#also by virtue of watching and eating dreams he has started to think of humans as like blorbo from his shows

[mister13eyond]

basically vin's morality is "you have to play with your cat until he's exhausted or he WILL make his own fun and it WILL be destroying your furniture"

[wesleyhill]

Jesus Feeds Us

A homily on Matthew 14:13-21 preached at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Pittsburgh, on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost 2020

I would speak to you in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In just a few moments, Aidan our priest is going to stand behind the altar there and pick up a piece of bread and a cup of wine. He will pray over them, asking the Holy Spirit to set them apart so that they might be for us the body and blood of Christ. And then those of us who are here will eat that gift of Christ’s body and drink his blood. And any of you who want to partake can receive them this week (just call or send us an email, and we’ll bring Communion to you in a safe, socially distant way).

What we are about to partake of goes by different names: Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Mass. The Second Vatican Council, in a wonderful phrase, said that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” Somehow, when we receive the Eucharist, we are returning to the nourishing heart of our faith. We are given divine grace in Holy Communion as we receive it with faith and gratitude.

I have been thinking a lot about Communion over these past few months of lockdown. I have been able to receive it, as you’ve seen here via the livestream, but I know many, many Christians, and even many of you, who have not. And they have longed for it, sometimes without really knowing why. In light of this extraordinary situation, starting this fall, I’m going to be offering to you some teaching videos on the cathedral Facebook page specifically on the Eucharist and why it remains so important, why it is indeed “the source and summit of the Christian life.”

But for now, this morning, I want to look at our Gospel reading through the lens of the Eucharist. The reason I want to do that is I think that’s what the Gospel is inviting us to do. Listen again to the climax of the story: “Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” Does that choreography sound familiar? We’re about to watch Fr. Aidan take the bread and wine, look up to heaven, bless and break the bread and pour out the wine, and give them to me, the deacon, and I’ll carry them to those here present — and to any of you who request a visit. What Jesus is doing is, we might say, eucharistic. It’s not the Eucharist itself, but it should remind us of the Eucharist, and the Eucharist should remind us of the story. If we pay attention to what is happening in this story, we’ll better understand what is happening to and with us when we receive Holy Communion.

First of all, let me give you the simplest way I know to think about what the Eucharist is. This is what I tell my 3-year-old goddaughter: The Eucharist is Jesus feeding us. We come to him hungry, needy, broken, and sinful, and he feeds us. How?

One thing we should immediately think about is that Jesus feeds us in a surprising way. In the story, the disciples, of course, are the ones who make the rational plans. They come to Jesus with a proposal for how to take care of the restless crowds. They remind him of the desolate setting — there are no markets around, no houses whose doors you could knock on to ask for bread — and then say, “[S]end the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus, bizarrely, says, “They need not go away; you give something to eat.” This is our first clue that the meal the crowds are about to eat isn’t “business as usual.” There is something new, something strange, something from another realm or dimension, about to take place. That’s of course the way it always is with Jesus: he’s always surprising us, always bursting out of our limited categories of understanding, toppling tables, breaking the rules, taking people off-guard with his unprecedented authority and power. He is always, as we heard in our daily lectionary reading last week, “going ahead of us.” Here Jesus shows his glorious freedom to act otherwise than what we could ever imagine. He breaks out of the narrow boundaries of the disciples’ thinking and performs one of his famous “deeds of power,” bringing provision and nourishment in a way no ordinary human process ever could.

And that, friends, is how we ought to understand what is happening when we receive Holy Communion in humble trust and expectation. Jesus is feeding us in a way that is miraculous, arresting, unpredictable, surprising. We are not dealing here with simply a human occurrence, a religious or cultural ritual. We are being fed by the Lord himself. This is a supernatural meal, a visible sign of the workings of God’s effectual grace.

But not only does Jesus feeds us in a surprising, lordly way. He also feeds us freely. In the Gospel story, there is the notable absence of any exchange of money or goods. Jesus doesn’t offer to feed the crowds on the condition that they come up with payment. He doesn’t set any conditions at all. He simply gives the bread and fish away, with no ifs, ands, or buts.

It’s probably not an accident that the creators of our lectionary, our schedule of Scripture readings, appointed that wonderful passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah to be read alongside our Gospel story for today.

Thus says the Lord: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food…”

What the Old Testament prophet saw about the free gift of God’s favor is exactly what took place in the life and ministry of Jesus. Over and over again, Jesus called out to those who had no money, no social standing, no distinguishing virtues or character qualities, no moral uprightness, and he said to them, “Come, have bread and fish without money and without price. Come, receive my body and blood without cost and without payment.”

One of my favorite hymns is Hymn # 685, “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” In that hymn, you and I are invited to say to the Lord, “in my hand no price I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” That’s about as succinct and memorable a summary of God’s good news as I can imagine, and we are about to show it with our bodies this morning as we open our hands to receive the gift of Christ’s body and blood. Our hands will be empty; we won’t be carrying a check book or a debit card to try to bargain for God’s grace. We will hold out our bare palms, and Christ will feed us freely.

Finally, we can see from our Gospel reading that Jesus not only feeds us surprisingly and freely; he also feeds us abundantly. Listen again to how the story concludes: “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.” All ate, and not just nibbled: they were filled, satisfied, satiated. And, even so, there were leftovers, with as many baskets full at the end as there were tribes in Israel. Not only that, but the “all” who ate to their hearts’ content numbered over 5,000, perhaps even twice that number. This is a story of extravagance, of abundance. What Jesus gives is lavish, over the top, more than we could ever dream of asking for. He gives and gives and gives, without measure and without end, and there is always more.

Ultimately, what Jesus gives is… himself. Jesus gives us his very life, the love that he is, the abundance that is his person. That is what he was offering to those hungry crowds that day in Palestine, and that is what he offers to us in Holy Communion. Jesus feeds us… himself.

There is only one of Jesus’s miracles that is recorded in all four Gospels, and that is the miracle of his feeding the 5,000. We read St. Matthew’s version this morning, but if we had read the version in chapter 6 of the Fourth Gospel, we would find this point about Jesus feeding us with his own life to be unmistakable. Right after all the leftovers are collected and Jesus has gone on to another place, he says to the crowds, “[T]he bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” With the memory of the loaves and fishes still fresh in their minds, they say, “Sir, give us this bread always.” And that is the moment when Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” And then, in language that is filled with eucharistic overtones, Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh…. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Friends, Jesus feeds us surprisingly, freely, and abundantly — because what he feeds us with is his own life, his broken body and shed blood, so that his life might become our life; that by communing with him, we might be healed.

I remember talking with a wise older priest when I first became an Episcopalian. He asked me what drew me to our church. I fumbled around for an answer, trying to sound well-informed and engaged. But then I decided just to be honest: “I’m here mainly because of the Eucharist. I meet Jesus in Holy Communion.”

And the priest, his eyes misty, said, “He’s here, isn’t he? He’s really here.”

Amen.

[ahiddenpath]

Epilogue Celebration: Family

I keep running behind with these, there’s so much going on!  HOW ABOUT THAT STEVEN UNIVERSE FINALE, EH?

I keep intending to write a ficlet, but I can never seem to stay on top of it.  I hope you’ll accept some miscellaneous 2028 family headcanons below the cut.

-Taichi is one of the last Chosen to have his first child, age wise.  This is partially because he’s busy representing digimon in human government, and humans to digimon.  It’s a difficult and demanding job, both in terms of the work and the emotional toll as a subset of humans exploit digimon and a large swath of humans fear them.  It often feels like Taichi is standing alone in a huge chasm between the two parties, trying to bring them together with little interest from either side.

So, yeah, he’s not really thinking about kids and family...  Except that he is, and he’s eating his heart out with indecision over it.  I think it takes a ton of courage and time for him to decide to become a father.

Like many of the Chosen, Taichi can’t spend as much time with his child as he would like because of his career.  Still, his son adores him and thinks he’s the best Dad in the world, an attitude helped along by Agumon constantly saying so!

Taichi is a laid back and indulgent dad, except when his Worry kicks in.  His wife has put him in parenting time out when he gets into his head and starts hovering too much.

-Yamato and Sora also waited a while to have kids because of their family backgrounds.  They wanted to really be sure that they were ready first, committed to each other and to their new family.  (I wrote a drabble that gets into it here, if you’re interested).

Because Yamato is an astronaut and Sora is a clothing designer, they rely heavily on their parents and Takeru for help watching their children.  This is difficult for them, because they very much want to be with their kids...  But they also want to achieve their own aspirations.  Luckily, their parents and Takeru all dote on the kids, and sometimes squabble a bit over who gets them next.

Yamato tries to be chill about it, but it’s embarrassingly easy to get him gushing about his kiddos and the wife.  Like, he’s that guy who starts every sentence with, “My daughter/son/wife/brother/Gabumon/nephew...”  Missions are really hard on him for this reason.  He’s known to tear up when talking to his family from space.

Sora is Best Mom, having trained since age 11 by handling the Chosen.  Even when she’s away, the kids can’t get away with anything; her Mom Powers elicit confessions without much effort.  The trick is that the kiddos just can’t lie to their adoring mother who takes such great care of them.

Sora does have to monitor herself closely.  When her emotional state is poor, she sometimes snaps at the kids for normal kid stuff.  Meanwhile, Yamato has to watch out for his tendency to send mixed messages by retreating when his emotions act up.

-I talked about Koushiro as a Dad a lot both here and here.  His Dad strengths are supporting all of his daughter’s interests and engaging with her via activities and teaching opportunities, but he’s not skilled at understanding and meeting her emotional needs and giving social advice.  Happily, I headcanon him marrying a lady who is well-equipped to cover those areas.  He also sometimes just... gets scared of doing the wrong thing and retreats, but again, his parents and his wife quickly learn when to intervene.

-Mimi also has a parent post here.  She’s great at interacting with her kid and having fun with him, and as an adult, she’s learned how to set boundaries.  Still, she has a tendency to spoil her son, so luckily, there’s a wide network of beloved people helping to raise him to balance that out.

-Jyou!  Oh my god, Jyou would be the most amazing dad, fight me (there’s likely no need). 

The thing I most want to say here is that Jyou goes out of his way to expose his son to all kinds of careers and hobbies.  In fact, he asks his friends, including the Chosen, to allow his son to participate in their “take your kids to work” events.  He tells his boy that he can be whatever he wants, and that while he wants his son to find his passion and succeed in it...  If he ever needs a place to fall back on, Jyou will be there.  

He doesn’t want his son to experience the pressure he felt.  Still, he is sure to instill the virtues of hard work and service.

Honestly, I think his only major flaw as a parent is worrying too much about his kids, and also spending too much time at work (he’s a doctor, so that’s inevitable).  Luckily, Gomamon is around to keep things light-hearted, and to remind Jyou that is family needs him and he needs to go home now.

-Takeru is a great dad, and I think having his own family was really...  A dream?  Just a dream come true for him.  After his parents divorced, I think it’s clear that Takeru wanted his family back, the way it used to be.  These days, he has both parents (and they love babysitting), his brother, his sister-in-law, their kids...  And he has his own wife and child.  Things are no longer quiet at home or awkward with his parents.

Honestly, I think Dad Takeru is living his best life and organizing play dates and is just so happy.  He’s amazing with children, and they love him...  But his adult friends know to be wary when their kids and Takeru huddle up.  What the hell kind of mischief is he encouraging?  At least they never have to wait long to find out.

-Hikari is also an A+ Mama.  Her warm, sweet aura soothes kids and inspires good behavior, but don’t think she can be walked on!  A teacher takes no guff and knows how to convince kiddos to behave.

Hikari needs to learn to tend her mental health with love, care, and regularity.  Teaching saps her emotional strength, and she often feels depleted, but forces herself to keep smiling and giving her all.  There are times when everything just reaches critical failure levels, and she melts down.  

So, Hikari...  I’mma need you to love yourself the way you love everyone else.

-Oh my God, Daisuke.  Sometimes, he acts more like a brother or uncle than a father, so his kid gets away with things that he... probably shouldn’t.  I’m hoping he is with someone who disciplines instead of joining in on nonsense!

I can tell you that his son adores him, though.  They live a fun, loud, and noisy life!  Daisuke and his son both wish that Daisuke wasn’t so busy as an entrepreneur, but the good news is that Daisuke’s parents, sister, and Chosen friends (especially the 02 crew) are always willing to babysit.

-Miyako and Ken might have the most... stable????  Presence for their kiddos, since Miyako is a stay-at-home-mom.  I do think that, when her youngest goes into kindergarten, she starts working part time as a researcher for Koushiro’s company, but...  She’s always wanted a big, happy family, and she is always, always there for her kiddos.  I really admire that.

I think the kiddos might favor Ken, just because he’s not at home all the time, and...  Well, who doesn’t love Ken-chan?  I bet Miyako gets a little miffed when the kiddos rejoice when daddy comes home after she cared for them all day...  But she’s probably just as excited to see him!  

I kind of think Ken and Miyako are That Couple.  You know, the one that makes everyone think, blech, get a room, just from the way they look at each other.

Miyako is the kind of mom that can cheerfully yell at kids XD  Like, the standard speaking volume is pretty high in this household.  They’re the kind of sibling group that bickers one moment and cuddles and plays together the next.  She always sees to everyone’s needs, knows how to discipline, but also brings on the fun.  The only issue is that her emotions get carried away sometimes, and she needs to reel herself in before she riles up the kiddos to the point where they’re impossible to calm.

Ken, I think, is like an oasis for his kids.  Calm, soothing, understanding, patient, quiet...  He might not be as good as talking and taking charge as Miyako, but he’s an amazing listener, and he gives the world’s best hugs, certified.

He has his hands full with the bedtime routine, trying to wind everyone down after a loud, fun day with Miyako and each other.

-I believe that leaves Iori!  Ugh, I love him, and I love to think of him as this strong, capable man who dedicates himself to service.  He’s like a pillar to his daughter, who is likely the sweetest and kindest gen 2 baby.  Like so many of the Chosen, Iori’s career is demanding, but his wife, mother, and grandfather step in.  In fact, they might all live together?  And while his daughter loves all of them, Iori is her favorite.  In her eyes, he is just, kind, capable, dedicated, and strong, always helping the digimon and people who need help.

I think the only issue is that Iori doesn’t realize how big of a shadow he’s casting.  His daughter pushes herself to be everything that she sees in him, which is a lot for anyone, let alone a kid.  The good news is that her great-grandfather sees everything, and he is always telling her that she is more than enough.

I LOVE THEM ALL, THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK.

[sshibalx]

The venom of my ambition, I sharpened my knife every day, but because of my uncontrollable greed, my knife became dull ⫸

Kim Jun-Myeon + cismale + he/him.┊ ❛ ━ hey, is it just me or do you hear Born Hater by Epik High playing in the distance ? oh, thats just Ssibal, a Chaotic Evil member of the league of villains. i suspect they might be Han-Jae Song (승한재), a twenty-nine-year-old Research Manager at Haggis Tech with the ability to manipulate all aspects of filth, rot, and putrefaction. according to my sources, he can be assiduous and multi-skilled, but also muddled, and closed-minded which is probably why they remind everyone of an ceramic ashtray full of half-used cigarettes shattered on the ground as the wind picks up the debris, a black coffee stain on a white cashmere versace turtleneck sweater, and a assortment of rotting fruit in a glass bowl on an black marble island counter. so much. anyway, a supervillain or not, crystalline city is keeping a close eye on them!

pintrest || the powers || wanted connections || spotify ||  musings || playlist || threads (updated daily) || tasks

BASICS ⫸

Name: Name: 승한재 or Han-Jae Song Nicknames/Alias: Nickname: Dr. Song in the professional setting. Han for his close friends. Jj only by his mother. Face Claim: Kim Jun-Myeon (Suho from Exo)  Age: He is 29 years old, though he does appear to look younger. Gender: Cismale. Sexuality: Sapiosexual. He finds intelligence and the human mind to be the most sexually attractive feature for a potential sexual relationship as opposed to gender. Date/Place of Birth: He was born Januaray 20, 1990 in Busan, South Korea. Astrological Sign: Acquarius-Capricorn Cusp Ennegram: 7,6,3 Myers Briggs: ENTP, The Debater Super Power: Filth Manipulation Alignment: Chaotic Evil Languages: broken hieroglyphics, Spanish, Greek, German, Arabic, Korean, English Religious Beliefs: “When you die, you rot in a hole in the ground.” Currently: Crystalline City, Downtown District. Occupation: Head of Research, Haggis Technology Rank: Upper Class

HISTORY ⫸

Childhood/Family Life: Han’s childhood was his opinion entirely without flaw, and he reflects of those family memories fondly. His hometown of Busan was full of wonder and excitement. The family of four partook in many family outings, picnics in the park, afternoons at Haeundae Beach, eating fish cakes down Seomyeon, and visiting the many local shops. Of the many places he lived, Busan is his favorite. Though, as to not tarnish those memories, he’s sure he’d only return if it were absolutely necessary. 

The nightmares of his family home decayed and decomposing haunt him all too frequently 

The family uprooted their location the year he turned 8 years old. A turning point in his mother’s career left them with no other choice but to follow her to Eygpt. And while the first move was particularly hard on him, he found time to forgive his mother as she introduced him to many experiences in his life; from bathing elephants in India, to visiting the many wonders of the world, Han, too, found himself a helpless wanderer, so long as his family was close by.

As a child, he portrayed questionable behavior. His obsession with death and decomposition started in his early formative years. It was a typical day at the beach when a larger predatory bird swooped down to pick at another seemingly flightless bird. Having scared off the vulture, he stared down at the warbler, it’s outward appearance withering in front of his eyes. While it elicited a typical reaction from his sister, the power consumed him, and never left his body. His father would later find out his son inherited the super powers that he’d hope to pass down. 

Though he learned most of his skills from his father, he gained his love for life from his mother, Shion Song. Having a very close relationship with her, and given her ordinary status, she is undeniably the most important person in his life. 

His sister, Seon-mi, being the second most important person, though he does have trouble speaking this verbally. Throwing cash at her and cleaning up her messes is suitable enough for their relationship. And while he’ll insist she find a better job and her own place, Han doesn’t necessarily think he’d be able to live alone in his condo.

“We promised we’d never speak of Mexico again.”

But Han-Jae is far from the perfect example of an ideal role model and self-less brother. There are some messes he can’t clean by himself, and that’s where their father comes into play. And despite his hatred for Heroes and the League in general, Han does believe there is one true superhero, that being Min-Jae Song, his father. There is no doubt that Han has made his parents proud, though there are some aspects where his father and him disagree on. Seon-mi, being the favorite and far better at her abilities, applied a small amount of pressure on his relationship with his father.

Education: For the most part, and due to their constant nomadic tendencies, the children were homeschooled for quite sometime. Having ever only attending a quick couple of years in highschool.  

Accomplishments: Han was accepted into Berkeley College where he recieved his PhD in Infectious Diseases and Immunity, and while typically the next logical step would to beome a specialist, Han spends his time flourishing his career at Haggis Technology. With its reputation and great technological advances, Han believes that he can find a cure for his mother’s ordinariness. 

Regrets:  Not necessarily a regret, but a constant fear that he will have to listen to his father’s guidance in tapping into his more regenerative abilities. Decomposition being his specialty, Han has trouble understanding that this power could stem from his father’s Infinite Supply. With his pessimism towards human life, their greed, and their vanity, Han believes they deserve the rot and decay they inevitably endure. This is problematic, because his mother, despite how much of a super she can appear to the family of supers, is ordinary, and she too will have to undego the same processes of typical humans and organic matter; death, old age, decay.

Secrets: His family is quite unaware of the research he does. As his research requires test subjects, he finds it a little inappropriate sharing his findings with them, and his end result-- finding a cure to his mothers inevitable decay. And since he is not entirely morally stable in his ideals in humanity, he does cross a couple of bridges when it comes to finding test subjects. This is where Sshibal, his alter-ego, comes into play, and the looming fear that his sister knows that he is the reason behind a couple of missing persons reports.

PERSONALITY ⫸

Positives/Virtues/Skills: He is assiduous, multi-skilled, and very ambitious. His family is very important to him, followed by the work he does at Haggis, and while he doesn’t believe in the more optimistic ideals the company represents, he does agree that technology and science contribute to his own obsessions. Therefore, he would do anything for the company, having helped in his own ways for it’s recent successes in the research department.  He can be quite charismatic, golden-tongued, taking on leadership roles to pass the time. Creative, resourceful, and intellectually quick, he’s good at a broad range of things. He enjoys debating issues, and is very much into "one-up-manship". He gets very excited about new ideas and projects, but tends neglect the more routine aspects of his life ie keeping his apartment clean, laundry, keeping an organized work desk. Generally outspoken and assertive, he enjoys people who he finds are stimulating company; coworkers and fellow members of the Syndicate. 

Flaws/Weaknesses: Because of his ambitions, he can seem to be in constant motion, never feeling like his goals are met-- this being a theme in his life due to his mother constantly moving them around. He, therefore, can seem very muddled, disorganized, and for lack of better words, all over the place. When he has trouble explaining his theories, concepts or processes he can be very temperamental, cold, and pompous. Making him a little hard to work with. Under stress, he, at times, losses the ability to generate possibilities, and becomes obsessed with minor details. These details may seem to be extremely important to him, but in reality, are usually not important to the big picture. Outside of his colleagues and syndicate friends, he not at all as social as his personality would convey. He has a natural distaste and distrust for anyone outside of his family. He, therefore, tends to fall into rather toxic relationships with others, often times never revealing his true emotions. While he is very upfront with his intentions, he tends to hide his feelings in fear of rejection. 

Likes: tea, fish cakes, traveling, fruit, expensive pens, expensive clothing, glass aesthics, expesive watches, expensive wine, elephants, a quiet office

Dislikes: humans, half of his interns--if not all, his cigarette addiction, the messes he always seems to create, Mexico, meeting his sister’s friends, his sister’s personality, pleasing others, white paper-- reports should always be printed on beige, the color white in general

Dreams/Ambitions: To cure his mother from her human form.

Hobbies: Meditation, running, traveling, wine tasting, research.

Fears: He fears losing his mother. He fears losing his sister. He fears that his father will no longer wish to save him from his destructive tendencies. He secretly fears that these relationships are the best relationships that he will experience which is why he fears losing them. He fears of becoming trapped, stuck, or stagnant in his life. He fears failure. He fears that his memories aren’t as accurate as he believes them to be. He fears that his childhood home is not being taken care of. 

Comforts:  When his sister is at home safe, and not out on the town, money, his father’s scent in the wind as he’s being bailed out of whatever unfortunate circumstance he’s in, the smell of mold

[translightyagami]

✤ Rem and misa fr the ask?

who said i love you first?

rem, while misa was doing her hair and rem was watching. it just, like, struck her that this boring moment where she’s hanging out as misa irons in some curls is probably the best moment she’s ever been in. so she says what she means which is “i love you” and misa says, “that’s rlly sweet of you to say, rem. do you think light would like it if i curled my bangs a bit too?”

who laughs when the other trips?

oh rem has nvr laughed in her whole life and also she’s a shinigami so misa hasn’t ever seen rem, like, walk let alone trip.

who pays the bills?

misa, bc she’s a human who has to and rem isn’t but also bc she’s a very well known idol and has the cash to spare.

which one makes a bigger deal around the holidays?

misa goes ALL OUT for holidays and will hv big outfits planned for each of them. rem doesn’t understand holidays. every day is literally the same. she goes along for misa’s sake tho and wears the santa hat to match misa’s.

who’s more clumsy?

rem bc she doesn’t rlly know how to deal with her huge shinigami body in the tiny human world and bumps into shit all the time. she knocks over misa’s skull collection and gets an earful abt how expensive real human skulls are.

who checks their daily horoscope?

misa reads her horoscope from like six different websites and the newspaper. she’s grilled rem abt her birthday but rem is no help. “i just existed one day,” she says and misa huffs. “that’s such an aquarius thing to say.”

who sings louder in the car?

neither of them bc misa doesn’t know how to drive and rem doesn’t understand music or cars and bc of that she hates them both.

who leaves the cap off the toothpaste?

misa bc she’s busy texting instead of putting shit back where its supposed to be. she always ends up with dried out toothpaste and has to run to the store to buy some. rem just starts screwing the cap back on after misa finishes bc she doesn’t want to take anymore trips.

who is more up to date in pop culture?

misa is pop culture.

who insists on going to see the newest movies?

they go see all the newest movies on misa’s request and she always complains in the theater abt how lucky rem is that she doesn’t hv to pay for any tickets. misa asks light to go but he’s always busy doing something for the case so it just her and rem, watching the newest blockbuster.

who cries when the abused animal commercials come on?

misa will DROWN her apartment when these commercials come on and rem has to physically remove her phone from her so misa can’t call light and cry abt wanting to adopt a cat with him. rem doesn’t rlly understand the draw but she does think cats are....what’s that human word.....cute. she wouldn’t mind raising one with misa.

who’s the lighter sleeper?

misa, by virtue of the fact that of the two of them, she is the only one that sleeps. she snores and kicks in her sleep. rem watches her and wishes she knew what misa’s dreams were. then she rmbrs what misa talks abt all day and goes back on that wish.

who believes in ghosts?

there’s not one single thing supernatural that misa DOESN’T believe in. vampires, werewolves, and poltergeists are alllllllllll real to her. rem doesn’t believe in ghosts, mostly bc she knows for a fact they are real and believing has nothing to do with it.

who does the grocery shopping?

drunk misa does the grocery shopping at the 7/11 and then sober misa has to figure out the puzzle. rem doesn’t eat anything but even she knows a trainwreck when she sees it.

who updates their facebook status more often?

misa has several facebook pages dedicated to her and only two are sock puppet accounts she made. at first she was a steady poster but after the whole kira thing she fell off. she tries to show rem how to make a twitter but rem’s fingers are too big for the keyboard and all her tweets are just key smashes or, when she’s able to make words, complaints abt how low ceilings are.

[tarnishedhalo]

Ship meme: The whiskey three

Married Life || Accepting { @therealgamble, @whiskeyandtwoshotglasses}

If  We Don’t Die, It’ll Make a Helluva Story

leaves their dirty clothes on the floor

The night before…

“Jesus, Riley, do you have to be such a slob?” “You were the one that said I couldn’t bring B-”“Say her name one more time-”

“Guys…honestly, is it so hard to-” It was all fun and games before the whiskey got knocked over and the tee-shirt was used to mop it up.

forgets to run the dish washer

It’s a land of empty mre packets and plastic utensil forests. There’s empty 3.2 cans, packed in such a way that they’d been claimed as tactical gear…and somehow, the brass bought it. All to avoid Punto Negro the Second of its Name.

Hunter still refuses to tell Gamble the story, and as predicted, uses security clearance as his excuse. Riley just laughs.

pumps gas for the car

It’s a known fact that Gamble drives. Riley pumps the gas because it’s better than waiting ~but it’s so he can stretch and pull tension out of his spine, his leg~ and Hunter…Hunter is the one that sits in the back, dreaming of margaritas and warm sands. Until they hit the roadblock. Then there’s a burst of thirty second activity. Before the car moves an inch, Brian’s now in the back, black case at his feet, looks like a suitcase. They know better. Hunter’s behind the wheel because he’s the one that speaks the local language. And Riley’s the one muttering it’s never going to work until Gamble kicks his seat.

It’s a fire-drill every few dozen clicks, lather rinse and repeat as it was before. Their shirts stick to their skin, rivers of damp down their spine, their brow, every part of them that isn’t covered with dirt.

drives when they’re going somewhere

It’s old hat by now. Squad forward to the release point.

Bravo is silent because there’s none, which makes some things better, some worse.

“Kumbaya, kids.”

The claymores are in place, camouflaged. The moon is low giving limited visibility so they have to rely on Gamble who is far too cheerful. The patrol they’ve set up against is destined to make its rounds and Riley and Hunter have established a crossfire. It will be a kill zone for forty-five seconds. Then green smoke between their position and the objective.

“You should see the look on your faces.”Riley knows Gamble’s keeping up moral in his way and because he knows neither Riley nor Hunter can smack-talk back. It’s both a comfort and an annoyance.

Gamble lets out a low, sharp whistle over the comms and time starts. Patrol is at Nine and Twelve. A deviation from what recon had gathered but it makes no difference. There’s barely sound as the first shots don’t ring out, weapons suppressed. 

“My granny leap-frogs better than you two old ladies. And she’s been dead twenty years. Don’t make me come down there and show you how it’s done.”

They move, covering each other while Gamble watches over, picks off the extras with well placed shots.

They hit the door and kick down the door, smoke obscuring everything, even breath. The masks do little to filter out the acrid taste but at least they aren’t crying. 

“Five…four….three….two….white.”

Moments later, out they come, dragging the limp frame between them. Riley hands over his rifle, Hunter slings his over his shoulder. The objective gets slung over Riley’s shoulder and it’s a running back’s rush as the PJ eats ground. The Brit’s not far behind him, pulling a pin with his teeth and lobbing the grenade into the building’s open maw.

rearranges the furniture

There’s four of them now, crammed into a space barely bigger than a couple of jail cells, and the civvie’s getting antsy. Keeps asking questions none of the Whiskey Three have answers for. Gamble’s given up trying to allay the engineer’s fears and has started ignoring him. Riley just keeps pouring drinks. Hunter thinks both of them are pretty shitty when it comes to intel.

He pulls a cable spool over to make a makeshift table, used chalk and a sharpie to make a board. Pebbles for pieces. Talks to him in his own language over the longest checkers game in history, because, as he reminds the other two…

This man is afraid. Was rescued from his own murder because he was willing to betray his god and his family to do the right thing. He’s still human.

Later, when the night gets cold because the desert’s a bitch that way, Hunter pulls the spare sleeping bag closer to the portable heat source, and gives the guy an extra blanket, and space to pray.

He notices though, that their guest isn’t the only one. Gamble’s got a well worn picture of Tabby that he may or may not just have brushed a thumb over, and he knows without a doubt that it’s a rosary Riley’s murmuring over. In moments like that, Hunter bites his tongue and doesn’t ask him if it’s Mary or his sister that he’s praying to. Low hanging fruit, and all.

falls asleep with the TV on

Three days on and things have scraped the bottom of the barrel for boring. And Riley’s going out of his mind. Waiting was always the worst part of the job, the hours and hours of nothing but watching sand-flies crawl up the crumbling mud walls, and the heat shimmer parching the dirt outside, micro-waving the horizon.

Muzzani and Hunter have grown tired of checkers, and are dozing off the afternoon heat. Gamble’s turn on the radio.

“You ever think about retiring from this? Getting a joe-job and-”“Naw. Where would you two be without me saving your asses?”“But we could be home right now, cold beer, game on the tv, yelling at the refs for shitty calls.”

“And who would you put in our place?”

“You make a valid point.”“Sure as shit I do.”

Riley shacks up in a corner, back against the wall, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. He refuses to complain, but some part of him knows he’s starting to get too old for this. He pulls his lid down over his eyes and closes them for just a minute…

gets to use the bathroom first

It’s the only time that Hunter’s had to himself, and of course, he’s stuck inside three and a bit canvas walls. He steals from it a moment of serenity from Riley’s constant complaint and Gamble’s murderous sarcasm. Even Muzzani’s hopelessness and fears. It gives him a moment of focus and clarity, to remind himself that they just need to wait a little longer.

Patience, after all, was a virtue, even here.

Patience is also what he calls the camel-spider lurking near the toilet paper.He doesn’t mention Patience because you have to laugh about something.

decides the temperature for the ac/heater

From temperatures that can soar upwards of a 105 degrees during the day, down to less than 40 at night, each one of them believes this is hell, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

sets up holiday decorations

“Uh…what are you doing?”

“Herding sheep. The fuck does it look like I’m doing?”

“….where did you even get flowers?”

“Muzzani and Hunter helped me out.”“And you’re stringing them together with…suture thread and a needle from the med kit?”

“It’s tradition.”“For…what?”

“It’s June 11th. Kamehameha day. So I’m making a lei.”

“You…need…fuckin’ therapy.”

leaves the lights on

Gamble’s set up the left side, Riley the right. They aren’t exactly landing lights but you do what you can. The road flares glow with a sickly pale red light, but it’ll be enough for the chopper to pick up a visual. It’s a bittersweet sensation; on one hand, it means finally going home. On the other, it means giving away your location and things have been going too smoothly, too quietly…

They’re all thinking it, but no one wants to be the asshole who says it out loud.

uses the bathroom with the door open

Man was raised in a bar, can’t be bothered to walk the hundred paces to make it from the door way to the latrine. Just unzips and lets it go, shakes. All with one hand, rifle steady in the other.“Do you do that at home?”Riley flashes Hunter a grin, even in the dark.

Gamble bites back on the first, second, thirty-fifth thing that comes to mind.

fixes the plumbing (or calls the plumber)

Sand scours the few exposed bits of flesh as the chopper blades whip it into a frenzy, not that they notice. Their luck didn’t hold out like it promised to. The night is filled with the staccato burst of automatic fire on both sides, Hunter’s running point with Muzzani and they’re half way toward the dark silhouette and the open doors that mean extraction.

Gamble and Riley are laying down cover fire and they’re running low; four heart beats later, Gamble’s shouting for them to haul ass and…nothing happens. He’s gotten about a third of the way when he notices he’s running alone.“Shit. Shit. Shit.”The pilot’s signaling, Hunter’s screaming…And fucktard’s not moving at all.

Keying his radio, Gamble barks a change in plan, from gun-run to cas-evac. And as soon as they get back to civilization, he’s going to kick Riley’s ass.

He turns back to drag his friend from the shadow of the building.

[a-wandering-fool]

From the article:  (it’s long, but interesting)

====================

Anyone who starts his “12 Rules for Life” with:

Stand up straight with your shoulders back

and ends it with

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

deserves a hearing.

I first read about Jordan Peterson from the left–from people hell bent on attacking this person as a racist, misogynistic, hateful little man who thinks governments should be involved in arranging marriages and who puts off everyone he meets.

Which is odd to me, because the world is full of racist, misogynistic, hateful little people–I live in the South, after all, and I’ve seen plenty–and why this particular “racist, misogynistic, hateful little man” deserves any particular attention simply because he wrote a book–again, the world is full of racist, misogynistic, hateful little people who actually write books.

And when the Left focuses on a specific individual like a laser beam, well, you know there is something going on behind the scenes.

Locally the issue came to a head when the local Indy Week rag wrote a piece calling “controversial” Jordan Peterson “regressive, backward, and hate-mongering”.

And the city of Durham, not to be outdone in its virtue signaling a few months ago when it banned cops from visiting Israel for training, decided to denounce Jordan Peterson.

Well, with credentials like this, it’s worth checking this guy out. So what sort of hateful anti-Left-wing bullshit is this guy spewing? Should I get the popcorn out? Do we have our Canadian version of Ann Coulter, who is rather famous not for saying anything really smart, but for exchanging barbs with the barbs the Left feels free to fling at conservatives?

So of course I went to YouTube.

And found… well, a 12 part series on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. A series on an earlier book of his, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. An earlier series on Personality and Its Transformations.

Of course you also have the mismash of politically oriented stuff–some revolving around his refusal to abide by a Canadian law which requires him to use transgender friendly pronouns, on the grounds that the law impinges on his freedom of expression by curtailing his ability to speak, and further: requiringcertain modes of speech on pain of legal action.

But if you ignore the mismash of political stuff–what you have seems more like a modern Joseph Campbell and his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, not Rush Limbaugh and his The Way Things Ought To Be.

I have only watched the first video of Jordan Peterson’s series on the Bible–and in it he sort of rambles but seems to make a few core points: that the Bible is, at least in part, observations on how people live and how they should live. That one can think of “chaos” as “that which we do not know”, and the transition to “that which we are able to talk about” passes through a dream-like “that which we know but cannot put into words.”

And that when God created the heavens and the earth:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

This describes at a psychological level the process of going from chaos to order–from the unknown through the dream state to that which can be spoken about.

Okay, so we have a psychologist turned modern-day Joseph Campbell, whose “12 Rules” start with “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.”

This is someone worth reading.

So I bought the book, because now I’m curious what this “regressive, backward, and hate-mongering” “little man” has to say.

From his introduction:

I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.

Which agrees with my understanding of the intent of the great religions of the world, and with the intent of the Native American storytelling tradition, of which I’m a little more familiar. Basically the elders did not believe that there was a literal Coyote God who could eat shit and shit food, who was a trickster who periodically had adventures with an Eagle God who was responsible for shading us from the beating rays of the sun. Instead, they believed in the dream-like transition from the unknowable Chaos beyond the camp fire to the spoken word of reality, and that all sorts of things lived in this “dream-like” world which could tell us something about how to live our lives.

And he said something in his introduction which took me by surprise by it’s blinding obviousness:

… I integrated all of that, for better or worse, trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks. It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively. It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces.

“I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.”

And people would rather destroy the world than have their belief systems destroyed–because it is our belief systems which turn Chaos into Order, and the chaos of destroying the world may be preferable to the chaos of disbelief, because at least we went out fighting before Chaos consumed us all.

Which is fucking profound, when you think of it.

His books speak to several ideas: that life is suffering, that the Cross of Christ is a symbol representing the World (most churches are built as a model of a Cross) in its representation of suffering and redemption. And “suffering” is no idle term: “Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence.”

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopeless and despair.

To Jordan Peterson, then, we are caught between the loss of belief that renders life hopeless and makes conflict inevitable on the one hand, and the rigidity of ancient belief which traditionally segregated us into tribes who inevitably conflicted on the fringes. And while we have been withdrawing from the later:

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict.

…

While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century. Our technologies of destruction have become too powerful. The potential consequences of war are literally apocalyptic.

We’ve opened ourselves to the former: to the nihilism and lack of meaning that makes life intolerable and hopeless.

So what is the middle path–between rigidity of thought which led to the conflicts of the last century and the hopeless and despair which opens us to Totalitarianism: to the strong man who takes advantage of our meaningless?

During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual. The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.

And that is what I’ve found in his book, “12 Rules for Life:” not a disrespectful diatribe against Leftism. But a paean to individualism–one which starts with the rule “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” by observing that Lobsters, whose evolutionary existence goes back 350 million years or more, form hierarchies to determine access to constrained resources. There are mechanisms in the lobster’s brain which regulate the balance of serotonin and octopamine based on where the lobster is in the social hierarchy: the higher in the hierarchy, the greater the serotonin, the more confident the lobster in defending his territory. The lower the lobster is in the social hierarchy, the lower the serotonin, the more energy the lobster spends insecure in its position. Low enough on the social hierarchy, and the lobster’s brain chemistry starts a self-destructive spiral which will eventually kill the lobster, removing it as a potential mate–because evolution serves packs, not individuals.

Nature is cruel.

It also means the hierarchies we humans form dates back nearly a third of a billion years.

In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.

So when you stand up straight with your shoulders back, you signal to others that you are important. And in the process, you convince yourself that you are important.

Because you are.

And he even points out two things you can do when your internal 1/3rd of a billion year old system of internal social ranking malfunctions, making you more anxious and making you feel less important than you are:

Wake up at the same time every day. It’s less important when you go to bed than when you get up–anxiety and depression is linked to an irregular waking schedule.

Eat a fat- and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible on awaking (and avoid simple carbohydrates and sugars). “This is because anxious and depressed people are already stressed, particularly if their lives have not been under control for a good while. Their bodies are therefore primed to hypersecrete insulin, if they engage in any complex or demanding activity. If they do so after fasting all night and before eating, the excess insulin in their bloodstream will mop up all their blood sugar. Then they become hypoglycemic and psych​ophys​iologi​cally unstable. All day.”

I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

I can see how, to some, he can be a very dangerous thinker in today’s world where nihilism and lack of meaning have become fashionable. After all, for the past 100 years we learned that “meaning” can lead to World War. And with today’s weapons, another World War could end the world entirely.

But as I noted at the start, anyone who starts his rules with “stand up straight with your shoulders back” and ends with “pet a cat when you encounter one on the street”, whose rules include “assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t” and “do not bother children when they are skate-boarding”–they deserve a hearing.

And as someone who strongly and unreservedly believes in Individualism and in individual Will, and in the paradox of sacrifice that underlies the heroism of performing one’s true Will–what I’ve seen so far seems like a breath of fresh air.

====================

[readiceprincess]

Chapter Eleven

She was still consumed with warmth when she woke up. In her anxiety driven slumber she didn’t dream. It was just calm darkness. But maybe that was even more unsettling. Stirring, she tugged on something. Someone groaned in response, softening. Her fingers relaxed against the fabric she pulled, falling against warm skin and a heartbeat.

When she breathed in the scent of carnations greeted her, followed with a musky smell. She relaxed against the planes of a strong body, arms holding her close. Sibyl curled into a ball, nuzzling into their chest.

She stopped, her eyes wide open.

With a scream Sibyl jumped, pushing them off the small creaking bed. The person woke with a start, falling to the ground with a loud thud and a puff of smoke. Sibyl curled in a ball against the wall. What did she just do? Where was she? How did she end up in a bed with someone?

Sitting up, she put her hand on her heart, looking around the room of dusty furniture and molding walls. This was the Aislin’s place. Right. She was there. She came after the whole Rose confrontation thing. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Gulping, Sibyl peered over the bed to the ground. No one was there. At least, no person. It was just a mess of blankets and clothes. Something sneezed, small and squeaky. She stilled, her shoulders up to her ears as it came out from under the bed.

A bird. A little bird squeaked up at her.

Sibyl stared at the bird. The bird stared back.

Slowly, she went back to the wall, staring into space. It was just her imagination then. She wasn’t sleeping in a bed with a man. It sure as hell wasn’t comfortable and warm and sweet. Nope. None of that was real. She was just lost in a hazy dream. Or it was sleep deprivation. Web MD would have the answer. Or Google.

What the hell happened to her life?

She took a deep breath. Where was her journal again? The bird kept squeaking, attempting to quack or something. Who knew. She was too weirded out to even look at the thing. What was a bird doing there in the first place? Was there a nest somewhere in here? Maybe she was the one going crazy. That would be a pretty irony. Sibyl let out a laugh at that, then clamped her mouth shut.

Out of no where the bird appeared and her eyes widened. Its wings rose, rising over her head and making her cower. Yup, she was going crazy alright. She didn’t even scream, gaping as the gray bird towered over her.

Then, a feather fell. And another and another, revealing hands. A strange energy radiated in the room as the giant bird fell into a mess of feathers, leaving behind a familiar face with golden eyes and soft cheekbones.

Yes, crazy indeed.

“Westley? Is that… Is that you? Were you the duck?” How she found her voice was beyond her, but her head was spinning.

“Swan.”

“Right. Swan.” She just stared at him. “Did we…”

“You wouldn’t let me go. I carried you hear after you collapsed and you whimpered every time I tried to let you go,” he explained. Westley blinked. “We just slept. Nothing happened Miss Sibyl. I wouldn’t compromise your honor like that.”

She gave a small nod, still staring with her mouth agape. “Right. Okay. Yeah.” It was then something odd occurred to her, and she almost screamed as her face burned. “Westley!”

“What? What is it?”

“You’re naked,” Sibyl screamed, covering her face. “Why are you naked?”

Westley let out a yelp. The door opened. “Something wrong-”

Reeve was interrupted by Westley’s shouts for him to shut the door, to which he closed the door and called, “Why are you naked?”

“It was the transformation,” Westley called, fumbling on the ground with the blankets. “You surprised me when you pushed me off. Did you see anything?”

“No!” At this point she was certain all of her was as red as her hair. “Just put on your clothes.”

“I’m trying!”

“Try faster,” she cried.

Fumbling with his clothes and muttering under his breath, Westley got dressed while Reeve kept asking what was going on inside. “Your highness need I remind you of your engagement and that she’s underage-”

“Oh my gosh Reeve shut up you’re not helping,” Sibyl shouted.

“I would never compromise her virtue,” Westley shouted at the same time.  “You’d do best to watch your tongue.”

Reeve opened the door and lingered. “Why aren’t you wearing a shirt? Sibyl what’s going on here? I heard you scream and then I see him here naked with you-”

“It was an accident,” Sibyl assured, dropping her hands. And holy mother of Zeus Westley was shirtless. That should have been a crime, or law that he stayed that way all the time. It was hard to decide in that moment. “This is so embarrassing.” She fell over on the bed, face down. “My life is a disaster.”

“Well on the bright side you got to see the royal jewels. No one else has that privilege,” Reeve tried. She pointed the finger at him.

“Do I have permission to murder him? That’s insulting,” Westley asked, pulling on his shirt.

“No killing. And no jokes, Reeve,” Sibyl said into the bed. “Are you all clothed Westley?”

“I am. Thank you.”

Sibyl rose, looking between the two. Reeve was much more lithe and thin next to the toned Westley. If it wasn’t for the shock factor and sleep deprivation she might have found this to be funny. Instead she was mortified, not able to look either in the eyes.

“Can I die now?”

“No, school’s starting soon. Also we have bacon and eggs downstairs, courtesy of yours truly by the way. Think about that before you let anyone kill me,” Reeve replied. “What happened?”

“I pushed him off the bed and he turned into a duck-”

“Swan.”

“And then he turned human again but the transformation-”

“Left him without clothes. Shape shifting does that,” Reeve finished. He stared at the floor. “That explains the feathers. Well this was thoroughly awkward. What do you say we eat breakfast and go to school.”

“Do I get to go?” Westley asked, wide eyed and full of wonder.

“I’m not going.”

“What?” both asked in unison, turning to each other then to Sibyl.

“Why not?” Reeve asked.

“I’m suspended. And now I’m homeless. And my life is a disaster,” Sibyl said as she stared into space.

“Can we act like what just happened never happened?” Westley asked, looking between the two.

“You think I want to remember what I saw?” Reeve shuddered. “Fine then we’ll stay here with you.”

“No you should go,” she blurted out.

His brows furrowed. “Why?”

To be honest, she had no idea. But maybe she just needed some alone time. This was all happening so fast and it was too much. Sibyl took a deep breath.  “Go. I’ll be fine here with Luther and Westley. Besides I… I think I need some me time.”

Reeve’s gaze lingered on her as he put his hands on his hips and sucked in his lips. “Alright. I’ll bring up your breakfast and leave you alone. Your stuff is by the nightstand. And if you need anything-”

“I know, Reeve. I know.” She rubbed her eyes.

He paused, lingering a moment. “What happened? Did your aunt hurt you?” Sighing, she dropped her hands to her lap. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay? Just please leave me alone. Both of you. Please?”

Sucking in a sharp breath, Reeve nodded, nudging Westley then turning to leave. “Get some rest,” he called before leaving. Her gaze flickered to the door before it close, Westley’s golden eyes meeting hers.

Then the door closed, leaving her alone. And again, she shivered.

****

Reeve never came to bring her her breakfast, so after writing in her journal she made her way downstairs. The place was still dirty and dusty. With a sigh, Sibyl made her way to the kitchen, Westley was napping on the couch, making her pause. He must have been tired and she just shoved him off.

Rushing off, Sibyl walked to the kitchen and was greeted by the scent of breakfast. Reeve went all out, making eggs, bacon, and toast. He even made chocolate milk. And he didn’t bother to bring it to her like he said he would.

She grabbed herself a plate and sat in the table, wiping off some of the dust.  “This place needs a major cleaning,” she said under her breath, putting her eggs onto the bread to make a sandwich.

There was a yawn and groan as Westley walked into the kitchen, stretching. She tried not to look at his rising shirt, but could anyone blame her? Sibyl grabbed her milk and gulped it down.

“And you say you don’t have a chef,” Westley mumbled sleepily, giving her a lazy smile. “How is it?”

Sibyl lowered her empty cup and gulped. “Good. Good. Nice and good.”

Westley stopped. “Are you alright.”

“I’m fine. Peachy. Dandy, even.” Sibyl stared down at her plate and started eating. Avoiding eye contact and trying to wipe the image of his chiseled body while stuffing herself was bound to help somehow. But trying to wipe away that image just reminded her she didn’t want to wipe it away. Or forget his scent and warmth.

“If you say so.” Westley swooped down and grabbed her bacon. Sibyl froze, turning to him.

“Did you just grab my bacon?” Standing, the chair fell behind her. Westley grinned and took a bite. Then he stopped, staring down at the bacon with wide eyes.

“This is amazing,” he proclaimed. When he reached for more she grabbed the plate.

“Oh no you don’t. This is mine. Don’t steal from a lady,” Sibyl warned, turning away to walk out of the kitchen. But there was a little touch of warmth in her chest.

Two arms wrapped around her waist and pulled her back. “You’re not a lady,” he whispered, making her bite her lip before he snatched her bacon and ran off.

“Hey,” Sibyl shouted. “No fair. Get back here.”

“It’s mine,” Westley sang as he ran to the living room.

When she caught up to him he held it up above her, just barely out of reach. “Oh that’s just cruel,” she said. Dropping her arms to her side, an idea crossed her mind. “Fine. I’ll just get the rest.”

His smile dropped. “The rest?”

“There’s a whole bunch in the kitchen and now it’s all mine.” Sibyl winked as she turned to get it. He grabbed his arm, her opening. Turning, Sibyl snatched the bacon from his lowered hands and shoved them in her mouth then booked it to the kitchen.

“Now you’re the one who’s cruel,” Westley called, hurrying after. But she just went back to her table and sat, grabbing her smile as he ran in and skidded to a stop. Westley turned to her, his brows furrowed. “No more?”

Sibyl just smiled, taking a bite of her sandwich. With a slight laugh, Westley ran his hands through his hair, making his way to her and plopping down beside her. “How are you feeling, Miss Sibyl?”

Again she smiled, half because her mouth was full. There was a certain little glow in his eyes and he chuckled, looking away in an almost shy manner. When she gulped, she lowered the sandwich. “There should be some bacon left over for you, you know.”

“I know. I’m not that hungry though. And I don’t want to be here. Don’t you want to leave this place? Go somewhere? I’ve never been to the Otherside before. I want to experience it. Live it. Why stay here? Why don’t we go?”

Just go. Like that. What an odd mentality. Leaving and doing things required planning. It required saving and working things out. Besides, there was nothing fun to do here and she’d never been out of Montana. Sibyl licked her lips. “It’s not that simple, Westley.”

“Why not? Who says it can’t be? Who put a limit on life?” he asked.

What was it like to think that way, to see life without limits? It tickled her fancy, and she let herself believe she could just leave, get out of there forever. “Well for one you know nothing about this world. We need to update you.”

“Then let’s do that today. Educate me on Earth.” His arms were folded on the table, his feet tapping with excitement. It was almost sad how beautiful he was. A guy with looks like Westley could have been a model, living the high life. And he could go anywhere living a life like that. Westley had no roots holding him anywhere her on Earth.

“Okay,” she said, staring at her sandwich. “After breakfast I’ll get stuff. Like magazines and snacks and you can read while I clean.”

His spirits dropped. “Read and clean?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s just so… gray.”

“It’s called reality Westley,” Sibyl replied. “Here’s your first lesson about earth: it’s as gray as it gets.”

[sambinnie]

How are you? I wish I had something more incisive to greet you with, but the speed with which everything occurs means it would be irrelevant, distasteful or a viral punchline a few hours later. 

I have been to the cinema for the first time in six months, and continued my regular habit exactly where I’d left it by attending a first-thing-in-the-morning screening of Tenet with only one other person in the cinema, sitting miles away and also on their own (the only way to watch a film, I say). Fucking Tenet, though. I mean, I have really missed going to the cinema, partly because I love films and partly because there’s such a small-scale decadence to occasionally going there solo at 10am on a Tuesday morning, and those tiny pleasures (which, of course, are currently no longer tiny) are just the things to keep me going.

But the film. Oh god, the film. I wish… I wish I could collate my thoughts into something which doesn’t just rapidly descend into a frustrated scream. I wish success didn’t mean people couldn’t say no to you. I wish I liked Nolan’s Batman films, for a start, since so many seem to get so much from them (see also: Breaking Bad, Killing Eve and Line of Duty), but I’ve always found them silly, really dumbly written, and badly made — I can’t hear much of the dialogue, and the action sequences are frequently shot with so many cuts and movement that’s it’s impossible to follow, something George Miller could teach him about so beautifully — and they’re so bloody solemn. Gotham is a grim place, but there’s a boring pomposity in fetishing that one-note grimness, and Nolan has it nailed. Having a character genuinely laugh at something doesn’t render your film light-weight; it creates contrast, and human engagement, something these serious (but sci-fi)/serious (but fantasy)/serious (but adult man dresses in a cape) films too often lack, as if a strained, one-note way of speaking will cancel out the frivolous, actually enjoyable genre aspect of the film. 

That lack of humanity is shared by Tenet. After a certain point, I simply don’t care. Is the nuke going to explode before Batman can something something something? *shrugs* Will the Tenet team manage to stop some sort of bad thing happening? Yes? No? Don’t mind, fine either way. Is Tenet nice to look at? Yes, but in a sort of “Christ, are we still holding up billionaire oligarch lifestyles as an aspirational thing at the moment?” very pre-2020 mood. Does it make sense? No, but that alone doesn’t mean it isn’t good — some great films, and some great Nolan films, take several goes to fully enjoy, and some are more enjoyable with every watch. Do I give a single fig about the outcome of the film or for any character after 20 minutes? Nope.

One major issue is that Nolan has made Inception, a masterpiece of film-making meta-commentary. How, once you’ve watched Cobb and Ariadne discuss the leaping-about way of conversations in films/dreams (stopping and starting in completely new locations) can you take the same thing seriously between Neil (Neil. Neil.) and The Protagonist? (I would like to see how many women read this screenplay along the way and just gave a small, inner sigh at the main character being named 'The Protagonist’.) As their boring expositional chats chop between pavement and public transport and plaza, one can’t help remembering how well Nolan previously pointed this out, yet has reverted to that self-conscious device to no benefit at all. It’s like he’s never seen his own films.

Similarly, the much-lauded aeroplane scene is completely without the necessary ingredient of tension because we’ve already been shown what happens, not just in other films but in this one, about fifteen minutes before. It’s like Bill & Ted promising they’d do whatever it was they needed right now, but in the future, and their momentary problem being solved by a loose sense of timey-wimey future self-ness. There’s nothing at stake at the airport, and between us being shown what happens and the scene beginning, nothing has happened for us to even hope the mission isn’t completed. It felt like the criminally underused Himesh Patel was in an instructional video for fuss-free plane-borrowing; compare it to the similar scene in Casino Royale (perhaps the only modern Bond film worth bothering with) and the flatness and mechanical nature of Tenet is all too apparent. The twists of the film, such as they are, are likewise foreseeable for even the least Pauline Kael among us. Who could it be under the mask? WHO COULD IT POSSIBLY BE? 

The Prestige, an earlier film of Nolan’s, is such a contrast to this that I’m stunned I didn’t watch it the moment I came home to clear my brain out. It’s smart, logical, moving, tense, engaging, and if there are plot holes (probably) I didn’t care because a) I really, really cared about what happened to each person, each of whom spoke and behaved like humans, not AI script-bots, and b) it gave this household a v useful shorthand nickname for anyone who wanted something one day but completely inexplicably changed their mind or denied it the next. I recommend it. I do not recommend Tenet. 

Of course, I feel guilty for caring so much about this, and writing about some fucking multi-squillion-dollar film with everything else happening. I am feeling extremely, crushingly ineffectual presently, and have completely come off all social media which from time to time would remind me of the efficacy of protest, of letter-writing and petition-signing and contacting one’s MP, so change feels hopeless and November’s blows seem inevitable. I am trying to knit my mind back together before then with small acts of body-work: cooking and running, drawing and swimming. I worry that I will drown in guilt and fear if I stop for a moment. It is pathetic, but I am still breathing, for now. 

My cynicism-filter is also at its finest mesh, because it cannot cope with the reality of our leaders and the UK’s political discourse: only small-fry stuff gets through, the Sali Hugheses and Jack Monroes, small-time fantasists who manipulate and virtue-signal to build lives of back-slapping consumerist celebration and Twitter Power Leader Boards. I’ve listened again to The Purity Spiral, and also to Desperately Seeking Sympathy, and wondered how many intelligent, kind-hearted people waste time supporting these innocent, victimised mini-Trumps just because they use the right buzzwords and also appear to hate the Tories. 

I wish I could give you some of the lights in my heart that keep me going — the occasional pure moon-eating delight of the people I live with — but here are more feasible treats instead.

Mike Birbiglia’s podcast Working It Out is a treasure, particularly the first episode with Ira Glass, which I think everyone who works in a creative field will listen to and wish they had an Ira Glass to critique their work. I like the idea of documenting works in progress, and not carrying any shame when things don’t work yet.

The Rose Matafeo episode of The Horne Section podcast, because I love her and I love stupid and brilliant songs. Several housemates have discovered Taskmaster too, which makes this a nice bridge.

Sarah & Duck, the BBC programme for tiny children. We never really used kids’ TV when they were little, but this now functions as a salve for when we’ve watched something truly terrifying like Poirot or a Marvel film, and besides the fact that Duck is absolutely fucking hilarious, the animation is staggeringly beautiful. The Islamic geometric patterns of the garden hedge; the soft blue-green hum of the “glow” section of the library, filled with lamps and luminescent books; the motes of dust caught in the sun-rays of Scarf Lady’s window. It’s a balm. 

Thanks to two housemates becoming great cooks over lockdown, I’ve rediscovered lots of my cookbooks and found 2015’s Simply Nigella to be a real corker. The rice with sprouts, chilli and pineapple, the drunken noodles and the Thai noodles with cinnamon and prawn are worth the entry fee alone. It’s quite chicken- and pomegranate seed-heavy, but even if you don’t like those, it’s extremely nice to be eating something that isn’t on our usual five-meal rota (and is also extremely delicious).

I was solo for some of the summer, and managed to watch a few excellent films, including BlacKkKlansman, The Peanut Butter Falcon and Love & Friendship. Cannot recommend these highly enough (*whispers* particularly the latter because it’s as painfully sharp as Austen should be, and we’d made the mistake of watching Emma. and I’m still so cross I’m not sure I’m ready to discuss everything that was wrong with it publicly yet).

I read Esther Williams’ memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid. Perfect for anyone who loves that period of Hollywood, and full of juicy (as well as some pretty traumatic) episodes from the swimmer and actress’s amazing life. To give you a sense of it, chapter one is called “Esther Williams, Cary Grant, and LSD”. Super good. 

I hope you all keep well, pals x

[changachino-blog]

28 february 2018

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters

Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters: A Dichotomy Between Life and Living

In two poems, Lord Alfred Tennyson depicts two outlooks of life: the Romanticist view in “The Song of the Lotus Eaters”, and the Victorian ideals in “Ulysses”. More specifically, their views regarding a pause, a lull, in living are in stark contrast with each other.  Using imagery, repetition, and simile, Tennyson proves the virtue of the Victorian ideals of his era using both perspectives.

The Lotus eaters and Ulysses are both set in stagnance. The island upon which the Lotus Eaters lay is representative of their sloth, even the air that they breathe is “languid...swoon[ing]”, in a state of perpetual afternoon. This builds on the image of stagnance, with the afternoon representing the transitional state of travel that the Lotus Eaters were mired in; between sun and moon, Troy and home. Afternoon on a tropic island brings to mind stifling heat, adding on to the day’s sun and toil that would wear on these mariners. However, the mariners rejoiced upon this piece of sand, “they sang, ‘Our island home is far beyond the wave...”, celebrating their freedom from weary travel. Using a repeating rhyme scheme at the end of the first choric verse, with the words “deep, creep, weep, and sleep”, he pulls the reader into some sort of a loop, resembling the loop, the trance, the travelers are bound in.

On the contrary, Ulysses has been filled with a dread for his life, as an “idle king, / By this still hearth, among these barren crags…”. Using the words idle, still, and barren, Tennyson establishes the king’s existential malaise within the first two lines of his poem. Ulysses’ life no longer has much of a purpose, after peaking many years before, “Far on the ringing plains of Troy”. This begs the question of whether life is worth living after a definitive peak. Ulysses answers with a resounding YES, exclaiming “How dull it is.../ to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!”. Stagnancy is death to Ulysses, a dishonorable degradation, a sword not dulled by use, but by its scabbard, betrayed by the respite of his home.

The Lotus Eaters expose the flawed nature of the Romantics, the dreamers and consumers too occupied by the “watch[ing] (of) the crisping ripples on the beach” to advance, to trailblaze, and return home in a wash of glory. They try to rationalize their sloth, preemptively alienating themselves to their homes, wives, children and slaves, figuring that “...all hath suffer’d change..”, but that is a lazy alternative to the truth Tennyson presents through Ulysses. Ulysses has a fervor for life, a chance at another adventure and expanding the self. Tennyson shows us the difference between merely living and having a life, and while the Lotus Eaters indulge themselves in material comforts and absorbing the nature around them, Ulysses delights in burning a legacy in the annals of history, in spite of all of he has already accomplished. Tennyson urges us to expand our horizons, both internally and externally, to fight for another peak in life.

***

11 June 2020

Two years later, this essay is helping fend off the evils that come with stagnancy. As long as one is breathing, one has potential, and it’s a waste of energy and life to live a day in which you don’t try to get better at something. 

A paraphrased quote from my AP English Literature teacher at the time, Ryan Miller:

“If you’re on your phone, you’re basically asleep.”

This really redefined the way I view the information age, because it really is a perfect analogy for my experience with content aggregators and sleep. Dreams flit through my mind in little flashes, and only some truly carry any feeling that carries through to the morning, and therefore any memories I have of those dreams are unreliable. In a very similar way, content aggregators (in my case, mainly reddit) flood my eyes with a veritable onslaught of information. Most of the time, I don’t remember what I don’t save to my account or device. 

What even is the worth of information without any ability to recollect it? 

I typically want to use reddit to distract myself and find fun content that I can share with my friends, but in many cases it seems to become a timesink that gives me loads of impressions, and headlines, and little easily consumable nuggets of information, like well-made gifs, or innovative infographics, which are all tailored to my tastes. It’s a buffet of knowledge, but the problem is simple: you can’t eat like you’re at a buffet for your whole life.

Just like food, information needs proper digestion, reflection, to truly permeate into your memory and become a part of yourself that you can rely on for the rest of your life. In every minute of everyday, we have the opportunity to learn about what is happening to people all around the world, all around our nation, and all around our community. Social media is designed to be addictive, and it works, because it is a very human tendency to want to learn more about the world and connect to more people.

Our brains are not designed to operate on this level of social involvement.

Let’s talk about dunbar’s number. 

“According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.” -linked article

The idea of a hard limit to mental capacity is not novel, and it explains a lot of how the information age has adversely affected the mental health of millions of people. Being a “good citizen” in the age of the internet entails many tiers of communication and information processing as a result of globalization and the current ease of communication:

At the most personal tier would be your loved ones, your immediate family, your closest friends. With distance, the pressure to stay connected is kind of immense, given that it’s so easy to do so, but when life gets busy, people get overwhelmed and need time to charge. Our connectivity adds an unnecessary level of guilt in mild cases of estrangement. As a contrast, my mother’s relationships with her closest friends are built over years, and they personally check in month to month. 

The importance of this tier is on par with that of the next, but I think that there is a lot of tacit pressure to catch up with older family members and record their wisdom. The whole point of family and reproduction is to make each generation better, but if this knowledge isn’t captured, it slips away with each death. 

The next most personal tier would be your involvement in your community, whether it’s through your protests, sports, college friends/clubs, local charities, or churches. These are your tribes, and as social creatures, we tend to become a blend of whoever we surround ourselves with. The information age already pressures us to be as connected as possible, and I find myself straining to maintain involved in my current communities as I try my best to stay connected with my loved ones.

As I mature more, I’m becoming more aware of my responsibility to get involved with community legislation, and local government. I guess this would fall between community involvement and legislative participation.

As we start to zoom out, the next tier would be our involvement in state legislature, voting on bills and representatives in our counties and states. This is where my citizenship fails, I consider myself a patriot but I haven’t prioritized my right to a vote as a citizen in a democratic republic. 

Performing as a national citizen in the United States is also fraught with disappointment and disillusionment in your voice, and bipartisanship has led to rampant tribalism and polarization. Conversations about the administration, especially across people of opposite parties, are rarely nuanced and productive. Mass media on both sides tends to twist words and fails to truly inform. Fear-mongering has always made more money, and gets more awareness, so spreading a more negative depiction of the world is how many media outlets have found their success.

Learning more about international human rights issues, climate justice, and staying informed about our world and affairs is another burden on the mind

I find humor in the irony of privileged internet users reading about unprivileged people’s plights and hurting in sympathy for them, to no net good in the world. The adage that ignorance is bliss is based in reality

We get more and more jaded as we learn about how the world really doesn’t make sense, and as we learn more about how bad humans can be and have been to each other.

Six tiers of investing yourself, your mental faculties, your resources, and your time fall beyond your actual person. 

So much of our presence and identity is invested outside of us, that it’s easy to be overwhelmed and forget to love and nurture ourselves. Every piece of trash information that we have to process stands as an obstacle in our path to a better self. Striking the balance between awareness of the world and mental health has been such a complicated task that we all have to juggle. While a quarantine during the information has posed serious implications for mental health, I’m jazzed about the ramifications of this quarantine. 

For many people whose lives have been uprooted and tossed around by this pandemic, this is a time of introspection, discovery, and a re-evaluation of what we want to live for. The potential for the my generation is staggering.

As a contrast, I truly felt like I was mired in a time of stagnancy during my depressive spells for the past few months. I felt like I was wasting my valuable time as a young adult, and the added guilt became a positive feedback loop that glued me to my bed for far too long. Writing out and processing my thoughts about what has led to these depressive spells gives me more answers and insights, and I’m excited that this is the first of many essays that seek to alleviate my headspace and free my mind for greater pursuits. 

To link my two essays together, here is the main theme I would like to impart to whoever wants to carve their own hope for their future:

A quote from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!”

It’s far too easy for me to grow comfortable in a non-growth-centered way of life, and it’s up to me to leverage the privilege that I have: a loving, financially secure family that feeds me. I must take ownership of my life and make the most of what has been given to me. I owe it to my parents, the universe, and the people I love to lead a life of growth.

“Stagnancy is death to Ulysses, a dishonorable degradation: a sword not dulled by use, but by its scabbard, betrayed by the respite of his home.”

[ilovelocust]

Mirror Mirror V.2 (Part 5)

Note: Probably the last rewrite for the day. The point of this is to make the work better. Trying to write while I’m tired is counter to that goal.

<< First < Prev.

There are two guards outside the cell. They snap to attention as his captor passes them. Fall into step behind Shiro when he follows Keith out. Now that he can see more than the four walls of the cell, the ship is obviously Galra. Dark metal halls highlighted with glowing purple, the common sentry marching by along with the rarer Galra soldier. He’s had screaming nightmares that start like this, some have even included him being just as naked as he is. Not that anyone seems to care about his nudity. Those they pass are too busy standing a bit straighter or patrolling a little more precisely to pay attention to him.

The doctor had called Keith “My Prince”. The title made sense in how the other Galra were behaving in his presence, but that also meant they recognized him on sight. Keith’s appearance couldn’t just be some weird illusion meant to fuck with his head, if the guards didn’t even gawk. For them to respond this way this must be what he actually looked like…Keith was a Galra prince.

Had he been critically injured in that last fight and was now trapped in a dying dream? He remembered fighting Zarkon, that final attack to rid the universe of him forever. Awakening Black’s true power, charging, then nothing. Then he’d woken up surrounded by lights and yelling voices, some sort of lab. He’d been dragged to the cell before gaining his bearings. This felt to real to be a dream, though. To sharp in places to be images conjured up from his mind.

Maybe Keith ignored his request to become the Black Paladin? Somehow becoming a part of the Empire. A quest to resurrect Shiro using their resources? No, no, that made no more sense than a Prince walking around with Keith’s face enough to be recognized. What was the point of going through all that trouble to resurrect him, only to do this? Keith loved him. He wouldn’t hurt Shiro. Not like this. No matter how much time had passed.

The stench of chemically enforced cleanliness hits him before they enter the final hall. This ship’s medical wing is the same as the one at the arena. Heavy duty restraint on the examination tables. Guards posted at the doors in case ‘patients’ attempt to escape. Sharp vicious machines that make a mockery of the name medical equipment. A place to sew prisoners back together or tear them apart, on the whims of the personnel. At least he can’t hear any screams. Either this ship doesn’t have any other prisoners aboard or they are in the middle of a night cycle. He’s grateful for either option.

A guard jabs him in the back, not appreciating his hesitance to enter the place of horrors. Shiro meekly crosses the threshold. The doctor from the cell walks up to a table that looks like every other, “Sit,” He orders. The metal of the table is cold, feeling too familiar from every other time he was on one of these. Still he sits. They’ll force him if he doesn’t. Click the restraints around his limbs and do as they please anyways. Don’t think about those times. He can’t panic here. Not now. This prince, this Keith, he can’t tell how he’d react, but the guards, he’d be lucky if they only tied him down until he hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness.

The doctor begins treatment. He isn’t gentle. Shiro’s wounds are brusquely cleaned and wrapped, his broken fingers set, and blood samples are taken. No care is shown for if the handling causes him pain, but the Galra is at least professional in speed and efficiency. Pain is the side effect, not the point. What does it say about him that he feels genuinely grateful for the lack of sadism?

Keith watches the proceeding with increasing impatience. He looks like he used to when he was forced to wait for his turn in the simulator. Annoyed and tapping his foot, as if the other cadet’s slow progress was a personal affront to him. Patience had never been his virtue, even if he had been trying as of late. There is a sharp tugs against one of his bandages, and the doctor is turning away from Shiro to address Keith, “Done my lord,” He says, “If your plans permit, I recommend rest to promote healing. Otherwise keep his wounds clean, and he should heal given time. Bring him back if any of the wounds continue to be inflamed or he runs a fever.”

Keith waves dismissively, and the doctor bows before scurrying out of sight. Keith’s attention turns to Shiro. Keith approaches and he tenses, preparing for a fight. He won’t go back in the cell willingly. The guards will have to drag him. He only obeyed because the treatment was a reprieve from the pain. If Keith thinks his cooperation will extend to sitting back down in that chair, he’s deluding himself.

Keith doesn’t seem to notice or care what Shiro is thinking. The guards watch him warily, but Keith enters Shiro’s space like he’s no threat at all. Simply grabbing his chin to pull him down to his level, “Would you like that, pet? Some sleep?” Keith asks, “If you continue to be a good boy, I can arrange it.” Sleep? Is he serious? Is he actually taking the doctor’s advice, after so long of not caring about Shiro’s well being? This must be more false hope. A promised ‘Goodnight’ before the screeching kept him awake? Yet what if it isn’t? Keith must get all the response he needs from Shiro’s expression. After a second, he’s lets go of Shiro’s chin with a smirk, “Follow me.” He orders. The guards step in to make sure Shiro obeys.

Whatever Keith’s game, it’s different than the ones before. They leave the medical wing in the opposite direction of the way they approached. The halls are winding, but he’s not being led back to his cell. Keith stops in front of a door, opening straight into a single bedroom. It’s not fancy enough to be a prince’s quarters or even a high ranking officer, but it is far to nice to the sort of room you keep a prisoner. Even when he was at the height of gladiatorial popularity, the most he was ever given was a private cell with his own cot. Nothing like the luxurious bed that is the centerpiece of this room. The mattress is large even by Galra standards, enough space to fit ten of him with room to spare.

The guards take position outside the door, as Keith walks inside, kicking off his shoes and sitting back against the headboard. He looks to Shiro expectantly. Sighing, when he doesn’t move, “Lay down, Takashi,” Keith says, patting the spot beside him. Why? Why there? Why now? He hasn’t been given new clothes to replace the ones he’s lost. Crawling into bed with his captor while naked is-there are implications he’d rather not think about, but the cell, it’s still there, still waiting for him. He has to do something.

Shiro climbs in to the other side of the bed, as far as possible from the other occupant. It’s technical obedience maybe that will be enough. Keith dispels that though with a glare, “If you want to rest, you will come here,” Keith warns, displeasure coloring his voice. He doesn’t have a real choice, torture or obedience. Shiro scoots closer, maintain a little space between them. Keith tires of his hesitance and grabs his shoulder, yanking him down. His arm is still deactivated, he’s exhausted and injured, and Keith is strong. Anyone would have gone sprawling given those conditions. Shiro squawks in surprise as he topples, and Keith lets out an amused huff of laughter at his loss of coordination. He shoves Shiro around until only his head lays in his lap, “There, no you may sleep,” Keith says with a grin. He pats Shiro’s head before reaching for a tablet on the night stand.

Shiro waits, but Keith only turns the thing on and begins to read, seemingly satisfied with their current position. Is this all he wanted? To lay Shiro down like some sort of pet. He’s not okay with this. How could he be happy with the idea of sleeping with his head pillowed on the leg of the man who spent the last however long seeing how loud he could make him scream? He should do something, but his body disagrees. Whatever energy he’d marshaled to walk to and from the medical wing is dissipating the longer he lays still. His eyelids weigh a thousand pounds, fluttering closed every time he tries to keep them open. The sleep that pulls Shiro under is far from peaceful.

-

Being clean makes him feel more human, but not enough to leave the room. He should go see the others. Even if only long enough to grab the promised leftovers. The longer he hides in here the more worried they’ll be, but he just can’t. Outside these four walls is too much too soon. Responsibility lies out there. The Black Paladin mantle looming large suffocating Shiro in its shadow. One day, one day won’t cause them to worry too much more. He can have one day.

So he stays, drifts under his blankets. He has water, heat, he doesn’t need to leave. Dinner time rolls around, and there is another knock at his door. Keith is waiting on the other side once again, of course he is. He’d never leave him alone for long. Shiro almost shuts the door as soon as he open its, but Keith shoves his foot in, blocking it open, before he can.

“Shiro, wait!,” Keith says. Panic skitters through him. Stop, he needs to be calm. Keith is not here to hurt him. He knows that. He’s sorted his head enough to know they are different for certain.

“Get out of my door,” Shiro keeps his voice purposefully even, but something must show through, because Keith looks taken aback.

“O-okay, I’ll go,” Keith starts, “but take this.” Shiro hadn’t noticed Keith was carrying something, but now he’s getting a bowl pressed into his hands, “You don’t need to come out, or talk to anyone, just eat, please,” Keith says in a rush. When Shiro wraps his hands around the bowl, Keith removes his foot from the door and steps back, “Alright, I’m leaving. I’ll leave some more food for breakfast. You don’t need to answer the door. Just get it at some point, okay?” When Shiro doesn’t respond, Keith nods to himself and turns to walk down the hall. He’s completed his mission.

“Keith,” Shiro calls at his retreating back. Keith turns around, hope unmistakable in his eyes, “Thank you.” Shiro says, makes his words sound like he means them. Keith deserves that, because Shiro is grateful. Very grateful, for not being forced to leave. He needed someone to care about his wishes.

Keith smiles like Shiro has given him the world, “You’re welcome,” He says, “Be back tomorrow morning!” He waves, before continuing down the hall.

Shiro isn’t ready to come out yet, but maybe tomorrow, he’ll answer the door.

Next >

[nurseperriestyles-blog]

More of the Same

A/N: I do not take credit for this picture. But I did have my husband edit her hair and eye color to match Perrie. This is the closest I’ve found online, and it’s pretty close. 

This post probably had a lot of typos and issues, as per usual. I was fighting sleep when I wrote it

Template from:

https://theboson.deviantart.com/art/Blank-Character-Sheet-2-1-8-390-Questions-460031650

“I’d much rather save the heroes than be the hero.” --Perrie Styles

 General Information

Name: Perrie Styles

Pronunciation: Pear-ee

Name Meaning: Pear tree

Name Origin: French

Other Names: Pear

Gender: Female

Titles: Nurse Styles

Birth Name: Perrie Styles

Birth Date: October 17th

Birth Length: 16 inches

Birth Weight: 6 ½ lbs

Birth Place: Infirmary in Wall Rose

Manner of Birth: Natural

First Word(s): “Uh oh”

Dominant Hand: Right

Astrological Sign: Libra

Catchphrase: “Fuck.” (She says it way too much)

Autograph: Literally just a “P” with illegible scribbles after it

Handwriting: The messiest, most lazy chicken scratch ever. She has very pretty, neat cursive handwriting, though, when she tries.

ID Number/SSN: N/A

License Plate Number: N/A

Appearance

Picture: See above

Height: 5’4

Weight: 110 lbs

Species: Human

Race: Caucasian  

Blood Type: A-

Symbol: N/A

Skin Color: White

Birthmarks: N/A

Extra Anatomy: N/A

Hair Color: Pale, icy blonde

Hair Length: Just above her collar bones

Hair Type: Wavy

Hair Style: A long, messy bob

Widow's Peak: None

Eye Color: Dark blue/grey

Eyebrows: Full with a subtle arch

Nose Shape: Small and turns up at the end

Teeth: Straight and white

Face Shape: Heart shaped

Complexion: She has pretty clear skin, but around her hair line tends to get a few small bumps from sweating.  

Facial Hair: None

 Health and Image

Diet: Perrie doesn’t watch what she eats at all. It’s lucky that she finds time to eat at all.

Exercise: She walks to and from work, and is on her feel all day, but that’ all the exercise she gets

Fitness: That’s one of her least favorite words

Posture: She slouches a lot, but if she’s trying to impress someone, she’ll stand up straight

Dexterity: She isn’t very clumsy, unless she’s really tired

Reflexes: Her reflexes are better than average. She’s pretty good at dodging items thrown by hysterical patients

Abnormalities: None

Handicaps: None

Medication: None

Allergies: Cats

Diseases: None

Illnesses: None

Disorders: PTS from the fall of Wall Maria

Broken Bones: None

Wardrobe: She mostly wears cotton dresses and skirts, her nursing smocks, collared button ups

Accessories: None. She doesn’t wear any jewelry or anything because she loses it or it gets in the way

Equipment: N/A

Musical Instruments: None. She has no musical ability whatsoever

Piercings: None

Hygiene: She’s not a neat/clean freak, but she keeps herself and her hands very clean

Makeup: Nope. Perrie doesn’t have the time or skill to put on makeup

Perfume / Cologne: She keeps a bottle of her mother’s perfume that smells like roses, but she only wears it on special occasions

Scent: She washes in strawberry scented soap and shampoo. She really, really loves strawberries, ya’ll.

Scars: She has a thin, diagonal scar on her left thigh

Tattoos: None

Voice

Voice: She has a sweet, soft voice. When she’s mad or super serious about something, it’s more loud and firm

Pitch: On the higher side, but not obnoxious and squeaky  

Laughter: She has a rather loud laugh, and she snorts sometimes

Impediments: None

   Psychology

IQ: 148

Vocabulary: Perrie has a very extensive vocabulary, especially medical terms and such. She isn’t pretentious about it, however.

Memory: When she’s learning something, or needing to remember something important, she has an excellent memory. If it’s just everyday things, or when she’s really tired, she can’t remember anything

Temperament: Choleric

Learning Style: She starts by reading and studying something, then moves on to hands on learning

Emotional Stability: She is very emotionally stable. She can, however, become overwhelmed and freak out, but not very often

Mental Health: She’s healthy. She has slight PTS and can freak out in certain situations, but it isn’t debilitating.

Philosophy

Religion: None. She believes firmly in science and thinks religion is ridiculous, but she doesn’t slam it in people’s faces. She never talks about religion with others.

Superstitions: None

Spirit Animal: If she had to pick an animal, it would probably be an owl

Etiquette: Perrie is very polite and kind in social or professional situations, but she can be very vulgar in casual situations, or if she’s bothered

Alignment: Lawful good

Perception: Realist

Philosophy / Motto: “She believed she could, so she did.”

Taboos: Murder. No matter what, Perrie could never bring herself to take another’s life. It is against everything she stands for as a nurse

Vices: Cursing, spite

Virtues: Kindness, open-minded, hard-working

Character

Primary Objective: Become a doctor

Secondary Objectives: Enjoy life with her family and friends

Priorities: Her job and her loved ones

Motivation: Being the best she can be

Self Confidence: Very high

Self Control: High most of the time, but sometimes her temper can get the best of her

Self Esteem: High, though she can be self-conscious about some things

Quirks: Chewing her lip, snorts when laughing, dry hands, always has stained clothes, her hair is always a mess. 

Hobbies: Cooking, gardening, reading, sewing

Closet Hobbies: Drawing. She isn’t very good, but she likes to doodle and sketch. She would die if anyone knew

Guilty Pleasures:

Habits: Lip chewing, cursing, hand washing

Desires: Success in her job, safe family and friends

Wishes: Defeat of the Titans, to become a doctor

Traumas: Titan’s invading Wall Maria, being betrayed by close friends...

Worries: Her friends/family being hurt, failing at her job, Titans

Nervous Tics: Lip chewing

Soothers: Quiet places, her garden, cooking, sewing

Soft Spots: Kids, puppies, pretty flowers

Cruel Streaks: Perrie isn’t cruel at all, but she can be a little spiteful. She would never intentionally hurt anyone, though

Accomplishments: Finishing nursing school and becoming a nurse, saving many people, learning how to cook new things

Greatest Achievement: She will always say her greatest achievement is making her dad proud. She’s such a daddy’s girl.

Failures: Not being able to help people when the wall fell, losing patients, she feels like she fails Eren everytime he gets kidnapped. She also felt like a failure when Ty joined the Survey Corps despite her trying to convince him not to, not remembering her mother

Biggest Failure: She feels that Carla Yeager’s death was her fault. She feels that she should have gone and seen if she was okay before fleeing Shiganshina.

Favorite Dream: She dreamt that she had a giant garden beyond the Walls, and there were no Titans. She could hear her father whistling somewhere near by, and she could smell strawberries and tea leaves..

Worst Nightmare: Perrie had a nightmare that her father and Ty were Titans, and she watched them eat Mikasa and her mother. She woke up and felt like crying after it

Earliest Memory: She remembers a woman singing and a vase of roses on the kitchen table

Fondest Memory: There’s so many, but her favorite is her father teaching her how to plant a rose bush

Worst Memory: The day Shiganshina fell

Most Prized Possession: Her mother’s perfume

Most Valuable Possession: A rare cookbook Ty got her for her 19th birthday

Collections: Cookbooks

Embarrassments: She’s embarrassed anytime a guy flirts with her. She gets so flustered

Humor: Sarcastic and silly

Regrets:

Secrets: The fact that she draws, her secret savings stash,  

Darkest Secret: She doesn’t really have one

Pet Peeves: Weeds in the garden, when people can’t cook

Phobias: Germs

Greatest Fear: Losing her family/friends

Confidence: 8/10

Creativity: 8/10

Generosity: 10/10

Honesty: 9/10

Loyalty: 10/10

Insecurities: 4/10

Patience: 7/10

Predictability: 6/10

Reliability: 10/10

Responsibility: 10/10

Trustworthiness: 10/10

Common...

Compliments: “Cutie” “Healthy as a horse!” (She’s a damn medical nerd)

Insults: “Asshole”

Expletives: All of them. Every one of them.

Farewells: “See ya later” “Be safe”

Greetings: “Hi” “Hello, I’m Nurse Styles” (at work)

Mood: Tired and friendly

 Preferences

Likes: Flowers, books, working, new dresses

Dislikes: Losing things, arguments, not being right

Favorites: Strawberries, pastel colors, spring, naps

Least Favorites: Lettuce, cold weather, Military Police (Even Perrie thinks they’re assholes)

Home, Work, and Education

Sleep Patterns: Sporadic at best

Eating Habits: She eats whenever she remembers

Pets: None

Job Title: Nurse

Experience: 4 years

Work Ethic: She is diligent and hardworking

Transportation: She walks

Criminal Record: None

Dream Job: Doctor

Social

Mother: Moria Styles (deceased)

Father: Desmond Styles

Guardians: She’s of age, so none

Siblings: None

Children: None

Close Relatives: Ty Styles (cousin) Ansel Styles (Uncle) Lise Styles (Aunt)

Distant Relatives: None. She had a very small family. Her grandparents on her mother’s side only had one child, and her father’s parents had Desmond and Ansel. Both sets of grandparents were killed in the culling after the fall

Best Friend: Ty, Hanji, Eren

Close Friends: Mikasa, Armin, Petra, Levi, most of the Survey Corps

Confidantes: Hanji, Levi, Ty

Allies: The Survey Corps

Acquaintances: Her co-workers

Rivals: Hanji, but in a friendly way

Inspirations: Hanji, Levi, Erwin, the doctors she works with

Heroes: Ty, Desmond

Mentors: Grisha Yeager, Hanji

Romance

First Love: Levi

Love Interests: Levi

Marital Status: Single

Orientation: Straight

Flirtiness: She’s too awkward and shy, but she has her moments

Turn ons: Intelligence, dedication, loyalty

Turn offs: Cockiness, selfishness, “assholes” (as quoted by Perrie)

Fetishes: None

Virginity: Perrie hasn’t even been kissed. Poor kid.

Reactions

Angry: When she’s angry, she’ll have a stony expression and not speak unless spoken to. She will say spiteful things, but not very hurtful. She’ll roll her eyes and curse even more than usual.

Anxious: She’ll tear into her lip big time, sometimes she makes it bleed. She will pace a little and talk rapidly and nonstop

Conflicted: She’ll go back and forth between her choices, being very adamant that she’s made her choice, but then the next second she’s switched.

Criticized: She can take criticism very well most of the time, especially when it is from superiors. But if someone is just being overly critical and mean, she’ll bristle and call them out

Depressed: She’ll bury herself in her work, and when she’s home, she’ll hide in her garden or bedroom and avoid people

Embarrassed: She’ll avoid eye contact, blush violently, and stammer a lot

Excited: Perrie’s eyes light up and she’ll smile and jitter around

Frightened: She’ll freeze up for a moment, but then slide her mask on and fight through the fear

Happy: She’ll smile and hum and compliment everyone

 Personality

MBTI Personality Type: INFJ-A

[belarath]

so I've finally figured out how to vent on here again without falling into a panic spiral which is lovely  :  and I’m just going to spam myself here cause I really need to let something out   :   I’m dying, I'm just straight up dying in here   :   I’m so empty, in many ways   :   I’m wrecked physically, I couldn't walk up a hill 2 weeks ago without sitting down halfway though, and I don't mean a big hill I mean the side of a lightly inclined large road   :   I barely can make it to eat anymore, sitting up is a challenge, any you can forget any kind of maintenance   :   I got better yesterday only just so I could wash my hair enough that after washing it again today its not riddled with dandruff enough to clog up my comb anymore   :   I finally shaved which I like, but i’ve only been able to enjoy that at home. I step outside and its not good for how anxious I am. I had a fake lining of protective masculinity that I relied on to convince me I’m safe. I still felt uncomfortable going places especially at night but it wasn't to bad. now though I’m double as certain every person I see will shank me. I’m constantly looking over my shoulder which panics me cause every time I do that I'm certain that makes me look afraid which makes me a better target   :   though shaving has made me feel better physically   :   I hate my body so much, but shaving makes me feel a bit better which is a relief, the constant loathing of how I look is very very draining   :   you'd think that like after alllll this god damn time it'd get a little easier to live with such a retched self body image but its just so heavy feeling still   :   I worry   :   I’ve always been a very sad person   :   and like I acknowledge that Its probably not healthy how sad I am all the time but   :   I’ve been like this my entire life   :   I’ve never felt happy for longer than like, maybe more than a month or 2 straight   :   I’m so confident in how well I can endure the deathly long expanses of numbness and hyper draining lack of energy   :  the lack of passion for anything the tastelessness of food   :   the contentment to not move the endless wishing for god damn peace and quiet   :   I have that thing where you really just don't want to exist, I just don't want to have to live in this body and be this mind, I acknowledge I don't have a fear of death because I day dream about not being alive in the sense that being alive is very very very heavy   :   not all the time but,,  so much of the time and that not needing to feel the desire to not want to feel heavy anymore is lovely   :   like I’ve lived like this for my entire memory and so just continuing to live has been my jam   :   I know that if I did die, my Mum would not cope, she’s die   :   I’ve watched her claw her way through things, I swear she doesn't know how hard she’s had it, and I cannot take any joy she's gleamed from this life she's sacrificed so much to reach by selfishly dying   :   death is out of the option until my Mum dies   :   and its likely that death will be out of the option until my close friends either drift away or die as, well, they’ve gone though too much, one specifically I worry about, and I think that dying would be rude to say the least   :   and again its just very selfish   :   one of the virtues of having been programmed to treat myself as lesser is that this instinct has prevent my death which is cool   :   it does make for some suffering though   :   but anyway i’ve drifted   :   I wasn't worried about myself and my sadness until this week   :   I think wednesday? I think I had a moment, I’m certain I had a moment where I fantasied about self harm, and the thing about this is that fantasising about it made me feel better, which really is the part I’m scared about   :   funny thing is though that I have a friend who did self harm but they used like a cutting tool and in my head I was like “ugh no thats just not the way to do it stabing is a way better idea!”   :   my friend told me about their experience and they said they knew it was dumb thing to do cause they had people they knew that did it but they still did it, I forget the reason why. but they regretted it and for some reason it made me thing that I’m way more reasonable because I learnt from them and decided that using like cork board pins seems like a way better idea XD   :   I didn't self harm because the pin I had on me I’m sure wasn't clean and I didn't have the energy or the free break to go get a clean one, and going through the rigamarole of sterilising and then trying to hide it was just,,, to much for my stamina to think possible.  : luckily again another piece of programming “gifted” to me by good old paterna saved me from this moment of self harm as I believe everything has to be done by the book! not by like a real book but the book he taught me to make for myself. what a lovely instinct! to have half my brain assigned to making rules to punish and contain my self which is completely SELF SUFFICIENT   :   I’m being sarcastic btw   :   to the core of me tip to toe I hate it with a fucking passion   :   one of the few passions that I do have XD   :   but again I drifted though   : the moment passed and I haven't wanted to self harm again since then which is good but I’m still unnerved   :   I’m so scared   :   I’ve been dying on the inside for a little bit now   :   I think i have anxiety, and i think I may have a little paranoia though I haven't googled it so I may not   :   but gosh its been put into perspective how self destructive I am   :   there was a post which listed a bunch of self destructive behaviours 28 in total, I had 21 of them and the other 7 involved sexuality which I don't have much of being mostly ace   :   I remember thinking “its a fairly good list” but it kinda highlighted somethings    :   it made me think    :   maybe dressing in wet clothes because you couldnt be bothered to keep your body clothed cleanly and then going out in cold windy weather even though you know you’re going to shiver and probably chafe a bit and then be super hungry cause your cold so you decide to eat out and berate yourself for spending or get home and eat and berate yourself for not making something better and getting fatter or not eating just cause who cares.   MAYBE THATS SELF DESTRUCTIVE   :   or maybe staying at public dnd games which a bunch of people who unnerve you and sap you of energy for sometimes chunks of 3 to 5 hours because you “don't want to offend people” or “don't want to mess up anyones schedule” while also not eating or drinking enough MaYbE ThAtS SeLfDeStRuCtIvE Too   :   maybe its knowing you will get horrific migraines or want to throw up from lack of sleep and maybe that will spike your anxiety about being fired from your work because you can't shake the feeling everyone wants to fire you but you don't mention anything because you'd feel bad about leaving or something and because some of these people you actually like you'll degrade yourself more because they are worth it and you’re not MAYBE THATS FUCKING SELF DESTRUCTIVE   :   I WANT TO SCREAM BUT I DONT   :   I NEVER FUCKING HAVE AND IM DYING INSIDE   :   god I get so mad and I scream so loud in my head my head hurts   :   I’m so broken in so many intricate ways and I know I could feel so much better but, theres so much in the way! and most of its me thats in the way! I’m so close to not even just like help Im so close to comfort! I just want be held by people I like, I’m sure I could ask for like more hugs or to cuddle or to hold hands or for people to play with my hair or for just in general human contact of any kind but, theres so much social anxiety to even begin to ask something like that and that even if I were to get consent how the hell could i learn to initiate!? I”M SO FUCKING SCARED to like ask for physical contact from yet another trauma as a kid. If it weren't bad enough that I’m hyper petrified about getting consent for any kind of physical contact but I also believe that if i were to touch people it would be automatically labeled as predatory because I’m male. I’m starting to think maybe sexual trauma as a kid has had a bigger effect on my psyche than I think? which in all honesty is just, its just exhausting to hold in my head that idea.

[getoffthesoapbox]

[R:MotM] EPS 33~34 - The Thorn Bird Sings But Once

In under ten minutes, Hwa-Gun manages to steal the show one last time. 

As I expected last week, Hwa-Gun knew she was a goner once she took out the poppy field. In keeping with the tradition of sympathetic second leads, the writers take her out before she becomes corrupted like the false crown prince. A light has gone out from Ruler and I for one certainly find the story dimmer without her presence. But her death brings new changes, and I thought I’d explore her courageous last stand and the results within the men she left behind.

The Courage to Face Death with Dignity

There’s a story I heard in a song once (by F.I.R.) about a thorn bird who sings but once in her life. The song is of such quality and sweetness that the whole world stops to listen, and it reaches the heavens. In order to sing this song, she must willingly pierce her heart with a thorn, resulting in her own demise. But there’s no way the thorn bird wouldn’t have sung--her fate was to sing that last song, and that last song she was willing to die to sing.

When I saw Hwa-Gun in this episode, I immediately thought about that thorn bird. Hwa-Gun stands at her most courageous once she makes her decision to burn the poppy field. No longer torn between love and familial loyalty, she’s free at last to be the woman whose been buried deep within her--a woman who might very well have won the prince’s love, had she been free to express herself.

Hwa-Gun takes full responsibility for what she’s done even when her father begs her not to and tries to come up with ways to keep her alive. She’s decided to offer all of herself in service to her prince, and protecting him remains her first priority even as she faces her end alone. 

When her grandfather accuses her father of negligence, she moves to protect him, refusing to hide behind him any longer. Even slimy Jo Tae-Ho tries to save her by deflecting responsibility onto the crown prince, informing Dae Mok that not only is the crown prince still alive, but he’s the one who burned the field down. Hwa-Gun, enraged that her grandfather now knows about the crown prince’s survival, draws Dae Mok’s ire back to her by claiming responsibility for the burning.

At any point, she could have hidden behind her father or her men or even run away, but she didn’t. She held firm, and she accepted the consequences of her actions. She clearly knows her grandfather well enough to know that he’ll never let her live after this, but it no longer matters--she’s struck him to the heart, and both she and he know it. 

The Thorn Bird Defeats The Dragon

Dae Mok and Hwa-Gun remove themselves to the watchtower, away from Hwa-Gun’s hovering father, with Jo Tae-Ho in tow as witness. It is here that they have their final stand off, and it becomes clear the world could not bear two of them at one time--they’re too alike as people and as such one had to go. 

What’s interesting about this scene is that Hwa-Gun clearly doesn’t regret a thing she did. She struck her blow, and she struck it with the full knowledge of what was the inevitable result. 

It’s actually Dae Mok who’s the most affected, the most distraught, over the situation. He clearly cares about his granddaughter, and he’s conflicted over what he has to do. He tries one last time to reach her, in a grandfatherly way--did she know what the Pyunsoo Group meant to him? 

Hwa-Gun, with cool grace, replies that it meant to him what the crown prince means to her--something more precious than life itself. Had she answered in any other way, she might have lived. He might have been able to spare her. But she answered in this manner, and after such an answer, there was only one solution--she had to be destroyed. The two of them will never see eye to eye, and Dae Mok has sacrificed too much to keep the Pyunsoo Group in power. Not even his granddaughter is worth more to him at this point.

Dae Mok asks Hwa-Gun if she has anything she wants to say, and she asks him to tell her father that she’s sorry. It’s not that she’s actually sorry about what she’s done; she’s sorry about the effects she knows it will have on her father. Throughout this entire story, she’s been torn between her loyalties to her beloved father and the crown prince. In burning the poppy field, she’s turned her back on her father despite still loving him with all her heart. 

Dae Mok orders Jo Tae-Ho to stab Hwa-Gun. She closes her eyes with quiet acceptance, a woman who has faced her demise with courage and is at peace with her decision. Jo Tae-Ho is incapable of stabbing her--for a slimy weasel, he has some morals when he actually has a relationship with someone. Dae Mok is left to kill her himself, and the killing of her strengthens her and those she loves, and weakens Dae Mok.

With the final blow, the first chink in Dae Mok’s armor appears, setting the stage for the crown prince to rend him to pieces before the end of the story. With Hwa-Gun’s sacrifice, the stage is now set for Dae Mok’s fall. He sacrificed the last remnant of his humanity when he killed his own future--without Hwa-Gun, there is no future for the Pyunsoo Group. The legacy will die with Dae Mok, an old man with no heirs other than his useless son. By choosing to destroy Hwa-Gun, Dae Mok has destroyed himself--but the death will be a slow one, eating him from the inside out, until the crown prince taking him down will come as a relief.

Dae Mok begins to walk around like a man in a daze. He can barely function, he can barely plan. He gets a bit of light back into him with the hit list proposal, but for the most part he’s now a ghost of a person. He may have killed Hwa-Gun for the sake of the Pyunsoo Group and his own ego, but her death haunts him permanently. He will probably not shake it until his own death. 

In the end, Hwa-Gun wins in the game against her grandfather. The aftershocks of her actions in the three men she loves best will be the first stepping stones toward her dream--that her crown prince take his rightful place, free of the Pyunsoo Group--being fulfilled.

The Strength of a Father’s Love

I never had the opportunity to say it, but Hwa-Gun’s father, Woo-Jae, is my second favorite character in the show. He’s a complete mess of a person--a miserable excuse of a coward who failed to actualize himself and free himself from the shadow of a controlling and overbearing father. He never ventured out into the world to make a life for himself, nor did he ever find his own path. Instead, he clung to his father’s coattails, despite the fact that leading the Pyunsoo Group was never something that would come naturally to him.

For all his many faults, he has one virtue that has shone brightly throughout the story--his love for his daughter. She is his number one priority, and while he may dote on her and spoil her, he is always true and devoted and loving and supportive of her. He has defended her at every turn in the story, even though he is not a brave man. 

That’s why it was so heart breaking to see him tonight. Instead of attacking his daughter for what she’s done to their enterprise, he begins planning ways to save her. Maybe they can talk to her grandfather, or better, she can run away. Or he’ll take responsibility and she’ll say nothing. His whole heart is bent on saving her from what he feels is a terrible mistake she’s made, not understanding the sacrifice she’s willingly chosen to make. 

When Dae Mok comes upon them and starts berating him, Woo-Jae never once tells the truth, despite shaking in his boots and falling to his knees. He does hide behind Hwa-Gun after she interjects between him and Dae Mok, but that has more to do with his inability to stand up to more forceful personalities than any lack of love for his daughter. He hovers anxiously below the watch tower while she speaks with Dae Mok, clearly hoping they can work something out, wanting to interfere.

Though Hwa-Gun dies thinking of her prince, it’s her daddy’s arms which cradle her in her final moments. Her death effects a change within her father, a change which will likely have longterm ramifications for the Pyunsoo Group and her grandfather--her father at last grows a spine.

When Dae Mok walks by, for the first time (probably in his life), Woo-Jae calls him a monster. With the last of his connections taken from him, Woo-Jae now has nothing to lose, and it is here at the end that he finally sees what’s important and what he should have stood up to protect long ago. 

After taking his leave of Hwa-Gun’s body, Woo-Jae faces down Dae Mok, probably also for the first time in his life. Dae Mok tries to justify his actions, but Woo-Jae won’t hear anything of it--he admits his intense disappointment in Dae Mok’s choice, that he’d hoped Dae Mok would prioritize family over the Pyunsoo Group just once. Then he cuts Dae Mok to the quick with a scathing remark about how Dae Mok always talked big about needing the Pyunsoo Group to protect the family, but that now he has nothing to protect, highlighting how far Dae Mok has fallen from his goal--he now serves the power for the sake of power, not his former goal.

Woo-Jae prophetically says Dae Mok will lose everything he treasures and will die lonely and tragically. And then, for the first time in his life, he walks away, leaving Dae Mok speechless. (The music in this scene is perfectly timed too, fufu.) 

Ironically, with her death, Hwa-Gun at last freed her father from the underworld he’d been trapped within. She freed him to see the world for what it is and to finally take steps toward living the truth within himself, whatever that truth is. Her father at last grows a spine, and says the things he should have said long before. Another chink in Dae Mok’s armer appears, leaving him bereft of all of the people he had been supposedly fighting for. 

Passing the Torch

In the last episode, Hwa-Gun said a few interesting things to Gon which I thought at the time were prophetic (and ultimately were). She told him to protect the crown prince, because protecting the crown prince is the same as protecting herself. She also told him to see the crown prince to safety, and then to return to her. 

Gon, ever faithful, fulfills her requests. He sees the crown prince and his posse to safety then hightails it back to Hwa-Gun’s side. Unfortunately, as Hwa-Gun surely knew when she dispatched him on his quest, he returns to find she is dead.

It’s here that we see Gon probably loved her, which many viewers suspected and secretly shipped I’m sure. As her servant, he couldn’t do anything about his feelings, of course, but that doesn’t make them any less real. 

He finds her laid out on a pallet, and her father sitting with her. Her father acknowledges Gon’s pain, and comments that it seems he doesn’t know how to cry. This isn’t true, of course--Gon’s just a very private man, and holds his pain within himself until he is alone.

He can’t even bring himself to touch her, even though this is his last opportunity and she’s not even in her body anymore. This is how much he values her and respects her. As he gazes upon her, he remembers what she’s said to him and the directive she gave him--a directive that likely temporarily stops him from revenge killing Dae Mok (as she may have suspected) by placing a superior directive to live and defend her love. If the crown prince lives, she also will metaphorically live on, because the crown prince is the man she died to protect. 

He accepts her directive, and declares that until the end of his days, he will protect the crown prince as she requested. Death flags raised for this poor guy, but hopefully he’ll get to help take down Dae Mok for her in the end. ;)

The Queen’s Command

Though the crown prince doesn’t have much of a connection to Hwa-Gun here at the end of her life, her death still has incredible ramifications for him as well.

Gon reports back to the crown prince that Hwa-Gun is dead, which distresses him greatly, because he’s a good man and he appreciated Hwa-Gun as an ally. At the time, he’s been struggling with whether or not he has a right to challenge the false crown prince and regain the throne--as the son of a traitor, that makes him illegitimate in his own eyes.

Despite all the other voices being raised up, calling him to take on the challenge--even his beloved Ga-Eun, he’s still hesitant to take the plunge. After hearing that Hwa-Gun died at the hands of Dae Mok, the crown prince asks her metaphorically what he should do to repay her kindness. 

It is here that Gon gives the crown prince her directive--regain the throne. She sacrificed herself to enable him to return to the throne. It’s his duty to see this through to the end, because if not, her sacrifice will be wasted. (And probably Gon would kill him, but shhh.) 

And so Hwa-Gun’s last blow to her grandfather is in strengthening the crown prince’s resolve and providing him the last push forward to take back the throne for himself. Though she will never be his queen, she still gave him a queen’s directive, and he is duty bound to follow it, for she paid for it in blood.

Some final thoughts, since this’ll probably be my last post on Ruler unless a surprise happens at this point.

Hwa-Gun will be sorely missed--she’s the light of the show, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve enjoyed her plotline immensely, and I’m sad to see it’s over so close to the end. I’m glad she got to go with dignity, though. I’m equally glad to see her death has so many ramifications for her grandfather’s downfall and the crown prince’s rise. 

The acting in this episode was superb. Dae Mok’s actor nailed his character’s inner conflict and the haggard expression from being haunted by his actions. Gon’s actor, too, did such a fantastic job--in the final scene with the crown prince, he looks so defeated and exhausted, while in the scene with Hwa-Gun’s body, he perfectly captures the sorrow and the love and the loyalty the character has. Hwa-Gun’s father also is a huge highlight this episode. I hope we haven’t seen the last of him; I’d be sad to not be able to see him find at least some happiness. I know he is a horribly compromised person, but even so, I’d like him to learn from his mistakes and learn how to live forthrightly.

It is a shame that the crown prince had so little reaction to Hwa-Gun’s death, but he never was invested in her and that was quite clear from the beginning. It was all her one-sided love, which is what ultimately makes her end so tragic. Still, I love that it’s her sacrifice that propels his goal forward, despite the pep talk from Ga-Eun. It’s a fitting resolution to a love that could never bloom. 

(Speaking of Ga-Eun, her character really stepped up the game this episode. Maybe she’ll get to shine finally now that her rival is gone. ;p)

When all’s said and done, I truly enjoyed Hwa-Gun’s character, and she’s one of the things I love about Ruler. She’s set the ending up to be a wild ride, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results of her sacrifice reverberating throughout the cast as they push forward. Who’s ultimately going to get to kill Dae Mok, it’ll be fun to see. I’m betting on Gon right now; our goodie two shoes crown prince doesn’t have enough invested to do the dirty work. ;) His opponent is the false crown prince anyway. He’s got to take down what he put up, after all. He needs to take responsibility for leaving Lee Sun alone for as long as he did, and allowing him to become corrupt while he ran around freely.

I probably won’t touch Ruler again unless something really significant happens. Hwa-Gun was really the only thing I wanted to write about, fufu. Still, it’s been a great ride, and I’m looking forward to enjoying it to the end. =)

[rogeramir]

Karma, Dreams And The Balance Needed In Daily Life

What is 'Karma'? It is a Sanskrit word meaning, 'action'. Ancient Hindu wisdom teachers studied human actions and how each action has consequences and how it leads to further actions or reactions. They came up with the 'law of Karma', which states that actions have consequences and that good actions will have good consequences and bad actions will have bad consequences.

I agree to the extent that whatever you do has effects for you and for others and, in fact, for the whole universe, which implies that we may want to be more cautious in our thinking and the actions which that thinking gives rise to. I do not, however, agree with the rest of the so-called law of karma. I am not sure about 'good' actions having 'good' consequences and vice versa for 'bad' actions. That involves many different philosophical questions and I don't waste too much time on those. Philosophical questions are for philosophers and for those who have the time and the interest to take those questions up. I am here to propose constant observation of our own selves as a way of discovering who we are.

For me, Karma is this: if I have a cup of coffee at home, then, to have another cup of coffee, I will have to wash the same cup or buy a new one or drink in the unwashed one. These are the possible consequences.

Or, if I have been rude to someone, I will have to apologise or live with the guilt of it or I will become or remain a generally rude person.

So, I do agree that every thing we do brings consequences.

Physicists say, 'to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction', also known as Newton's Third Law of Motion.

The Chinese have their own philosophy of yin and yang, which states that seemingly opposite forces are complementary, interconnected and interrelated. The opposites / polarities create one another. Night means that soon it will be day. When a baby is born, it means that at some point in time in the future, there will be a death (no one lives indefinitely). If grass is growing and flowers are blooming, then in a few months, autumn will be there. These are examples of yin and yang, opposites creating each other.

Now, lets look at what is happening in our daily life:

If I have eaten too much, I will have to stop eating for a while.

If I have remained awake for a while, I will have to get some sleep.

If I have talked for a while, I will have to remain quiet for some time.

If I have been with other people for a few hours, then I need some alone time.

If I have been angry or agitated or happy and excited, then I will need to silence the mind for a while.

If I have been earning money today, then, today, I will naturally feel good if I can share my money or other possessions with others.

Similarly also in other things that make up our day. All these are examples of Karma too. And they also suggest that our everyday life demands a balance. A very fine balance. Not just balance for the sake of balance, but a balance that will actually bring sanity and a freshness to life. It is the balance which brings us back home. During the whole day, we take hundreds of actions, see thousands of images, speak many words, listen to many words, use our imagination about things, interact with people, eat, drink, converse with people, watch TV, listen to the radio or music or podcasts, read newspapers, journals, blogs, and take so many other actions. All that is information being downloaded into the brain, into the mind. All this information changes us. It becomes a part of us and, to whatever extent, we become this information. Every day, every minute, every second of our lives, we change the world and the world changes us.

The more information we absorb, the more we change. The more we change, the more we go away from our original self. It is as if our original self keeps getting covered over by layers and layers of information. And these layers hide our true nature. They come from the outside, from the world of images, from the world of perceptions. These perceptions are not the reality, they are a version of the reality which the limited human mind comes up with. This perception depends upon our biology, our heredity, our training and development from childhood, the so-called social programming that we undergo.  

The problem is (and this is the whole crux of man's spiritual problem and his spiritual struggle) that the more we change, the more we seek our original self. The more we go out into the world, the more we want to come back home. The more we forget ourself, the more we try to remember ourself. The search for God, the search for the right religion, all philosophical thought, all cosmological studies, all studies of man and all studies of the universe, all these are geared towards that one search, the search for our origins.

We come from a great silent, as yet unknowable, blissful nothingness and we become these small noisy, all too predictable, sad, confused individuals. And then we search for that nothingness.  

What I am proposing here is that while we continue with our normal lives of going into the world and getting more and more information and becoming more and more different every day, we can also start a parallel process of taking a few steps back home each day. And that journey is not necessarily a long one. It can happen in an instant. If you can learn to use the right vehicle, it will take you less than a second to go back home. That vehicle is utter silence. If you can learn to harness that vehicle, it will transport you in a micro-instant to that land of blissful nothingness from where we all originated.

Going back home each day creates that balance in our life without which we become a bunch of confused, agitated, egoistic, insane individuals. Without it, we live in the world of the ego, images and attachment. Going back home each day will reduce and keep in check our insanity.

If we just keep an eye on ourselves every day, we will come to understand where exactly this balance is needed and what happens when we do not keep this balance.

If we work too much without getting adequate rest, the body and the mind suffer. Our future performance and also our health will inevitably suffer.

If I stay awake all day and do not get adequate sleep, it will be disastrous for the mind and the body.

If we eat too much and keep eating, we will suffer all kinds of diseases and sickness.

If I focus on money alone and do not address other key factors in life, such as family, spirituality, inner peace, then all the money in the world will not be enough to bring peace and contentment to life.

If I keep talking and do not listen to others, all of my relationships, whether personal or professional or social, will start suffering.

That is the daily balance I am talking about.

(Neitzsche, image from Wikipedia)

Neitzsche, the mad philologist, philosopher and genius, hints at the need for this balance when talking about the virtues of good sleep in his book, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'. He said we need to deal with sleep with respect and modesty and that we should stay away from those who do not sleep well and who stay awake at night. According to him, when we do not create this balance, the mind tries to do so in dreams. It plays out scenes, as in a movie, which bring back this balance. But, of course, that balance is only imaginary, fake, unreal, only meant to show us what is missing in life. Most of us do not understand what the mind is doing, the hints it is giving us about what we are not doing. But we are too dumb to take those hints.

Ten times must thou reconcile with yourself again; for overcoming is bitterness and badly sleep the unreconciled.

Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.

Ten times must thou laugh during the day and be cheerful; otherwise, thou stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee during the night.

 (Neitzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Neitzsche also famously declared in one of his books that 'God is dead'. With utmost love and respect, I beg to differ from Neitzsche on this. But that is a topic for a separate post, which I am dying to do very soon.

So, for now, lets take a few moments every day (throughout the day and especially before going to bed) and see what we are doing, what the so-called Karmic-consequences will be and what we will need to bring back that balance in life.

Lets learn to master the use of that vehicle of utter silence to go back home every day. It is the same vehicle that was used by Jesus, by Mohammad, by Gautum Buddh, by Mahavira, by Lord Krishna, by Rumi, by Kabir, by Nanak and by many other luminaries of the spiritual world. We can learn to use it too. These great ones were like Prometheus (in Greek mythology) who stole fire from gods and brought it to humanity. Similarly, the great wisdom teachers, the prophets, the shamans found this art of attaining great silence and doing deep meditation to come to our original self, to see our original face, to go back home. Jesus called that home the Kingdom of Heaven. Buddha called it nirvana. Mahavira called it moksha. Mohammad called it tawhid. Lao Tzu called it the great tao. They have taught us over the centuries and most of us have not paid too much attention. And that is OK. As a specie, we have not yet reached that place where we collectively, in large numbers, start seeking sanity. We are still in the phase of going through, and coming to terms with, our insanity. Our greed, our attachments, our sounds, our images are too over-powering for us to really pay any attention to the other world, the world of silence. I think one day we will wake up in large numbers and that day will mark the real turning point for the human world. That waking up will be Karmic too.

Karl Marx thought that socialism will come on its own (and not by a CIA-sponsored rebellion) as an evolution of, and withering away of, capitalism. I feel that the great spiritual awakening of man will also come on its own. People like Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Krishna and others saw it and tried to tell people and we didn't listen. But their words changed us and contributed to the great spiritual evolution of man. I feel that going back home (in the spiritual sense of the word) is our destiny. It is the great Karma that so many spiritual traditions have talked about. Some call it the 'second coming of Christ', some call it, the 'final judgement'. There are different names for it. But if you look closely, the concept is similar. We can choose to ignore it for now, but not for too long. And, to be clear, I am not advocating any specific religious belief here. On the contrary, I am trying to go beyond all religions, to the place where there are no religions, there are no images, no words, no beliefs, no attachments, no sounds, just a great big nothingness and silence. And maybe not even that.  

Lets just remember that whenever we want we can start paying a little more attention to our daily life and choose to take our lives into a wholly different dimension, a wholly different direction. If we want to!

If you eat every day, then fast a little every day. If you talk every day, then stay silent for a little while every day. If you work every day, then stay still a little while every day. If you earn money every day, then make it a practice to give some money away every day. Do these and other small balancing acts every day and you might discover a great confidence, a sense of control and an inner peace and bliss emerging somewhere inside.

And I can promise you one thing: you are not going to find a greater treasure anywhere in this world than that peace and bliss that you find inside!  

[thebewisepodcast]

The Most Interesting Possibility About Our Reality

When you read this, you're looking at your computer screen, mobile phone or tablet. 

 You think that you see everything there is to see...

But what if that's not the case?

 Is it possible we only see glimpses of reality? 

A cognitive scientist has put forward an intriguing theory suggesting that we live in a conceptual prison and only see glimpses of reality. 

 This would mean that reality as we perceive it may only be a tiny fraction of true existence.

    How Much Of Reality Do We Perceive?

 There are some scientists, like Dr. Joe Dispenza, D.C who claim that your thoughts create your reality.

 Dr. Dispenza who is a neuroscientist and author of several books such as for example Evolve Your Brain - The Science of Changing Your Mind said that he during his research into spontaneous remissions, discovered and continually sees, similarities in people who have experienced so-called miraculous healings - showing that they have actually changed their mind, which then changed their health.

 In other words, what you think can affect your health.

 Recent studies in neuroscience have shown we can change our brain just by thinking.

   How much do we see of our reality?

  The concept is interesting, but what happens of we do not perceive all of our so-called reality?

 Researchers at the University of Amsterdam suggest that what you see is not real - it's a visual illusion.

 The findings (The Uniformity Illusion - Central Stimuli Can Determine Peripheral Perception) suggest that even though our peripheral vision is less accurate and detailed than what we see in the center of the visual field, we may not notice a qualitative difference because our visual processing system actually fills in some of what we "see" in the periphery.

"Our findings show that, under the right circumstances, a large part of the periphery may become a visual illusion," said psychology researcher Marte Otten from the University of Amsterdam.

   What Is A Conceptual Prison?

 Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, University of California has spent 30 years trying to unravel the mystery of our perception. He is convinced that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.

 Hoffman uses the evolutionary game theory to show our perception of reality is flawed.

"Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. 

 But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don't need to know. And that's pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be," Hoffman said.

 "Evolution isn't about truth, it's about making kids. Every bit of information that you process costs calories, meaning that's more food you need to kill and eat. 

 So, an organism that sees all of reality would never be more fit than one tuned only to see what it needs to survive," he adds.

Hoffman says he became interested in the subject of reality as a teenager.

 He wanted to find out if humans are machines and eventually in the 1980s he went to the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and worked on machine perception.

 He has developed the theory of conscious agents to solve the combination problem of consciousness, both for the combination of subjects and of experiences, but Hoffman does not think we are machines.

"The mystery of how brain activity causes conscious experiences has not yet been solved, and never will be solved, because brain activity does not and cannot cause conscious experiences. 

 If we want to have a scientific understanding of consciousness, and of the many well-documented correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences, then we cannot start with brain activity or physical dynamics of any kind. 

 We must start with a brand new, but rigorous, foundation.

 I propose a new foundation which models consciousness as interacting networks of conscious agents," Hoffman said.

According to Hoffman there's no reason to believe that the objects that we see have any correspondence to things that exist outside our minds.

   Our perceptual system is our window on the world,

 but it's also a conceptual prison.

 Image credit: Glen Santayana  

"The standard view of vision is that we're akin to cameras, taking an image from light reflected off an object," he explains. 

 "But billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are involved between light hitting the retina and the construction of the 3D objects that we perceive."

 "Our perceptual system is our window on the world, but it's also a conceptual prison. It's difficult to conceive a reality outside of space and time. But maths can open up a chink in the walls of that prison.

 I can't imagine a multidimensional space, but I can deal with infinite dimensional space in mathematical form," Hoffman explained.

Reality, according to Hoffman, is a network of conscious agents and by studying the dynamics of this network we can understand how its interactions build up to the perception that we have of a physical world.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's exploration of the extraordinary creative genius of the mind's eye,

"has many virtues, of which sheer intellectual excitement is the foremost" (Nature). 

Hoffman explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience. 

 In an informal style replete with illustrations, Hoffman presents the compelling scientific evidence for vision's constructive powers, unveiling a grammar of vision - a set of rules that govern our perception of line, color, form, depth, and motion.

 Hoffman also describes the loss of these constructive powers in patients such as an artist who can no longer see or dream in color and a man who sees his father as an impostor. 

 Finally, Hoffman explores the spinoffs of visual intelligence in the arts and technology, from film special effects to virtual reality. 

 This is, in sum, 

"an outstanding example of creative popular science".

Source

With the help of mathematics, a recognition of the existence of this perceptual prison brings a freedom to form new theories about the world beyond it. 

 Hoffman identifies two inconsistencies in our perceptually-derived view of the Universe that may offer clues into the structure of reality beneath.

The first: our inability to explain conscious experience, for example, how we get the sensation of what it is like to taste chocolate from the physical material of neurons and chemical messengers. 

 The second: interpretations of quantum mechanics in which states of a particle are indefinite when unobserved - something that calls into question our assumption of objects continuing to exist whether or not anyone is looking at them.

   Is Our Reality A Computer Simulation Created By An Unknown Advanced Life-Form?

 More and more scientists are seriously discussing the nature of our reality. The Holographic Universe theory is becoming very popular.

 One scientists suggested our reality is a hologram controlled by an evil genius.

   Are our creators watching us right now?

  A NASA JPL scientist said that our creator is a cosmic computer programmer and there are even researchers who say they have found evidence our Universe is a big 2D hologram and we are an illusion.

 All these theories are though-provoking and many studies must be conducted before any conclusions can be reached.

 Perhaps it really doesn't matter right now whether we call our world a conceptual prison or a hologram. 

 What matters is that we still cannot determine how much of reality we really perceive, and many would say we cannot even define the term "reality".