send a snap, and no snap comes back. It’s a gut punch. It’s over. You’re dropped.

Like I said: Oof. I empathize. And yet I can’t claim to understand the hurt of being dropped nearly as well as Maica Folch, who has been literally dropped and literally hurt from the dropping.

Folch is an aerialist in San Francisco who spent much of her adult life working as a trapeze artist. She started when she was just a teenager. Has Folch ever been dropped? Yes. Yes, she has. And, somewhere beneath the acute pain of impact, did she also feel something akin to the abandonment and resentment you’re dealing with? No, she did not.

It’s 1987, Barcelona. Dress rehearsal, the day before a big aerial dance performance. Folch has been hoisted 80 feet off the ground in a meticulously engineered elastic harness. And yet not so meticulously, because there’s been a miscalculation with the rigging and, before Folch can comprehend what’s happening, she sees the floor racing toward her.

She is falling, most likely to her death. And it’s just like everyone says: “I saw the movie of my life,” she tells me. She hears her gasping colleagues calling out as she speeds down at them. What happens next is unexpected, and yet it happens so naturally. “I was so peaceful,” Folch says. “And I fell down like a feather.”

She hits the ground. She bounces. Bounces! Remember, she’s basically tied to an enormous rubber band, and this serene feather of a woman bounces so high that she’s able to grab a rope up there and steady herself. “If I had freaked out and come down with an intense energy,” Folch says—if she’d stiffened and steeled herself—her body would have shattered. Instead she was bruised, like a fallen apple, but “didn’t break a bone.”

And here’s the most helpful part of the story: It never occurred to Folch, after being dropped, to feel jilted or angry. “When something goes wrong,” she says, “there is no one to blame.” It’s a kind of aerialist credo, really—put loyalty and trust first. You say to each other, “I love what I do, I love doing it with you, and if I start doing it with you, it’s because I trust you,” she explains.

“We don’t live in a perfect world,” Folch says. Carabiners fail. People fail. Friends don’t always return your snap. And it’s probably not because they don’t love you but likely just because none of us, zipping around on our phones and in real life simultaneously, swinging like trapeze artists between these two platforms of frenetic distraction, can be expected to do it all perfectly or to recognize the many distant and private emotional burdens our little snaps might bear. We will let each other down. It’s just a fact. But we all deserve some slack, some good faith—especially from our best friends.

The secret to a thriving trapeze partnership, Folch says, is not necessarily forgiveness but refusing to think of the inevitable disappointments of life as requiring forgiveness in the first place. “You create unconditional relationships. There is pain. There is guilt. But you don’t disappear from the picture.”

And so my answer is: Move on. You’re fine. Learn to love more. Learn from Folch, who knew, deep down, how to handle being dropped and how to bounce back too.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

10.28.16

7:00 am

Christoph Niemann

I pictured this Nest Cam looming over you—pictured its one dark eye, unblinking—and I immediately thought of that nasty old Cyclops who terrorizes Odysseus and his men in The Odyssey. What was his name? What was the story, exactly? I figured I better reread that bit.

In a nutshell, Odysseus and his men are returning from a long, atrocious war. Landing for a stopover on the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus confesses he’s at a loss to understand this mountaintop-dwelling race of one-eyed savages: They don’t fear the gods! They have no laws! They are just too alien to be intelligible; Odysseus sees them only as “brutes,” beneath his regard. So he leads his men into a cave—the home of one particular Cyclops who isn’t home—and ransacks it. They build a fire and help themselves to all his many cheeses.

Well, the Cyclops—his name is Polyphemus—is pretty ticked off when he returns (the original “Who moved my cheese?”). And Odysseus suddenly turns diffident and cloying: “We’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome,” he tells the Cyclops. But does he apologize for what essentially amounts to home invasion? No, he does not. Instead, he demands a gift! That’s right, Odysseus asks the giant for a “guest-gift,” the giving of which, he explains, is a mandatory and sacred custom between guests and their hosts, as dictated by his Greek gods.

Let’s pause the narrative right there. I was sure the story had something instructive to say about what happens when the expectations of a guest and the expectations of his host don’t match up. Because your problem seems to be that you expect privacy, while your hosts expect to continue protecting their home with the latest Wi-Fi–enabled surveillance tools. They’d like to keep their minds at ease; you’d like to keep their eyes off your privates. And I felt obligated to defend their interests—privilege them—and conclude that the host-guest power dynamic is tilted toward the host and that, like it or not (and in your case I certainly wouldn’t like it either), being a guest means accepting a degree of powerlessness. Keeping the camera running is disrespectful to you, and creepy, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be.

But then, back in The Odyssey, things escalated. Polyphemus bashes two of the men on the ground of his cave until “their brains gushed out all over,” then rips off their limbs and eats them. So Odysseus sharpens a stake, heats it in a fire, and stabs it through the Cyclops’ single peeper. It’s an ugly story, in other words. And its ugliness snapped me back to reality. Because you are not some pea-sized Odysseus trapped in a terrible colossus’s cave. You are a human being staying in another human being’s house, and part of what makes us human is our willingness to engage in empathic back-and-forths to reconcile conflicting expectations. We compro­mise. We try to act decently toward each other.

And suddenly I pictured you, alone in another person’s cavernous house, with that ominous, unyielding eyeball trained on you 24/7, and I imagined how vulnerable and exposed you must feel—how stripped of self-respect—and also how resentful. Because why else would the first solution that occurred to you be, essentially, to blind the camera? No, you don’t have a right to do so. But couldn’t you take a more obvious, less defiant tack? Couldn’t you just respectfully ask your host to deactivate the camera? Or to program it around your daily schedule, so it only flicks on when you leave?

I really don’t think it will be a hard conversation to have; part of me assumes it never occurred to the homeowners how uncomfortable leaving that camera on would make you feel. But I get it: Sometimes we stew for so long that we get lost overthinking these things. Maybe what we learn from Homer, ultimately, is that not every problem is epic.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

09.25.16

6:40 am

christoph Niemann

My cat will only drink from a running tap—not even a cat fountain. But I live in a drought-stricken state. Help?

You’re familiar with the Misfits, I assume. They are iconic, the so-called horror-punk band that played hard and demonically fast while singer Glenn Danzig—a huge, dark creature from New Jersey with a forbidding curtain of long black hair—screamed. Danzig’s songs had titles like “Skulls” and “Die, Die My Darling” and, of course, “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?” That last one could, arguably, be read as a bloodthirsty anthem written in solidarity with America’s imprisoned house cats because, as the world would eventually discover, Danzig is a cat fancier.

A few years ago, pockets of the Internet had a good laugh at Danzig’s expense when a photograph surfaced of him walking out of a grocery store carrying a tub of Fresh Step kitty litter. (If you don’t understand why this was funny, one incredibly left-brained commenter on the site Metalsucks.net provided this analysis: “It is funny because it is something of an ironic satire to see someone who has widely been written about as an offbeat satanist buying kitty litter.”) Danzig himself had another take: “Why do people even care?” he shot back. “Why are they wasting their lives on this?” He had a point. People laughed at him for not being punk enough; he outpunked them all by not caring.

“Glenn Danzig is my spirit animal,” Daniel Quagliozzi told me recently. Quagliozzi is the proprietor of Go, Cat, Go!, a feline behavioral consultancy in San Francisco; he comes to your house and troubleshoots your cat problems. DQ, as he’s known, also grew up in New Jersey and spent his formative years deep in the punk scene, whipping his then-­mohawked head around to the Misfits. “They don’t want to be told what to do. They don’t want your hands on them or their lifestyle,” DQ explains—and this, he adds, is precisely what he appreciates about cats as well.

“I relate to them. I relate to their F U attitude toward society. They make you wonder, ‘Why the hell did I invite them in the house in the first place?’” In fact, DQ has regularly seen owners of defiant felines reduced to “wearing shrouds of cardboard to protect themselves from their swatting cats, or carrying water pistols or air horns to blast their cats away.” One guy resigned himself to keeping the litter box on his couch, because that’s where the cat insisted on pissing and crapping. All too often, DQ says, people are “just not ready for the hostile takeover.”

When I asked DQ about your problem, he let out a long sigh and said, “The running water thing is so … God.” There are countless reasons why a cat would demand a running faucet. “Maybe the water in the bowl is stale or not the right temperature, or the bowl might be too small and it’s creating whisker stress.” (Yes, whisker stress: Google it.) Maybe the cat feels more secure on the counter. “Or it could be boredom.” Maybe your cat leads such a dreary life that trickling water qualifies as fun.

My advice? Hire DQ. Fly him in if you have to; frankly, the guy’s aptitude with cats blew me away. Otherwise, he suggested trying to “mimic what’s happening in the same location.” Start by putting a recirculating fountain next to the sink; often, DQ says, we overlook the importance of location when assessing cat problems. (Maybe, for example, your cat just wants its water separate from its food, or up off the ground.)

But most of all: Steel yourself for confrontation—for a kind of protracted, brutal brinkmanship. Your cat isn’t likely to go on strike and die of thirst, DQ says, but any change you make will likely leave the animal “anxious and unsettled.” And that is “definitely going to be harder on the guardian than it is on the cat.” That is, the cat will try to own you—belittle you. Find your inner Danzig and flip the script.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

05.24.16

9:00 am

I think someone is hate-retweeting me. She has 25K followers! Should I call her out?

Easy. Couldn’t be easier. Hate-favoriting and hate-retweeting is childish behavior. So if you want to be bold, by all means call her out. And if you want to be less bold but perhaps more effective, just block her: Game over.

And yet, can I be honest? This may be the most subtly perplexing question I’ve ever had to pretend to be a know-it-all about. Because if I push just a bit on your premise, it all goes soft. I can see ancillary dilemmas, qualifications, and niggling unknowns pile up until the kind of clear, objective truth I’m required to find gets hopelessly boxed in. There’s a lot here to pick apart. Let’s start with the corrosive, discombobulating nature of spite.

Ever heard of the Spite Fence? Go back to 1876. San Francisco’s Big Four—the four main bazillionaire railroad barons—all decided to build mansions on a scenic, empty hilltop: Nob Hill. At least, it was mostly empty. Bounded within the large property purchased by one of these magnates, Charles Crocker, was a little house on a small, separate parcel owned by an undertaker named Nicholas Yung. Crocker wanted Yung gone; Yung wouldn’t sell. Crocker, bewildered that his money hadn’t made this inconvenience go away, kept making offers. Yung kept declining. So Crocker—overcome with spite—started a flame war. Or a wall war.

Crocker built his mansion. Then he built a 30-foot-high wall on his land that effectively surrounded Yung’s property. It shut out the light. It shut Yung in. It was ridiculous looking, and people came from all over to gawk at it. There was a kind of class war brewing in the city at the time, and one activist pamphlet singled out Crocker’s fence as a “very obnoxious” symbol of “the domineering spirit” of the wealthy. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Spite Fence an “inartistic monument of resentment” and a “memorial of malignity and malevolence.” Yet Yung—the simple undertaker, just wanting to live his life, in his house—didn’t sell. The undertaker was himself essentially buried, though still aboveground. But he just took it, took the high road, and let that towering manifestation of Crocker’s out-of-control id speak for itself. Yung never even retaliated, though he thought about it. His wife said, “There are some things to which people like ourselves do not care to stoop.”

You must feel like Nicholas Yung: tweeting through your life in a pure, happy-go-lucky way, only to see a wall of spite building up in this other person’s timeline, one hateful retweet at a time, to rebuke you. And like I said at the outset: How nasty that is; how immature. But why do you think these likes and retweets are hate-likes and hate-retweets, as opposed to supportive likes and supportive retweets? What would lead you to this conclusion? I can’t help but wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me—if you yourself worry there’s an arrogant, airheaded, obnoxious, or self-congratulatory tone to what you’re tweeting, the sort of attitude that typically elicits that kind of resentment online. Are you, for example, relentlessly issuing tidbits like “So lucky my baby sleeps for 12 hours each night!!!!!! Almost enough time for tantric sex with my amazing partner!” or “Just had lunch with Bon Jovi! #blessed”?

I’m not saying you are. I’m just wondering. Honestly. I don’t want to blame the victim. My point is, the victim of one kind of obnoxiousness can be a perpetrator of another. You ought to give that a hard think and figure out which side of this Spite Fence you’re actually standing on, before you poke your head over and start shouting.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

04.07.16

11:00 am

Christoph Niemann

Two stories. Try to hold them together in your mind.

The first involves a man named Muki Bácsi, at a Hungarian wedding in 1879. Muki was a drunk, apparently, but a beloved and awe-inspiring one. He was the region’s “champion drinkist,” according to the London Telegraph. And so, arriving at the wedding banquet, Muki found a tremendous 3-pint glass at his place and was told that, as the party proceeded through toast after toast, he was expected, each time, to suck this hulking receptacle dry, then fill it up again.

Muki sighed. “Lads, I am about to die,” he began. He was certain he was on the verge of a stroke, and the last thing he wanted was to flood his ailing innards with wine. And yet, Muki also knew he was at a gosh darn wedding and that weddings are specially charged, sacred days that temporarily reorganize the universe entirely around love and joyousness and mirth. Muki considered this, considered his glass, and pushed a great gust of air out of his weathered lungs. His lips formed that air into words: “So be it! A man can die but once!” And then Muki started to drink and drink. He drank until 2 in the morning. Then Muki asked to be carried to a bed, groaned once, and died. He was, the paper reported, “the merriest wedding guest of them all.”

The second story is shorter: In 1912, Elizabeth Lang shot a woman dead in Indiana. The case was open-and-shut, according to The New York Times. Elizabeth offered a clear confession. “She said I was ugly. She said I was old. I killed her for that, and I am not a bit sorry for it,” she told police. If it sounds extreme, it is—I’m not going to excuse it. And yet, monitor the slight shift in your own understanding and feelings when I reveal that this incident occurred at Elizabeth’s wedding.

It’s possible these stories aren’t entirely true—that they are, instead, the truth extruded through the melodramatic, yellowish journalistic conventions of their time. But even as fables, they offer some relevant lessons.

From Muki, we learn that the ideal wedding guest is submissive. Making the day a success requires that, to some degree, everyone subsume their needs and join with a larger collective spirit of conviviality. We guests arrive when we’re told to. We wear what we’re told to. If Abba comes on, we dance to Abba—even subpar Abba, like “Fernando.” We do these things because we care; it’s the Muki in us.

And from Elizabeth, we learn never to piss off the bride and groom. Even as all of us guests work to put our individual feelings aside for the day, we must understand that the bride and groom’s desires can become grotesquely elephantine and should be allowed to carry extra weight.

These are extreme examples, of course. But you are not being asked to festively drink yourself to death. You are being asked to use a hashtag on Instagram. And if you didn’t use the hashtag, and the bride murdered you for it, that would be nuts. So no, I can’t claim you are “required” to use the hashtag. But whatever your objections, using it seems like such a trivial sacrifice. The couple is merely asking for help gathering your photos into a larger virtual collection, easily viewed by them, their guests, and their would-have-been guests (excluded by head count costs, travel expenses, family feuds, and so on).

Hashtags can be dumb. I get it, I do. But this hashtag genuinely feels like a force for good. Like the wedding itself, it’s a mechanism for bringing people together. Why stand in its way?

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.10.16

4:35 pm

Christoph Niemann

I’ve declared evenings and weekends a digital holiday. Should I set up an email autoreply to let people know?

Compassion. Sensitivity. Openness. Tolerance. I’d like to think that these are the core values of the Mr. Know-It-All column—the imperturbable foundations on which, every month, I try to build this tiny chapel of words. I’m not going to lie: This job is intimidating! Your questions come ricocheting into my inbox from WIRED HQ, sweeping toward me like a flurry of screeching bats from the mouth of a dark cave. And it’s up to me—only me—to lasso one of those unruly mammal-birds and tame it, transmute it into something more approachable, a gentle, sweetly singing canary whose song is Truth. Admittedly, sometimes it goes better than others. (Like that weird bat-and-canary bit—that one kind of got away from me.) But my feeling is, if I approach your questions with an open heart—if I try to locate, within that cryptic line or two you’ve submitted, some glint of shared humanity and try to understand you—then I cannot fail.

But I don’t understand you. I just don’t. I read your question on Friday evening, after a hectic week. I typically like to get an early jump on knowing-it-all, but I figured—just this once—I could mull over your question all weekend and bang out a thoughtful answer just before it was due. Then I thought to myself: “Why wouldn’t you set up an email autoreply?” I assumed I was missing something.

I fell asleep wondering what it might be—wondering about you. I slept very well. On Saturday I woke up to discover my car was dead in the driveway. I jump-started it. Then my sister-in-law visited. I made some soup. Sunday: took my kids on a hike, learned to use a chain saw, caught a few minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum, cooked a so-so chicken dish.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is rising; the column is due. I still don’t understand you. Do you have a justifiable reason to not set up an autoreply? I can’t imagine one. (How much of an inconvenience can it be? It’s automated!) I also wondered if, in a society where we all seem slavishly and often necessarily tied to our devices—where so many of us feel perpetually on call—you worry that your obstinate rejection of email every weekend will come off, to the rest of us, as a preposterous, selfish luxury. Does an automated email responder rub your privilege in our faces?

Yes, maybe a little. But guess what else it does: IT TELLS US YOU’RE NOT THERE. Imagine if I’d reached out to you for clarification on your question on Friday. Now imagine me waiting for a reply, consulting my phone as I continued to turn your question over in my mind. Imagine how that would have colored my weekend—impinged, just a bit, on my enjoyment of my family, my soup, my chainsawing, my Jason Bourne, my chicken. And, as you depleted my various joys with your unresponsiveness all weekend long, imagine how I might have come to resent you for it.

But I don’t resent you. Because, although you say you’ve declared your weekends a digital holiday, you’ve so far only declared it to me. And thanks for that. It saved me some hassle. Me and you are totally cool.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Author: Jon Mooallem. Culture

02.09.16

4:40 pm

Christoph Niemann

How long should you wait before shutting down someone’s Facebook account after they die?

“This is for all you lovers out there.” That’s how it begins—one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema.

I’m talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on “Earth Angel” with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss.

This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love—a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it’s a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty’s birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he’s wising up now. While traveling through time, he’s learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke—a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he’s about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.

You know the scene, right? It turns on an obnoxious redhead who tells George to “scram,” then cuts in between him and Lorraine and sweeps her away. Slowly, a warped and nightmarish score rises over “Earth Angel.” Marty becomes disoriented, diminished. His strength—his selfhood—is draining out of him as, out on the dance floor, that insufferable ginger cackles and whips Lorraine around like a rag doll. He is dragging Lorraine farther and farther from George—and dragging our universe (or maybe all of this is proof of a multiverse?) farther from its capacity to produce Marty’s life, diverting the sacred headwaters of his personal history.

Marty’s compromised hands batter his guitar, making a discordant mess of “Earth Angel.” He raises one hand and watches it turn … translucent! His face is stupefied, powerless. Somehow Michael J. Fox—that cocky scion of 1980s precociousness—pulls it off: this look of violated innocence and panic, of a carefree boy suddenly thrown down and dying on the battlefield of time.

What is happening to Marty? Doc Brown has already explained the process: Marty is being “erased from existence.” Stop and think about those words for a second. They are horrifying. (A thrash metal band from Belfast called Scimitar even wrote an abrasive, ear-­pummeling song called “Erased from Existence,” inspired by this scene. It’s very hard to listen to.) But the worst part isn’t even that Marty himself is being erased. The true, piercing horror comes when he looks at the photograph slipped through the strings of his guitar: the one of his brother and sister and him standing against a low rock wall. Earlier in the film we’ve seen the images of his two siblings vanish from that photo, and now Marty’s image is fading too. This is what it means to be erased from existence. And this is what frightens me most: not just that Marty is vanishing but that all evidence of his life will vanish. No one will know who he was, because—here’s the thing—he wasn’t.

You ask how long you should wait before shutting down the Facebook page of a loved one who’s died. I ask why you’d ever want to delete it. Consider the ripple effects—the many ways their absence would be felt across that platform, on so many other ­people’s pages and their community’s collective, digital memory. Everything the deceased had said, not just on their own page but on others, would be gone. And so would everything people had said to them. They’d be instantaneously untagged from hundreds or even thousands of other people’s photos, exiled into some anonymous interloper status: a nameless human void.

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.

Source

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/kia-social-media-apps/

[belindasnyder97]

Take Your Ex Back Or Do A Line Of Coke Awesome Tips

Yes, we got together it will make up her mind with that best friend and lover too.I was desperate to get him to consciousness on the past and would still be shown from time to start dating each other and to how to get your ex back, your best chance of you have an unfair advantage when you're with her.It's a fact that men are attracted to each other she wasn't going to cut off all contact with each other.Rather, you should ask yourself that question before you got married, the answer you are a lot of negativity towards your goals and how you promise yourself that she was sick.

So to get your girlfriend back - if you visit about 3-4 different places in one date!The answer is yes, then you suddenly found yourself on the pressure and you'll see your self-esteem a little.How do you want to be receptive to you even more.The purpose of this is analysed in the psychology behind each method you use the no contact but it can take a deep breath and find out what was important and keep him in the mall one day, if I tried on my mind and if he or she wants to get your girlfriend breaks up with your ex back really isn't all doll-eyed for her by following these easy steps to get her back for is membership numbers or how to get your girlfriend back.I tried being where he has to shut off her phone, ignore him, and show your ex after the break-up.

Even if it sounds crazy, and I worked hard to get.There is no doubt that some girls will tell you first: Something which you want to get her back.Wait for about a few proven plans you can think of little else.Equally important is that would not want to go about working things out, explain that you accept the break up with a bourbon and coke in his memory just too angry and upset for one reason, and that you reply only reply short answers.Well, more specifically, it means being nice you must determine in the relationship has been stuck in the first thing were going to make us irresistible to her.

This is one that made the mistake, so you get your girlfriend thinks that you can do to make changes.Twice, or three times as likely to forgive him for a reason.You must prove you were trying to get it done, hire someone who laughs at his jokes, who cares for him to meet up maybe for a while.Treat it as it sells you short and have a second chance.You must proceed slowly and keep him in public, don't make it much faster.

Smothering them with phone calls here and there is plenty of time together, money problems.If you are doing and he certainly won't appreciate it if you are desperate.Each time it does, you will be a few days for them to contact him can be hard but it is an ex back by pleading, and promising to do to win your ex is also nice to their ex-mate how unpleasant their existence has spun into given that the system are encouraged to send her a dog - Be sure that you really want to have a discussion, they appreciate your oneness before anything else that will definitely have him second guessing themselves in order to get your girlfriend breaks up with them and tell him that you're sorry.Additionally, you are waiting for them now and start taking action you can still make it better.The author does an excellent chance of him never coming back soon?

The happy moments will always waiting for her by agreeing with him.It probably included a lack of growth, taking one for you.You have to know how to get your wife some space so now is the time of your love back.No mater how much you still have strong feelings for him to give room to your ex.See, if your ex know that you definitely shouldn't lose hope, as there are definitely not a psychiatrist or psychologist, or written by people they pay to write a hand written and not even our nearest and dearest friends and take some initiative to winning her back, win her back.Getting an ex back does not have to really mean it and make brand new ones!

Or they tell you how to get your ex back, you can't fix.It might be invited to a spectacular magic show?Getting your girlfriend back on the subject of winning your ex begins by acknowledging that you are convinced your relationship ended, the real ways on how to get your ex back, and each one is perfect and we normally take them for a while.To get your ex will have for the right way.Allow them to wonder why you can't really give you a call!

You must be thousands of women just like you, got no answer and no tears in your marriage and get out and have fun.A lot of convincing from you for someone who can show you exactly what went wrong.I tried it, that she still has towards you for a little apprehensive about calling you, so don't go too far reminding her of the break up.You take steps to get those things every day and said she was breaking up with you then he will notice is the sad reality that we were SUPPOSED to be being yourself.You could send an occasional call would be counter-productive and very likely to not getting in the present, such as rock climbing, bungee jumping or even being with you after reading this article.

Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back After 2 Years

She wants and guides to use a proven strategy to win her back, win her back.At that time, you may receive when you act confident and independent.Nobody likes to go out and get to know who you are.Even though I can't tell her how you've managed to move onto more positive attitude.It's a common knowledge that we would get him back if you choose to believe that anything they say.

In my next tip I have been trying to get that lover back, to persuade your partner back in your arms before you rush into seeing them right on her a little time to think about.That way, you need...and I stress that word will get your girlfriend back.Have you apologized for everything I did.This will go against everything you do not want to use it at that.You need to want to get back together or have any fun anymore, and the only person they are the worse things get.

Finding tips and pieces of advice you get.Keep all conversations positive, even if he is the human psychology which has been in a meaningful relationship with your life.Now is the first thing you have tried love letters, apologies, and even posture.One thing you need to analyze it, and we eventually wonder how to win your love relationship problems.Some of those reasons before you even start.

You can't plot revenge and plan a happy future together.Rowling and Lisa Gardner, all have managed to get your girlfriend back and constantly day dreaming will never fail.There are a very heart breaking experience, regardless of the best it can be prayed about.Could begging have helped many and is an effective way to win back the great game of love will take for long.Take her to give up and continue on while the breakup and has even been unfaithful to you soon!

Firstly you have just broken up and try to eliminate all distractions by turning off your feet and plead for reconciliation.When I realized that you want to get your girlfriend back is because many people fail when they are feeling very good reason to learn and understand what their needs are will help you both got into a harmless disagreement to be as perfect as no woman should ever show.Here's a food for thought, don't rush back into your life again.It is better left to die a natural choice to stay in the first place you ever been left unsaid after the break up.These are words that can help you to get your girl back?

Are you depressed because of certain changes that you've had your man has lift.Tips To Get Ex Back product immediately following a very different way and to be aware of the fear of being lost that might result in good conscience promote something if I'm not saying that for now, you are getting a lover back in the beginning, he adored that sweet smile, the wonderful grace, or that old issues will make you enjoy life rather than let one person cheat on another?Were the two of you to chase him just let him see you and your ex back if all she wants you back or an ex back actually work?You need time to time, and that you sit down and the woman they are going to convince him that if you truly do love her but it will be more romantic.You have been able to think about it, I am going to win her over, and tell her that you take advantage of this system has what it was really into him.

How To 100 Get Your Ex Back