#also jason is an atheist change my mind

[scorchedhearth]

i don't know enough about the other characters kyle interact with and their stance on religious beliefs to talk about them, so ill talk about what i know: jason saying to kyle's face 'in god we thrust' with a pointed look after making sure to call him a wannabe god multiple times

[homopessimist]

Okay so I’m in the process of writing a fic comparing the binding of Isaac (the biblical story, not the video game) to Jason’s relationship with his father that’ll be uploaded on Father’s Day but it had me thinking about Isaac parallels with bare.

So to preface, I’ve pretty much been an atheist my whole life and wasn’t raised in a Christian environment. I even went through an annoying reddit phase when I was in middle school, largely in part to being gay, but in current day I have a lot of respect for religion and religious people. More on that later. The point is, despite my atheism, the story of Isaac has always fascinated me, and the fucked up nature of the story kind of reinforced my early dislike of God. What kind of loving God would make a father hurt his own child? And later I realized this hit very close to an experience many have. Parents hurting and disowning their own children for being queer and justifying their actions through religion isn’t a strange concept for many. 

In very early drafts of bare there are a few references to Isaac in the text. In Claire’s introduction in Epiphany in a 2000 workshop, she says:

Our first reading today is the story of Abraham and Sarah In which Sarah learns she's to bear a child

Referring to how despite their old age, (Abraham is about 99 I think?) Abraham and Sarah manage to have a child. As a result of the absurd circumstances of his birth, the child is named Isaac, which is roughly translated to something along the lines of “he who laughs” from Hebrew. This also reflects Peter’s firstborn and only child status, which is important to Claire because if he’s gay then she won’t have grandchildren. (Mind you, I’m not a fan of this Claire presented in LA 2000 because she’s written a lot less sympathetic)

In bare’s very early 1999 demos, Are You There and Confession are replaced by Cut From The Same Cloth, which changes the scene to Peter confessing being gay to the Priest. In this version, the Priest is gay and is conflicted about whether or not to give Peter the assurance he needs or to follow the doctrines of the church (much like how his future iterations would hide behind a screen, knowing how much empathy might mean to Jason). The song basically serves the role of God Don’t Make No Trash where Peter receives positive assurance from an authoritative religious figure. In it, The Priest uses Isaac as a metaphor for his struggle with what to do with Peter.

I still can feel young Isaac's fear as if I held the knife That'd slash the heart that beat for boys which I said was a crime He gave his plea on bended knee A young me in his prime

“That'd slash the heart that beat for boys” Incredible lyrics, thank you Jon Hartmere. Are You There and Confession make more sense for the overall narrative, and the Priest being an antagonistic figure to Jason in Cross makes more sense for the thesis and the Romeo & Juliet parallels, but this is still a really good lyric I can’t help but gush over.

Anyways, I know I’m writing a fic about Jason as Isaac, but the idea of Peter as Isaac is so fascinating to me. I can’t find the source for it, but one interpretation I found regarding the sacrifice of Isaac went something like, “The world will try to sacrifice you, but God won’t,” and it stuck with me. God stays Abraham’s hand at the end, after all. The fact that Peter remains faithful in God and keeps his idealistic outlook despite everything that happens in the opera is such an important message, especially for queer audiences who feel like Isaac, about to be sacrificed on the altar. His moment in Absolution where he forgives The Priest reinforces that his love for Jason isn’t sinful but is in fact the conclusion of his faith. I said before that I respect religion despite being an atheist. It is my utmost belief that what is most important is that you find something that you believe in. Whether that’s religion, or politics, or whatever. Something that makes you believe that life is worth preserving, and that happiness and kindness are things you should cultivate in others. And Peter does exactly that. In a world that’s so cruel and unkind to people like him, Peter sings. Peter’s unwavering optimism is so necessary and is a large part of why he’s one of my favorite fictional characters. 

He who laughs, indeed

[butwhyduh]

Jumping

Tim drake x reader

This is during the time that Dick has to fake his own death. I’m also ignoring most of canon tbh. Mentions suicide ideals.

You worried about Tim. I mean, you always had since you met him in a coffee shop and they gave him your order instead of his and all he did was ask for a shot of espresso to go with it. But tonight you were terribly concerned because Tim was so sad that he was dull. His shiny black hair hang limp and his bright blue eyes looked dull and blood shot.

You couldn’t exactly blame him. It was only 2 week before that his brother Dick had died. He hadn’t touched his computer all day but instead sat staring at various places around his apartment. You forced him to eat a very late meal and he took all of 3 bite from his food.

You washed up and went back in the living room for him to be gone.

“Tim? Tim?” You asked. You noticed the window to the fire escape was open. You walked over and shivered at the cold breeze.

He was standing on the edge of the roof and you froze. Your first thought was ‘is he going to jump?’ Your heart pounded as you gently called him and it scared you even more when he didn’t respond.

“Tim? Timothy? Tim, what are you doing?” You said with fear creeping in your voice. There was no way that you could climb the stairs up a level to stop him if he jumped right now. He looked down at you disoriented.

“What?”

“Please step back. You’re- you’re scaring me. Tim, please,” you said and he took a step back but looked bewildered. You quickly climbed the stairs.

“What’s wrong?” He asked in a daze. You pulled him into a hug and farther from the edge. Your body was shaking and he confusingly pat your back reassuringly.

“Don’t scare me like that,” you chided him before mentally kicking yourself. If he was that bad, he needed support not anger. He really didn’t seem to get it.

“What are you talking about? What’s got you so scared?” He finally said clearly.

“I thought- I thought you were going to jump,” you said burying your head in crook of his neck. Your fingers gripped the back of his shirt tightly and you listened to his heartbeat. You might never let go of him.

“Oh shit. I wasn’t- no. I just needed to think,” he said rubbing your hair gently. “Sorry I scared you.”

“It’s okay. I’m just worried. It’s a lot to lose your brother. Maybe you should talk to someone,” you said gently. He looked at you guiltily.

“I’ve been a little too lost in it, hu? Sorry. It’s just that.... I never expected this to happen. He always seemed invincible. He’d jump off the roof with no hooks or nets and swing on light poles before landing on the ground and wouldn’t hurt a thing. He’d take on metas and come out unscathed. That was just Dick, you know?” Tim said after a minute. “Nobody knew how he did it.”

Tim pulled you both to sit on a lawn chair on the roof. Your fingers played with the back of his hair and you couldn’t stop looking at him because you had never been so worried to lose Tim before. He flinched at the sight of how you looked at him. You were genuinely terrified earlier.

“I wouldn’t jump. I wouldn’t do that. Especially not to you,” Tim said and it scared you that you weren’t sure if he meant that he’d never do it or not where you’d possibly see. “Don’t worry. I’m right here.”

You let yourself believe that and you leaned into him, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat calmed you and you listened to it as he rubbed your back. He stared out at the sky and Tim didn’t know how long you were both out there before he noticed that you had fallen asleep. He smiled a little.

Then his next thought was the logistics of getting you down to your bed without waking you. The fire escape wasn’t exactly built for carrying people through. Soft goosebumps were on your arms in the cold and Tim carefully picked you up and miraculously made it back into your apartment. After a few hair raising seconds where he almost smacked your head and feet on a door frame, he managed to get you in bed.

You hands had a death grip on his shirt and Tim was pulled into bed. It wasn’t the worst idea to get some sleep. And he certainly felt that he owed you some peace of mind after he scared you so bad. When was the last time he fell asleep? He laid back and you clung to him tightly.

The next morning you woke up warm. Far too warm. And arm was thrown over your face that you wiggled out from under and another held your back. You stretched your fingers that felt like they had been gripping something all night. The sun was out and Tim was still in bed. You put the pieces from the night before together and looked up at his face.

There was no scowl or wrinkle in his brow. He looked peaceful. His lips had a slight pout in sleep. His face had a light smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks and his hair had fallen over his eyes. You gently brushed it back to get a better look at his beautiful face. You held the back of his head as light as you could while staring at him. You almost never got this view and you just watched him sleep for a few minutes.

“Isn’t it rude to stare,” he said after a while. You jumped a little and laughed.

“Did I wake you?” You asked.

“No. I think I actually got a full night sleep,” Tim said and he still hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Yeah, we should probably get breakfast,” you said moving to get up. Tim wrapped his arms around you tighter and squished you to his chest. You squeaked.

“Not yet. A few more minutes,” he mumbled almost back asleep. You chuckled and booped his nose. Tim’s eyes flew open. “What was that?”

“Waking you up,” you said and he gave you a fake glare before his arms slowly moved. Then Tim attacked your sides with a tickle. You shrieked and jumped back before he stopped. He smiled at you almost ruefully before gently kissing you chastely. His smile fell when he pulled back.

“I’ve got to go to Bludhaven today. Take care of some of his stuff that he’d want to keep,” Tim said and you frowned.

“Do you need me to go?” You were still worried about him.

“No, Jason is going. Don’t worry about me, okay,” Tim said seriously. “I need to get up because he’ll be here in 30 minutes? Maybe?”

The knock on the door said that his timing was a little off. Tim got up to go answer it. Jason stood there and he frowned as he looked Tim over.

“That’s your clothes from yesterday.”

“I’ve got to change,” Tim said, letting him in. You came out of the room with a sweater over your clothes and smiled at Jason who nodded his head at you. Tim went in the bedroom to change.

“Hey,” you whispered, barely audible. Jason looked at you confused. You hadn’t really interacted much before. “Watch out for him. He’s not okay. Alright?”

Jadon just nodded. “Anything I should know?”

“No. Not really. He scared me last night,” you admitted as you put on a pot of coffee. Jason gave you a look that clearly read ‘do I need to kick his ass?’

“What did he do?”

“He just stood on the roof edge. I thought- I thought he was going to jump,” you whispered and Jason’s face dropped. Tim hadn’t exactly had the most self preservation in his history.

“Shit, seriously?” He said with a sigh. You nodded.

“But he just seemed confused when I found him. I’m worried. Just watch out for him, okay?” You said.

“What are you two talking about?” Tim said walking in the room, throwing on a tie.

“Really? A full suit?” Jason said rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, one of us needs to look like a functional adult in case someone stops by. I can’t exactly wear sweats everywhere as WE’s CEO,” Tim said. You straightened the tie and collar.

“... and then there is you,” Tim said looking at Jason after you were done. “You look like you tattoo out of the back parking lot of a Denny’s.”

“Maybe I do,” he said dryly with a little curl to his lip. “Come on. We don’t want to be late.”

Tim nodded and gave you a kiss and Jason groaned by the door. He gave the ‘come on’ hand gesture. Tim rolled his eyes.

“I don’t know when I’m going to be back. See you later.”

“Bye.”

Half ways down the highway, with Tim as a captive audience, Jason starts to talk.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Cut the shit. For real,” Jason said, violently passing a slow car on the highway in his truck. Tim grips the dash and is sure he’s going to die.

“I’m fine. Why do you think I’m lying?” Tim said through gritted teeth. Jason keeps driving roughly.

“Well, your girlfriend thought you were going to kill yourself last night and that isn’t exactly the first thought I’d have if I saw you on the roof. So either she’s being dramatic or you’re acting really off. Which is it, Timbo?” Jason said. Tim never missed Dick more. Jason had the subtly of a butter knife to the gut.

“I might be a little sadder, sure. I mean, my brother died,” Tim said. “Can you drive without trying to kill us?”

“I’m driving fine. Go on,” Jason said, crossing 3 lanes. The squeals of car horns behind them tell Tim he isn’t the only one that doesn’t like his driving.

“I’m gonna die in this car,” Tim muttered. Jason glared at him. “Watch the road! Okay. Fine. I feel numb. Okay? Like I don’t feel happy or sad about anything. And I’m fucking guilty because I should be over the moon because I just moved in with my girlfriend and then...”

“Then your brother died. It’s normal to feel like shit Tim. But to be numb.... you ever think you’re depressed?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know. I have anxiety,” Tim answered.

“You can have both. Is it this exit or the next?” Jason asked two second before the ramp comes up.

“This!” Tim yelped and Jason turned them off to a side road going at least 70 mph. Tim held the dash and considered praying despite being an atheist. Jason finally slowed down enough to not look like he’s driving a getaway car.

“I think you should see a therapist. I can give you mine’s number,” Jason said and Tim quickly turned to look at him.

“I didn’t know you went to therapy.”

“I was tortured, beat to death, and had to dig myself out of my own coffin. Does that seem mentally okay in anyway?”

“I mean, no. But I don’t know,” Tim said with a shrug. He just hadn’t thought about it.

“Anyways that’s not the point. The point is that she’s used to Gotham’s brand of bullshit and will help you. Okay?” Jason said driving into a parking lot and skidding into a space. “If you scare your girl like that again, I’ll knock you out.”

“Yeah. I won’t scare her again. It was an accident. And I’ll talk to your therapist,” Tim agreed. Jason nodded.

“Let’s go do something I’ve been dreading all week. Clean out golden boy’s apartment,” he said with a grimace. And they did. Anything of value was personally taken by the pair. Anything of Nightwing or Robin. Any Flying Grayson stuff. Anything that his brothers had gotten him. A moving service was moving the rest to a storage unit later that day.

Jason sat on the concrete steps outside the apartment and tossed Tim a beer. Tim barely caught it before sitting down himself. Jason pulled out his own.

“Jason, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars to not drink that before we leave. Can we have this moment at the manor after we survive the drive home?” Tim asked and Jason sighed.

“Sure kid. Dickhead wouldn’t have liked me getting you drunk anyways. Let’s get this stuff back,” Jason said and they both went to the truck.

After dropping off the stuff and talking to Alfred, Tim and Jason were back in the truck. The beers were mercifully forgotten. Jason passed him a paper with a name and number.

“My therapist. You better call them. If not for you, for your girlfriend. You can just talk and shit,” he said not looking off the road. Jason knew better than to think that this kind of thing could be done for someone else. But he also knew it probably only took a tiny push for Tim to get help.

“Yeah, thanks.”

A few hours later Tim sat on his bed with his phone in hand. Yeah, he needed to call them.

[lunapaper]

Album Review: 'Justice' - Justin Bieber

So did Justin Bieber change direction? Will he do his latest album... justice?

Uh...

Released a mere 13 months after the bland and tiresome Changes, the Canadian singer delivers yet another set of mawkish love ballads and Top 40-baiting pop to remind us all once again that he really, really, truly, madly, deeply loves his wife Hailey Baldwin and of his commitment to God.

On ‘Deserve You,’ he admits: ‘When I'm in my thoughts sometimes/It's hard to believe I'm the person you think I am/The person that you tell me you love.’ He’s even ‘off my face in love with you,’ replacing one vice for another as he finds himself stoned after one touch of Mrs Bieber. On the skittering, soaring ‘Ghost,’ he vows: ‘If I can't be close to you/I'll settle for the ghost of you.’

Bieber also pledges to die for her, to walk through fire ‘even if your kiss would kill me,’ on ‘Somebody,’ be the shoulder for her to cry on, and even calls he ‘the only good thing I’ve ever done’ on ‘Anyone’ as they dance under a sky full of diamonds.

‘Love You Different,’ however, leaves nothing to the imagination: ‘Under covers ain’t no rubbers/ On this planet I’ll treat you like a mother/ Let’s make babies.’

If it was just a couple of love songs dedicated to his wife, it’d be fine, but one after the other, at this level of co-dependency and self-loathing from a now 27-year-old Bieber, is just suffocating and kind of frightening. Then again, Homer did say complete and utter dependence is a ‘wonderous, marvellous thing’...

The breezy ‘Peaches,’ meanwhile (ft. Daniel Caesar and Giveon) is carefully tailored to be a potential Song of the Summer, this time praising Georgia-grown produce and California weed alongside his wife. It’s like a more grown-up version of that ‘you gotta keep your head up, oh-woah’ song, with just a dash of Maroon 5’s ‘Sunday Morning.’

Then there’s previous single ‘Holy’ (ft. fellow wife-lover, Chance the Rapper), a sweeping gospel pop ode sampling, of all things, Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,’ that sees Bieber ‘runnin' to the altar like a track star.’ But this goofy eagerness for The Lord is outmatched by some even goofier lines from Chance, like this one: ‘Life is short with a temper like Joe Pesci.’ As both an Italian and a music lover, I just can’t abide. Then again, Chance really doesn’t like criticism, so that probably explains its first draft-like quality....

Look, I have no problem with religion or spirituality of any kind (Except for Hillsong, ‘cos fuck Hillsong, fuck Morrison and fuck prosperity gospel). I don’t even consider myself an atheist. It can help provide guidance and comfort in troubling times, as it’s done for Bieber. It’s also quite ironic that I post this review on Good Friday... But like a lot of born-again types, he must espouse his religious beliefs at every single turn, in the most preachy and insufferable way possible; there's just no in between.

Justice also sees Bieber attempt to restyle himself as some sort of humanitarian – by sampling the powerful words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

But rather than use them to speak out against racial injustice or police brutality, they’re merely used to prop up Bieber’s overwrought declarations of love on piano ballad ‘2 Much’ and on an interlude halfway through the album... which is immediately followed by ‘Die For You’ (ft. Dominic Fike), dedicated yet again to Hailey.

Although he admits that ‘I know that I cannot simply solve injustice by making music, but I do know that if we all do our part by using our gifts to serve this planet, and each other, that we are that much closer to being united,’ Bieber’s social conscience rings hollow, nothing but a gross, vapid, self-indulgent attempt to capture the cultural zeitgeist. It's corporate brand wokeness; the bare minimum when it typically comes to celebrity activism. Or maybe this is some weird way of atoning for the awfulness of ‘Yummy’ and trying to game the Spotify algorithm. That he didn’t anticipate such backlash in the first place is also pretty galling.

Even the album’s title is perplexing: What justice is Bieber fighting for, exactly? The right to bone Hailey Baldwin? The right to dedicate soppy ballads to her?

But, like Changes, there are a few diamonds in the rough.

The hazy, drum-powered atmospherics of ‘Deserve You’ could’ve easily sat alongside Purpose’s biggest hits, like a softer, slower take on Jason Derulo’s ‘Cheyenne.’ ‘Unstable’ (ft. The Kid LAROI) is sparse and ghostly with those ‘Another Day in Paradise’-like vibes.

‘Die For You’s intensity is matched by punchy 80s synths. ‘Somebody’ (produced by Skrillex) is also urgent and feverish, given some extra grit with some power pop riffs and murky percussion, while the glitchy ‘Love You Different’ (ft. BEAM) is as bold and vibrant as ‘Sorry,’ combining garage-inspired beats with dancehall swagger.

If Bieber had just stripped away all the cheesy ballads and stuck with the 80s synthpop, he probably could’ve turned Justice into his very own After Hours (not nearly as good, mind you, but still better than... this).

Justice is not nearly as profound as Justin Bieber thinks it is, his latest album once again let down by cheesy, uninspired lyrics and a lack of focus as he relies on a grab bag of styles: early MTV-style New Wave, tropical pop, RnB, pop rock. Although the acoustic ballads are, thankfully, kept to a minimum and the production is just as slick, with much stronger collaborators for the singer to bounce off (Then again, just about anyone is an improvement on fuckin’ Lil Dicky...)

Like Changes, it’s also about five or six tracks too long. Hell, there’s no less than four deluxe editions of Justice: The Target Exclusive, The Walmart Exclusive, The Alternate Version (featuring one extra track), and The Triple Chucks Deluxe. It’s so fuckin’ shameless, but what do you expect from the guy who released ‘Yummy’?

His quest for TikTok notoriety blew up in his face. His attempt to ‘continue the conversation of what justice looks like’ is hollow and plain tone-deaf. His syrupy, obsessive odes to his wife have more than grown thin at this point. If he doesn’t gain some self-awareness soon, then It’s hard to know just where Bieber goes from here...

- Bianca B.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #325

tired of seeing me in the survey tag yet? lmao me too

Would you date someone who’s shorter than you? I have absolutely never understood why there would be any correlation between someone's height and whether or not you would date the person because of it. What, do you think the person has any control over that? So basically, yes, I would, without a second thought. Have you ever fallen in love on the Internet? "Fallen in love," no. I had to meet Sara first to see how we meshed in the same environment. Have you ever had a crush on your best friend’s sweetie? Yes, hence the Joel mess. Have you ever had a controlling boyfriend? No. Good luck getting me to date someone like that. Can guys be sluts? Who the fuck cares so long as the person is safe and open with their partner. Ever had a crush on your best girlfriend? Twice now, haha. Would you ever kiss someone who’s taken? No, I'm not that kind of person. Do you mind being the third wheel? I don't care, really, so long as my friend doesn't totally ignore me. I very much enjoy seeing people in love. Has a kiss ever made you weak in the knees? Yes. Have you ever been in a love triangle? No, and I absolutely would not if I was aware. You pick me or you leave me alone. Do you feel comfortable buying condoms? I've never had to, but I'd probably feel a hint of awkwardness. Have you ever run into your ex with his/her new partner? No, and the only case where that would be a problem would be with Jason. I know in my heart I would feel at least some hatred towards her. Have you ever felt guilty after doing something sexual? Yep, when I was first actually getting truly sexual and felt like I was betraying my "abstinence." Would you stay friends with your sweetie’s friends if you broke up? I'm still friends with Jacob, mine and Jason's former roommate and his then-close friend. So yeah. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I hope more than words can explicate that I have a stable job that I love, my driver's license, and my own place with a long-term partner, since I think living alone would be very detrimental to me. I also hope I have much better control over my social anxiety. Oh, and can I PLEASE be fit again? What was the last thing you bought for less than a dollar? No idea. Who was the last person in your bed? My niece Aria was sitting on it with me. I miss Misty's kids. Do you have a nice phone? Not particularly, but it does the job. Is Marilyn Manson creepy or cool? I find him creepy in a cool way, haha. Well, at least aesthetically. With his recent sexual assault (or abuse? idr) allegations however, I don't know how I feel about him because I don't know the facts. I really should actually read up about it. Regardless, I love his music; he's one of my favorite musical artists. Do you like talking to strangers? Depends on my mood and the person. Do you have OCD? Yes. Are you clumsy or graceful? I'm clumsy as all getout. Have you ever ran into a door because you didn’t know it was closed? Haha, no. Have you ever woke up and didn’t know where you were? After my cyst removal surgery, I was confused for a moment or so. Do you own a Wii? Yep. Do you like to talk about yourself? Depends on with whom, the subject, and my mood. Has anyone ever called you conceited? No; I'm very much on the other end of the spectrum. Tattoos or piercings? I love both, but tats win. Have you ever had ants ruin your picnic? I’ve never had a picnic. At least that I remember. What’s the last gross movie/show/video you saw? Recently, I watched The Dark Den dissect his recently-deceased tarantula to figure out why she died. It was serious impaction, and it was disgusting. Would you rather live in a huuuge house or a little cozy one? A lil cozy one! Not TOO small, though. I'd feel claustrophobic. Have you ever blow dried something other then your hair? Maybe? What is your favorite piece of equipment at gyms? Treadmills. Do you have a tutor for anything? No. Does your sibling(s) have braces? My older sister did for a little while. Did you tell your last girlfriend/boyfriend that you love them? Yes. What was the last thing your parents got mad at you for? Apparently I somehow forgot to wipe crumbs off the kitchen counter. Have you ever had a bathing suit fall off of you while swimming? Not a suit, no, but when I wore bikinis and I jumped into the pool, it's happened before where my top would go up. I'd obviously fix it super quick. Do your pets have favorites? I'm absolutely Roman's favorite, but he loves Mom, too. I'm the only one who interacts with Venus. What’s the longest you’ve ever liked someone without telling them? A very long time. I had a big crush on Girt my freshman year, and some time after Jason, my crush for him came back, but he didn't ask me out until years later. Turns out we'd been friends just too long and the relationship felt too weird for me, so I broke up with him after I think... four months or so? We're still great friends. That's my bro. Did you prank anyone on April Fool’s Day? I never do anymore. I don't like pranks. What’s the sweetest thing a gf/bf can do to get you to forgive them? Changed behavior. Do you dislike when surveys ask to describe your underwear? Well, I'm almost always in my pajamas, sooo I generally don't even have any at that moment. Did you check to see how much fat/calories was in the last thing you ate? No. If the last person you kissed gave you roses, what would you do? Blush and thank her. Anything happened lately that you never expected to? "Never?" No. Are you the person you thought you’d be when you were younger? I'm a massive disappointment and embarrassment to that little girl. Are you a confrontational person, or the peacekeeper? I am absolutely a peacekeeper. I avoid confrontation like the plague. The last time you did something with BOTH of your parents was? They've been divorced since I was I think 17 and I am now 25, so... Do you like pumpkin pie? Absolutely not. Do you believe in any conspiracies? I am 100% sold on that the government had some involvement in 9/11. Look into the evidence - there is an overwhelming amount. There are others that I consider as possible, but no others do I absolutely believe. I'm around 50/50 on the simulation theory. Do you have a little sister? What’s her name? Yeah, Nicole. Have you ever changed yourself to impress someone? Who? Nah. Who was the last person you gave up on? Why did you give up on them? Colleen. We simply butted heads way too much, and she just had this volatile meanness towards others I couldn't watch anymore. What was the last thing you printed? Is there even ink in your printer? Probably a paper for when I was in school. I don't know if our printer does. Have you ever gotten your nails done? Or do you get them done regularly? Yeah, with Colleen and then another time with my sisters. It was really just to hang with them, though. It's not something I'm interested in. Have you been outside yet today? What were you doing? Nope. When was the last time you got a new bed? Is your bed comfy? Not since I was an older teen did I get Mom's bed, but it wasn't new. This was actually her parents' bed, too. Well I mean, the mattress obviously isn't that old, but the bed itself is pretty ancient. It's comfy enough. Do you remember the first time you ever drove a car? Who were you with? Yes: on the dead-end road that led to our old house. I was with Mom obviously and probably my sister, since I think I did it on the way home from school. Do any of your friends drink excess amounts of alcohol? Do you? Not to my knowledge. I definitely don't. Have you ever been in handcuffs? Why, exactly? Yes, because it's mandatory when being transported to a mental hospital. What’s your favorite thing to do when drunk? Would you do this sober? Never been drunk before. When was the last time you bled? What happened? Well it's my time of the month, so. Are you a fan of dogs? Do you have any pets? I love dogs, but don't currently have one as a pet. Mom's looking intently. How often do you bathe? I'm going to be completely transparent and say not as much as I should. Doing my hair is fine, but moving all around, bending and propping my legs up exhausts my legs so much that I avoid showers as long as I can take it or until I have to go somewhere. I want strength back in my body. So. Badly. Do you have any tattoos? What, where and why? I have six that I'm not all explaining, but locations: right upper arm, right inner wrist, left inner forearm, left upper arm, right collarbone, left breast. What do you wear to bed at home? Pajama pants and a tank top. What do you wear to bed when you're somewhere else? Pj pants, tank top, and usually a bra, depending on where I'm at and with who. Do you have any phobias? What? Why do you think you have this/them? I have a lot, but I'll discuss my strangest/strongest: pregnancy, maggots, parasites, and whale sharks. Pregnancy would be because a fetus is technically parasitic, and, to cover that topic, I'm just generally terrified of anything living in MY body. I also find it absolutely disgusting to see a baby move from the outside. I will actually scream if I see this, and that is not an exaggeration. I'm afraid of maggots (larva in general, really) because I think they're just disgusting, and I once brought something in from outside and put it in my dresser (idr why), and one day I opened it and reached in for something just to find lots of little larva squirming around. That's when it started. Now, whale sharks: it's literally because of World of Warcraft, hahaha. There's an underwater zone in the game where they roam as boss enemies, and their mouths look so weird and are actually a bit toothy. Irl, they just have mouths that are just way too big for my comfort. I know they're entirely harmless, but still. If you could ask God (to atheists - IF there was one) one question, what? "Why." Why so much evil, pain, and unfairness. Briefly describe your family. Kinda broken, but still loving and try to stay close. Big "ohana" mood: everyone's loyalty is endless. Where do you stand on the death penalty? For it in extreme cases. Where do you stand on wearing fur? Disgusting and horribly morbid unless for survival purposes in cold climates. Could you kill somebody? In self-defense, yes. What are your political beliefs (anarchy, communism, democracy etc.)? I just say I'm Independent. My beliefs stretch over so many titles; plus, I'm not very educated on all types and what they entail. What, if anything, WOULD you sacrifice your life for? To save those I love most. How would your ideal partner look? *shoves picture of Mark Fischbach in ur face* Would you ever have an affair? Nope. I'm telling you: pick me or leave me be. I'm not a side-chick. Would you ever have a one night stand? Also no. What one thing would you change in this world (free Tibet, abolish Sweden)? Honestly... probably abolish all militaries. I do not in the least support war, and it's just... sad to know countries stand ready to kill the moment they "need" to. Distrust seems to make the world go 'round. Sure, a country may try to rebuild them in secrecy, but that's a preeeetty big thing to succeed in keeping under wraps. "But what if a terrorist or something rises?" I'm quite sure we could handle that without an full-on army. Maybe I'm not well-informed on this topic, but I've just never supported military presence. I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR AS DAY, I have endless respect for veterans and aspiring soldiers, because I DO understand the mentality of wanting to protect your home, but yeah. I just wish it wasn't a thing. Would you ever choose a career or job where your life was at risk? Nope. Do you have any famous relatives? Ancestors, yes, and I have a distant cousin who wrote a fantastic book, if that counts. Are you a loyal member of any organizations? No. Desired weight: At MOST 140. :/ I'd like to be closer to 120, but I'll take 140. What are your opinions on marijuana legalization? Legalize it, but treat it similarly to alcohol, like prohibiting driving high, obviously. What do you think about tipping at restaurants? Tip a minimum, and THEN increase according to service quality. Are you addicted to anything? Soda. Would you ever get back together with any of your exes? Yes. Never mind what gender you ARE, what gender do you WANT to be? I'm a female and content with that. Do you ever feel ashamed revealing your age? Yes, considering how behind I am in just being an adult. What does your parents call you? Generally just "Britt." Mom occasionally still calls me "Twinkie." ;-; Has anyone ever threatened you with a knife? Wow, no. Do you ever watch The Simpsons? No. What’s the last thing to make you scream? Truly scream, a mix of depression and anger. I screamed into my pillow. Do you play games with boys/girls, like ‘hard to get’? I'm an adult. I'm a tease in some romantic situations, but "hard to get" is definitely the wrong term.

[nellie-elizabeth]

The Good Place: Whenever You're Ready (4x13/14)

Okay yeah I cried cried cried. That was powerful.

Cons:

I don't really have the heart to nitpick and critique this finale. It was as good an ending to a TV show as I've seen in a very long time.

I guess... I wish it was longer?

Pros:

Just conceptually, this version of the afterlife is so freakin' gorgeous and ideal and even though I'm an atheist and don't think there's an afterlife, I... hope this is what the afterlife is like?

It just... works, on every conceivable level. Think about it. You die, and then you get to go through simulations where you learn about yourself, where you learn to improve and be a kinder, better person. And then after that, you get to go to a fun place where you can live whatever kind of life you want with absolutely no worries - the conventional dream of Heaven. You can be peaceful, or you can learn new things, you can achieve goals, you can repair relationships with people from your life on Earth. You can do whatever you want, for as long as you want. But after that, you go into the great unknown, and are finally, fully, at rest. We even see a hint of what these souls do when they're at rest - they linger within humanity, inspiring people to do better, to be better, thus continuing the cycle.

How... perfect. It's an afterlife built around the thought that effort is important. That trying is what really matters. We see all of the different ways it can manifest. We see that some people take forever, we see a snippet of Brent still trying to learn and grow but not there yet... but other characters, like Tahani's sister and parents, eventually do improve and heal through the program, and get to have a meaningful reconciliation, their family complete at last.

And then there's the paradise part, where we see different goals and dreams coming to life. Tahani spends her afterlife in self-improvement, learning new skills. I like that she doesn't have a shoe-horned romance, and that hers is a life that is fulfilled without the necessity of a single life/afterlife companion. And she doesn't go into that great beyond. We don't get to learn Tahani's "ultimate" fate. She becomes an Architect and spends at least a part of her eternity helping other people to improve, thus fulfilling the purpose she pretended to have on Earth. I like that her story feels unfinished, in a way. Maybe someday she goes through the final door. Maybe she doesn't. It's okay that we don't know.

Jason plays a perfect game of Madden, he gets to hang out with his dad and the rest of his dance crew, he gets to have a meaningful and loving relationship with Janet. And then, after letting his thoughts go blank and spending several Jeremy Bearimys alone with his thoughts (like a monk), he goes through the final doorway, off to bring encouragement to some soul back on Earth.

I loved the fake-out, where Jason is the first to leave, but then it turns out he hung around to give Janet the necklace he made for her. He was ready to leave, but he also didn't mind sticking around. Eternity means there's no harm in waiting. And it was such a fun callback for him to achieve the spiritual peace of being a monk, when that was a part of his deception and fear during season one.

Chidi's section of the episode is the part that made me bawl. See, the thing is, this show never really gave me "feels" about the characters in the way that other shows do... but that's because it gave me more... conceptual feels. I loved watching... love happen on the screen in front of me, more so than I was invested in the specifics of Chidi and Eleanor's romance. But this - the very concept of this - Chidi being ready to move on, but sticking around for Eleanor. Eleanor selfishly holding on to that love, and then learning that she owes it to Chidi to let go. And then... Chidi sharing with Eleanor a Buddhist idea of death - that life is like a wave, and death is returning to the ocean. The wave was just... a different way for the water to be, for a while.

God, I don't know what it was, but that thought... it soothed something in me. It touched me, spiritually, because of the journey we've watched these characters go on for so long. They got to have as much of an eternity as they wanted. They got to be fulfilled in every way that they wanted to be, and then they got to return to the ocean, from whence they came.

I'm also obsessed with Michael's ending. He begins to feel unfulfilled as an Architect, and so the next logical step is for him to become a human, and go through the system like anyone else. I particularly loved that Eleanor pointed out to him that there's no guarantee - the system has been working, but what if Shawn changes it? What if something goes wrong? Michael has to make that leap of faith, and as he reminds Eleanor, the very fact of his unknowing is an essential part of being human. We see him living his life on Earth. Good days, bad days, days in between. And we don't get to watch him live out the remainder of his life, die, go through the system, get his eternity, and walk through the final door. But we can have faith that that's what happens, and that faith is enough.

Janet isn't a human, and she doesn't want to be a human, so we've got another ambiguous/unfulfilled ending with her. I like the moment early on, when she talks about how she experiences time differently from humans. For her, she's everywhere and every time at once. So there's not really any tragedy to the thought of her existing on in perpetuity, befriending and existing among humans forever more. She formed really meaningful bonds with Jason and the others in the Soul Squad, so she'll do it again. She'll grow and love and continue to be not a girl, not a robot. It's lovely.

Sometimes show finales can feel like curtain calls, and this episode certainly had a lot of guest appearances from characters we've gotten to know over the years. Each one felt intentional and worthy of inclusion. I loved seeing Simone again, and John, albeit briefly. I loved seeing Mindy, and knowing that she too goes through the process for self-improvement. Her parallels with Eleanor helped to show how much our protagonist has grown as well. Derek was hilarious. Tahani's family was great. We got mentions of Eleanor and Chidi's mothers, too. Vicky was there. The Judge. Shawn. The list goes on.

And then Eleanor. Her journey is so stunning. There's something so relatable about the fact that she's the last to be ready to move on. And that she's not sure what she needs to do to feel fulfilled. I... felt that. I understood it on some deep level. It meant so much to me that Eleanor's fulfillment wasn't any one thing, any more than Tahani's or Chidi's. Living an eternity with Chidi wasn't it. Helping Mindy wasn't it. Helping Michael... that was the thing that finally tipped it for her, but it wasn't just that alone. It was a combination of all of those things.

I loved this finale so very much. It was powerful in a way I don't know how to describe. I've often found that finales of TV shows can either be astoundingly good, or incredibly disappointing. They are very rarely somewhere in the middle. This one was astoundingly good, and I'm so happy.

10/10

I have to review this show as a whole. Sure, I can think of things I would have changed, ways it could have been stronger, more exactly my own cup of tea. I could have used more queer representation. I could have used less memory wipes and re-sets in seasons two and three. But these things don't change the fact that this show had a very clear message. A very powerful philosophy. And it made a very persuasive argument for the ideas it espoused. I want the world to work like this. I want humanity to work like this. I want people to have the chance to grow, and change, and I want to acknowledge that it's not always easy, that it often involves a lot of time, and that it requires help from others. I'm so happy I watched this show. I'll definitely be recommending it to people for a very long time.

My over-all rating is...

9.5/10

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Secret Identity, our regular column on identity and its role in politics and policy.

In the last edition of this column we looked at “electability” as a concept, and some of its more problematic undertones. This week, let’s explore the nuts and bolts of electability — what factors make someone more (or less) likely to win an election. I know everyone is thinking about this question in terms of who the Democrats should nominate to take on President Trump in 2020, but I want to explore both presidential races and down-ballot contests, since we have much more data on the latter.

First, two really important caveats. One, there have been only 58 presidential elections in U.S. history. That’s a fairly limited data set — and one of the main reasons why you should be skeptical when someone confidently suggests one potential presidential aspirant is more or less electable than another. Second, the way we think and talk about politics often overemphasizes candidates and campaign strategies and underplays what political scientists refer to as the fundamentals — factors like the state of the economy and which party controls the White House at the time of the election. One view of the 2008 election, for example, is that Barack Obama ran a brilliant campaign that overcame America’s racial divides. Another view is that once Obama won the Democratic nomination he was virtually a lock — the GOP was trying to win a third straight presidential term, which is generally hard to do, and there was a stock market crash a few weeks before the election.

With those caveats in mind, I’m going to start with a Gallup poll from 2015, because I think it’s telling in some important ways. Gallup asked people if they would vote for a presidential candidate from their own party if the person were “well-qualified” and were, say, Muslim, or Jewish or a socialist. (Gallup had 11 categories in all.) More than 90 percent of Americans said they would vote for a woman, a black candidate, a Jewish candidate or a Latino candidate, while fewer than 10 percent said they would not. By this measure, women and nonwhite candidates are pretty electable. (People could be lying to pollsters, but let’s take people at their word for now. And even so, 7 or 8 percent of the electorate isn’t nothing.)

Who would Americans NOT vote for?

Percentage of people in 2015 survey who would not vote for a “generally well-qualified” person nominated from their own party if they had each of the following characteristics

Democrat Republican Overall Socialist 38% 73% 50% Atheist 35 55 40 Muslim 27 54 38 Evangelical Christian 33 14 25 Gay or lesbian 14 38 24 Mormon 21 16 18 Hispanic 6 9 8 Woman 3 9 8 Black 4 9 7 Jewish 6 5 7 Catholic 5 7 6

Source: GALLUP

In contrast, 50 percent of Americans said they would not back a socialist candidate. More than a third were opposed to an atheist or Muslim candidate.1 Similarly, in a Pew Research Center 2016 survey, more than 40 percent of Americans said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is Muslim and more than half said they would be wary of someone who did not believe in God.2

So, if you want to have a conversation about whether an atheist or Muslim candidate for national office is “electable,” you at least have some data to support asking the question. (The better way to phrase that question, of course, is probably, “Are Americans too Islamophobic to elect _______.”) In addition, these are categories, not people. How does Americans’ resistance to a “socialist,” for example, relate to the once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist? We are not totally sure, but it’s worth remembering that many of his views are shared by other leading Democrats — and voters might consider him more of a Democrat than a socialist if he is the party’s 2020 nominee.

Electability concerns are still raised about plenty of candidates who don’t fall into those categories, particularly women, minority candidates and people with views more out of the ideological mainstream of U.S. politics. And just because Americans say they wouldn’t rule out voting for these candidates, that doesn’t mean those identities have no effect on how elections play out. So, let’s look at some of those other factors now, where the electability effects perhaps aren’t as explicit.

Women

This is a tricky question to answer. The best data we have on how gender affects elections is in down-ballot races. An extensive study of U.S. House races from 1982 to 2012 by the University of Georgia’s Jason Anastasopoulos found no “gender penalty” for women candidates. That was true in terms of raising money and in garnering general election votes.3

“Based on a systematic analysis of the 2010 and 2014 midterm House elections, we found not only that women win at equal rates, but also that the content of women’s and men’s campaigns looks the same, the volume and substance of the media coverage they receive is indistinguishable, and voters assess male and female candidates on a variety of issue competencies as equals,” said Jennifer Lawless, a professor at the University of Virginia, referring to research she did with Danny Hayes of George Washington University for the 2016 book “Women on the Run.”

“In short, it all comes down to party,” she added. “Whether there is a D or an R in front of a candidate’s name is far more important — to voters, donors, journalists, and their opponents — than the presence or absence of a Y chromosome in a candidate’s DNA.”

That’s Congress, though. Many observers have asked whether gender plays out differently in the context of a presidential election. Two scholars at the University of Texas at Dallas concluded that attitudes about gender were a much bigger factor in determining how Americans voted in 2016 compared to 2012 (when there were two male candidates), but on balance that helped Clinton because the number of voters with sexist views were outnumbered by those with less sexist views. Clinton did not do as well as Obama electorally, but that probably had more to do with the fundamentals of the race (the fact that she was running for the third term of her party was a disadvantage for example). Other scholarship also shows that attitudes about gender did correlate more closely with how people voted in 2016 than in previous elections — but so did racial attitudes. (So it’s likely that Trump brought gender and race to the forefront in 2016 as much as Clinton.)

But we should be cautious here. Clinton was the first woman to win a major party presidential nomination. If we don’t have a big sample of presidential elections in general, we have far less than even that for women running for president. So I don’t think we can dismiss the idea that Clinton’s gender played some role in the campaign. There were facets of the campaign that are difficult to explain without gender — such as the somewhat odd view of American voters throughout 2016 that Clinton and Trump were basically equally untrustworthy. From a scholarly perspective, however, Clinton followed the pattern — there is not a big penalty in terms of vote share for being a woman in U.S. elections.

“In terms of most of the academic and advocacy research we have, there is no voting or fundraising penalty in the raw data we have about who votes for women as nominees,” said Shauna Shames, a political scientist at Rutgers University and expert on the role of gender in politics.

“But that does not mean there is no gender penalty,” she added. “It just means, to my mind, that only the stronger female candidates run, and those can raise as much money and votes as the mediocre men. We should actually therefore see a penalty against men, in favor of the women who make it through the (tougher for women) gauntlet of becoming candidates, and we should see these women raising more money than men. But we do not. That the levels are equal, therefore, does not prove to my mind that there is no penalty for women — it suggests in fact that there is one, just one we don’t see.”

Race and ethnicity

African-Americans — Generally, there is evidence that black candidates increase turnout among black voters but do worse with white voters, perhaps because black candidates are perceived to be more liberal than white candidates with similar ideological stances.

Obama’s presidential campaigns seem to have conformed to this pattern. University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Brian Schaffner, for example, argued that Obama’s candidacy caused more voters to see the 2008 campaign through a racialized prism and that cost Obama support from people with more racist views. Schaffner estimated that Obama lost about 3 percentage points of the white vote, which comprised about 75 percent of the electorate in 2008. So that’s about 2 points overall. Economist and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz estimated that Obama lost about 4 percentage points in the national popular vote in 2008 and 2012 because of his race. Other experts, such as Nate Cohn, who’s now with The New York Times, have argued that that overestimates the racial backlash.

The flip side for Obama is that the black turnout rate was more than 65 percent in both of his runs, compared to about 60 percent in 2004 and 2016, when Democrats ran white presidential candidates, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That matters. Clinton likely would have won Michigan and Wisconsin with 2012-level turnout among blacks.

Latinos — I found less research on Latino candidates. But there is some evidence they too face a penalty. A paper written last year by Neil Visalvanich of Durham University in the United Kingdom estimated that Latino Democratic candidates performed 6 percentage points worse with white voters than white Democratic candidates of similar ideology. The study, based on 2010 and 2012 congressional election results, found the penalty for Latino Democrats to be higher than that of black Democratic candidates (3 percentage points, according to Visalvanich).

There is evidence, based on mayoral and U.S. Senate elections, that Latinos are more likely to vote for Latino candidates. But direct appeals to Latinos, according to scholars, are likely to cause a backlash among some white voters. And Latino Democratic candidates, like black ones, are likely to be perceived as more liberal than white ones with similar ideologies.

Asians — We don’t have as much data here, But in his study, Visalvanich estimated that Asian Democratic candidates did better with white voters than even white candidates.

Ideology

Would it help the Democrats in 2020 if they had a “centrist” at the top of the ticket? All else being equal, it’s probably safe to conclude that candidates more removed from the mainstream of American political thought will do worse at the ballot box. There is some evidence, for example, that Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater (1964) and Democratic nominee George McGovern (1972) lost by larger margins than other factors would have predicted in their elections because of the ideological extremism of their voting records.

But ideology is somewhat complicated to measure, particularly for people who haven’t served in legislative bodies (like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a potential Democratic candidate in 2020) or in any political office at all (like Trump.) Trump’s Muslim plan was perhaps the most radical idea proposed by any recent presidential candidate, but voters had trouble pinning the candidate down on a left-right spectrum before the election. Trump, according to the Pew Research Center, won the plurality of 2016 voters who described their views as “mixed” and basically was even with Clinton among self-described independents.

Still, unlike race and gender, there is some solid grounding to claim that extreme candidates are less “electable.” Who gets labeled “extreme,” on the other hand, tends to be a less empirical exercise.

There are, of course, other characteristics that could make someone more or less electable. Would it help Democrats win the Midwest if they nominated someone from that region? What about the South? We didn’t get into age in this analysis, but in a 2014 Pew poll, 36 percent of people said they were less likely to vote for a candidate in his or her 70s. (Trump was 70 when he was elected in 2016.)

And that fact about Trump and age speaks to the point I started with: We don’t really know who is electable until the election. In terms of 2020, it’s hard to know how much it matters who Democrats nominate.

Maybe it will matter a lot –– because some of the fundamentals favor Trump (he is an incumbent and the economy is strong), so the Democrats may need a savvy candidate to win a race where Trump will be formidable. Or maybe the Democratic candidate won’t matter much at all — that the biggest fundamental of the election will be Trump’s very high disapproval rating, and Americans will vote for just about anyone to replace him.

If you have ideas for future Secret Identity columns, please reach out to me via email (perry.bacon@fivethirtyeight.com) or Twitter (@perrybaconjr.)

[drawingsanddrabbles]

Too Bad Santa’s Dead

Prompt: “Too Bad Santa’s Dead” (Bones s3e9)

I know, I know... A Jew writing a Christmas fic... I am confused about it myself. Anywho, here's a fic that was prompted from a line in a Bones episode from a rewatch and... and basically I wrote this in May. I wrote a Christmas fic in May and I'm a Jew so like... yeah. Join the confusion.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all who celebrate and by the by Tim and Kon are aged-up to at least 18 because yeah.

ao3

“Dude, this sucks.” Kon said as he floated over the dead Santa.

“You know I’m an atheist, right?” Tim poked at the body and finished his oral report on the body and crime scene.

“Hey, I’m only part-Christian but that doesn’t mean this doesn’t suck.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Santa isn’t real, Kon.”

“How do you know? I’m a clone of an alien and an evil corporate super-villain overlord. Santa could be real.”

“He’s not.” Tim snapped.

Kon recoiled. “Okay, it was just a joke.” Tim didn’t respond. Something had clearly upset Tim. Kon frowned, had Tim and Kon never had a conversation about Santa before? They’d known each other for years, not to mention that they’d been dating for around a year. Though, this would be their first Christmas together.

Did Tim hate Christmas?

Why did Tim hate Santa?

“Are you okay?” Kon asked as he floated.

Tim exhaled annoyedly (Kon knew that reaction well) and he stood. “I’m fine. Sorry for being snappy.”

“Are you sure?” Kon asked.

Tim pulled his mouth into a smile. “Yeah.” He was lying.

Which obviously meant that Tim wouldn’t tell Kon why and if Kon wanted to understand him better there seemed to be only one way to figure out why Tim hated the concept of Santa: ask the family. “I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get from the scene and I collected samples. Do you mind if we go back to the Cave so I can run tests?”

For once, Kon didn’t. “I’d love to go back. Want me to keep you company?”

Tim smiled, this time a real smile. “If you don’t mind.”

“Of course not.”

Dick’s first reaction was: “Someone killed Santa?”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Santa isn’t real, Dick. Someone killed someone dressed as Santa.”

“Uh huh.” Dick said. He leaned over to Kon and whispered, “Tim doesn’t like Santa.”

“Yeah, what’s that about?” Kon whispered back. Tim worked without sign of hearing them, they continued to whisper for Tim’s sake.

Dick raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Dick zipped his lips. “Not my secret to tell.”

“At least a hint?” Kon asked. “Help a boyfriend out.”

Dick looked at Tim, hesitated, then back at Kon: “It’s not just Santa, it’s also Christmas.”

“Wha-Really?” But Dick zipped his lips again. He walked over to Tim and rubbed his hair.

“See ya, kiddo.”

“Bye, Dick.” Tim raised an eyebrow. “What’re you doing all the way over there?” Tim asked Kon, just realizing how far away from Tim he was.

“Nothing, just thinking.”

“Sit next to me?” Tim asked.

Kon smiled and pulled up a chair next to Tim’s at the Batcomputer. He kissed his boyfriend on the cheek. “Sure babe.”

“EW!” Someone cried, seeing Kon kiss Tim. Tim rolled his eyes.

“I don’t ‘ew’ you when you kiss Cass.” He called to Steph who bounced over to Tim, resting her arms and head on Tim’s.

“That’s ‘cuz we’re gorgeous and there’s nothing to ‘ew.’ You on the other hand...”

“Hey!” Kon cried.

Steph grinned at him. “Not you of course, Kon. You’re just as gorgeous as us.” She winked at him.

“Stop hitting on my boyfriend.” Tim said, eyes never leaving the Batcomputer screens.

“Tim is gorgeous too!” Kon cried outraged.

“You only say that ‘cuz you’re his boyfriend, I’m his ex so I can say that he isn’t.”

“Thanks, Steph.” Tim said.

“You’re welcome.”

Tim switched to his crime scene pictures of the victim and frowned.

“Aw! Someone killed Santa?” Steph cried.

“Santa-”

“I know, I know, Santa isn’t real.”

“Who is not real?” Damian asked, Kon jumped out of his skin. He knew the gremlin was a ninja and all but like? Seriously? Damian hadn’t been there five seconds ago. He pushed Kon and Tim out of the way so he could see the case.

“No one you care about.” Tim said, pushing Damian so he could go back to his past position in front of the computer.

“Dami, see the red suit and the white beard? In our society that is a marker of a man named Santa Claus.” Steph explained.

“Santa Claus is imaginary.” Damian said.

“I can’t believe we agree on something.” Tim muttered.

Wait, Steph had dated Tim before… “Hey, Steph? Can we talk for a moment? Y’know, alone.”

Steph looked surprised. “Yeah, sure thing Hot Stuff. Step into my office.”

Kon stood and they began walking away from Tim when Damian said loudly: “If you are discussing sexual encounters with Drake, please walk farther from my earshot.”

“We’re far enough away that you can’t hear us, Kid!” Steph shouted at him. She turned to Kon, “what’s up?”

“Why does Tim hate Christmas?” He asked softly.  Steph glanced at Tim. “Please, Steph? Help a boyfriend out?”

“You used that exact line on Dick, didn’t you? And he didn’t tell you?”

Kon chewed on his lip. “Possibly…?”

“If Dick didn’t tell you, no way I’m telling you.” Steph said.

“Aw, please Steph?”

“The key to a healthy relationship is communication, Sunshine.” Steph said, patting him on the shoulder.

Kon sighed. “Whatever, thanks anyway.” He went back to Tim but Damian was sitting in his seat, conducting tests. “Dude, move.”

“Find another seat.” Damian snapped.

I can’t believe I’m arguing with an angry munchkin. Kon thought. Tim glared at Damian. He turned to Kon and stood, kissing him on the cheek. As if sensing his anger towards the little man, Tim suggested, “you know what, I’ll see you at home Kon, okay?”

“Are you sure?” Kon asked. He glowered at Damian but the youth ignored him. Tim nodded and Kon kissed Tim again and Damian rolled his eyes.

“Please take your possessive sexual activities somewhere else.” Damian said.

Kon was about to bite something back but Tim hit Damian on the back of the head and Damian growled something at him. Tim went back to the case and seemed to forget that Kon was in the room which was understandable, he always got that way when on a case. Kon guessed he’d go home then. He glanced back at the dead Santa on the screen and got an idea.

“No.” Tim said. Kon frowned, he hadn’t expected Tim to react so strongly. Tim stumbled backward, eyes staring. He tumbled into the wall, his gaze breaking. He turned and walked out.

“Tim?” Kon grabbed a robe, following him out into the cold Gotham night, “Tim, come back! If it bothers you that much I- Tim!” But Tim was nowhere to be seen.

Kon had fucked up. Kon had really, super duper, absolutely, indubitably, and terribly fucked up. Kon was about to jump into the air when a strong wind blew into Kon’s robe. Someone above him snorted. “Wow, trouble in paradise?”

Jason. Great. “Why are you here?”

“To stare at your wonderfully beautiful ass. Or maybe just to annoy Tim’s. I like to keep you heroes guessing.” Jason said. Kon was sure he was kidding.

Kon glared at him. He sat on top of Tim’s apartment building, mask on, leg hanging lazily over the edge of the roof. He looked Kon up and down, physically moving his mask to make sure Kon knew what he was doing. Kon looked down and closed his robe tighter (which probably wasn’t helping Kon’s modesty). “Are you here for a reason? Because if not, I have to go find my boyfriend and make sure he doesn’t want to kill me.” Kon grumbled.

“You really fucked up, didn’t you?” Jason shook his head. “Didn’t you know he has a thing about Christmas?”

“How did you know? You’ve tried to kill him.”

“Oh please, Krypto-Boy, we all have a thing about Christmas. For the demon-spawn and the mute it’s a detachment; they aren’t Christian, they never had a reason to love or want to love Christmas. Christmas was one of the only days Princess Eggplant’s dad was allowed to contact her, which didn’t always give her warm and fuzzy feelings. Not to mention a cheap Christmas and no presents, nothing that you want from Santa. And Dickiebird and Brucie? Well, being an orphan isn’t too fun on a family-centric holiday.”

He hadn’t known. Kon didn’t know what it was like, sure he was lonely and alone. Sure he didn’t know of a family before Tim and Bart and Cassie and Dubbilex and Jim and… but he had Ma and Pa, he had Kara and Clark and he had Lois. He had Christmas. They didn’t.

“And you? Tim?”

“Me? I was a street kid. Christmas meant cold, it meant pity charity from people too rich to care about me except for one fucking day of the year. Then? It meant Bruce and Dick and Alfred and family. And then? Then it meant nothing. But this is about Tim, and Tim? Tim wasn’t like us. Tim’s family wasn’t like any of ours. You’re never going to make Tim like Christmas. Tolerate it? Maybe. But like and love? Never. Just give up on that dream, don’t force him.”

“So? What do I do now?”

“So, you wanted to find out why? Ask him yourself clone. You want to accept that he just doesn’t like Christmas and he never will? Do that. It’s up to you now, Luthor-spawn, make the right choice.”

“Why are you here, Jason?”

Jason stood and brushed off his legs. “I heard Kris Kringle bit it, I thought I might have heard something, I was going to tip off the replacement, but clearly this isn’t the time. Go after him, Wannabe. He needs you.”

Kon nodded. He was about to take off again when Jason added, “and put on some pants. Maybe things are different in Metropolis, but in Gotham ripped dudes flying around wrapped as a Christmas present isn’t appropriate.”

Kon ran into the apartment he and Tim shared and changed, then he closed his eyes and followed the sound of his love’s heartbeat.

“Here, huh?” Kon asked, landing on the top of the Wayne Enterprises Tower.

Tim shrugged, his legs swinging off the edge of the roof. “I like being up high. How’d you find me?”

“It’s not hard, I know you. I know your heartbeat. And I know when I’ve clearly upset you.”

“I’m sorry I shouldn’t have-”

“No. It’s my fault. I knew you were upset about Christmas and Santa and I pushed it too far. I thought... I thought I could make it right. Give you some good memories. Clearly I was wrong.”

“Clearly.”

“Tim, please tell me: what I can do to make it right?” Kon asked. He sat down next to Tim. Tim stared out at the illuminated street below him.

“When, when I was three I learned about Santa for the first time.” Tim began slowly. “I was at pre-school and my teacher asked if anyone knew who Santa was. I was the only person in class who didn’t know. That night, that afternoon really, Mrs. Mac picked me up from school—Mom and Dad were in Africa for Christmas. I told Mrs. Mac about what I’d learned that day, about Santa, and she, and I’ll never forget this, she turned around in her seat with the most pitying look on her face and she said: ‘oh, Tim dear Santa isn’t real.’” Tim stared at his hands and inhaled shakily. “Just like that. To a three year old. I mean, I’d figure it out eventually, but really?” He paused before continuing. “I didn’t really believe her, not entirely. What my teachers and classmates said… it had to be real, I mean Batman was real so why not Santa, right? Well I waited up for him that night, after Mrs. Mac had gone to her family for the holiday, I stayed up. I stayed up and I made milk and cookies and I hid with my camera, a birthday present by the way, under the couch and I waited for Santa to come. And by morning Santa didn’t come, and there were no presents under my tree. And until Mom died that was my Christmas, alone in the house. When I turned five I started buying my own presents, Mom and Dad gave me the money of course, but I bought them. I wrapped them. I hid them under the tree. Christmas didn’t really seem so magical, and soon I just… stopped, all together. After all I could buy whatever I wanted with my parents credit cards whenever I wanted, what was the point of celebrating Christmas?” He finally stopped to breathe. The breaths were thick and his shoulders shook, his voice trembled. “So when you… I don’t want Christmas. I-I know you were trying to be helpful, but I just-I don’t want Christmas!”

“Okay.” Kon said. “No Christmas, promise.” Tears fell from Tim’s eyes and Kon wrapped him in a hug. “No Christmas. Promise.” He repeated.

Tim walked into the apartment on December 24th not expecting what he saw. But it didn’t make him walk out. “You-you cleaned the apartment.” He stated.

Kon grinned. He wore Tim’s favorite sweater for him (it was an S-Shield pattern that Ma had made for him one year) and the apartment was flawless. The mouth-watering aroma of Chinese food filled the air. A blanket lay across the couch and Tim’s laptop was plugged in, laying on top of it. The TV was on and ready to be watched. “What-what is this?” He asked, slightly overwhelmed by the sparkiliness of the moment.

“I figured, since you don’t like Christmas, how about we don’t do Christmas. How about we never do Christmas. Instead we do an ‘us’ night. We stay in, eat our favorite foods, pizza is on it’s way by the way, we marathon Wendy. We cuddle on the couch. Then, tomorrow we can go out on patrol or whatever you want to do.”

“An ‘us’ night?”

Kon nodded enthusiastically. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to. ‘Cuz then we don’t have to. I just thought… since I’ll never be able to give you good Christmas memories, what if we never had to worry about Christmas at all? Y’know do kind of a new holiday, just for us.”

“Just for us.” Tim repeated.

Kon nodded, trying to gauge Tim’s reaction. When Tim said nothing, Kon’s face fell. “Actually,” he said bashfully, “it’s stupid, we can just do nothing, I’ll just-”

“No!” Tim said, freezing Kon in his tracks. “No.” Tim said. “It’s perfect.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And very sweet.” He walked over to Kon and hugged and kissed him lightly.

“Um, excuse me?” A voice said from behind them.

The pizza guy had arrived. Kon paid him and took the pizza from him. He closed the door and Tim and Kon settled onto the couch. Wendy the Werewolf Stalker played and they began stuffing themselves with food. The night wore on until they were out of food and halfway through Wendy’s first season. Kon lay drowsily on Tim’s shoulder while Tim curled the blanket around his feet.

“Tim?”

“Hmm?” Tim asked.

“Where do you want to patrol tomorrow?” Kon asked, yawning.

“What if we... didn’t patrol?”

Kon frowned and sat up, looking at him. “But you love to patrol.”

“And you don’t, and I also love you. This is an ‘us’ day, right? So let’s do something we both like. Maybe head down to the arcade.”

Kon smiled and kissed Tim gently. “I love you so much.”

Tim smiled and laid his head down in Kon’s lap, stretching out on the couch, his legs hanging over the end. “I love you too.”

[killingthebuddha]

Habbakuk and the Angel by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Photo by Jennifer Nelson.

In the summer of 2016, my sister Cecilia and I took a road trip to see our parents. We drove from the Northeast to the Midwest, making our way through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana (where I swore I would never ever live, and where I now currently live), and on to Illinois. We’d been looking forward to our time together, but our spirits waned as the trip continued, mine in particular. It took me so long to figure out what was wrong—why I couldn’t sleep, why I was sullen for long stretches of time, why I sometimes couldn’t breathe; why even now I can’t bring myself to write what exactly I kept thinking, hoping, wishing. 

The horrifying events of June 2016, when 49 people were murdered in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, were weighing on my mind and spirit, threatening to pull me under. Like me, most of the victims were young, queer Latinos, and I was lost in the aftermath of their deaths. My depression wasn’t just sadness, but something deeper, something abiding and heavy. It made me realize that I was fundamentally changing. My relationship to the world was eroding along with me.

I didn’t think that I could cope, but somehow I made it through. Several months later, when I apologized to Cecilia while we were walking to get some Thanksgiving wine, we bonded over the heaviness of our feelings: sadness and anger, bitterness, despondency. These emotions seemed like more than moods. They were deeper than personal despair, more unruly and unmanageable.

*          *          *

Right when I heard the news of the Pulse shooting, as Facebook has reminded me every year since, I looked up some Bible verses and posted them there:

I felt beyond distraught. I felt that nothing could ever change, that horror, violence, and destruction were the only possible outcomes of life. The verses were less like a balm and more like a lonely beer at a bar. They cooled something unnamable that seemed to steadily burn inside me; they quenched a thirst that seemed to be coming from my belly, not my throat.

What business does a profoundly Atheist person have in turning to the Bible in times of crisis? Though I have not kept the faith of my Catholic father or my evangelical mother, apparently I have kept their sacred text. I find the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible (or, as I grew up calling it, the Old Testament) to be especially fascinating and disturbing, even unnerving. But I also find some of them oddly calming, especially in the face of disaster, bigotry, and violence. They provide me with a powerful anchor in the various storms of the twenty-first century. What emanates from these books lends words to the voiceless sorrow I feel, to the rage and helplessness that pin me down. They provide a strange solace when I can’t move, when it’s hard to do anything but overthink, or under-think, or hard even to think at all. 

*          *          *

Even as I turn to the prophets in times of national crisis and mourning, I’m wary of some of the ways that they have been wielded in this country. I’m wary even though I can sometimes feel the appeal.

One of my favorite novels to teach is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s prophetic plea on behalf of America’s rural poor, displaced due to the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the changing economic and demographic realities of the United States, became an instant best-seller when it was published in 1939, so much so that it has become a cultural anchor. The title, suggested to Steinbeck by his first wife Carol, takes up the famous lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

These lyrics explicitly echo images of divine wrath and trampled grapes from the book of Isaiah. To my mind, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel form the linked strands of American exceptionalist rhetoric when it comes to motivating emotional and political reactions to injustice—messianism and millennialism intertwined to form a specifically American response to crisis. Like the God of these books, the United States judges, demands justice, and justifies taking vengeance on its own behalf: The nation becomes the “terrible swift sword” loosed upon the world, making sure that our version of truth marches on. 

Steinbeck’s book can be read as a classic example of a jeremiad: a national call to repentance that takes its form and name from the book of Jeremiah, and that describes Isaiah and Ezekiel as well.  Well before The Grapes of Wrathwas written, the jeremiad had a robust history in American letters. (Sacvan Berovitch’s The American Jeremiadremains the quintessential study of this American tendency from the Puritans onwards.) And, as I have seen over the last several years, the jeremiad remains a powerful presence in our contemporary life, continually providing an expressive outlet for our anger about injustice. It tempers the steel of Howe’s divine retribution, of Steinbeck’s anger at a nation hell-bent on rejecting migrants, and of much of our cultural anger right now.

Turning to the prophets in this way gives many Americans a seemingly secure knowledge of a future that will eventually benefit us: Though the moral arc of the universe might be long, it bends towards justice, right? I teach American literature at a Catholic university, and I can see how this interpretive tendency gives many of my Christian students a sense of hope and blessed destiny—the universe, for them, has a predisposition towards correction. All they have to do is believe the right things, fulfill the right prophecies. This is supported by the self-fulfilling Christian teleological progression, which informs the possible interpretations many of my students bring to the table: They know the New Testament is the fulfillment and correction of the Old, because this is, simply, what they know. This means that the Bible’s complexities are quite often ironed over. Isaiah and Jeremiah point towards Christian theology, and the other prophetic books, by virtue of being prophetic books, must do so, too. Everything, it seems, leads to redemption. 

*          *          *

I want to suggest that many of us—as American Christians, or as adherents of American civil religion—have been reading these biblical books the wrong way. Perhaps we’ve even been reading the wrong books of the Bible altogether. This is a self-derived realization, one that maybe has no power outside of my own feelings, but it’s a realization that I’ve come to trust, and even to cling to.

In recent years, I’ve mostly stopped turning to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Isaiah to provide words for my fury, because it seems the moral arc of the universe is taking too long to come to its just conclusion. Perhaps it is even bending awayfrom justice. 

The end of times may be coming, especially given the disaster of what Jason Moore has called the Capitalocene (a stronger term for what many of us have been calling the Anthropocene). But despite the power of Howe’s poem, I cannot bring myself to imagine God “trampling out the vintage” to extract the juice of vengeance such that it benefits the nation’s image of itself as God’s aggrieved people. Or, to turn to the original, I can’t understand the world in light of Isaiah’s mediation of Yahweh’s anger: “The wine press I have trodden alone, and of my people there was no one with me. I trod them in my anger, and trampled them down in my wrath; Their blood spurted on my garments; all my apparel I stained. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, my year for redeeming was at hand” (Isaiah 63: 3-4). 

God’s fury in this passage is terrifying, but it does seem uniquely suited to the American imagination: Isolated, God smashes the people arrayed against him, and their blood fertilizes the ground in waves of crimson. God stands uniquely above his enemies, alone in his moral certainty. His garments are stained, and his feet carry out his monomaniacal mission on “the day of vengeance.” This violent retribution, exacted through a terrible cosmic anger, creates an enormous mantle of outward-facing rage, one that the United States has cloaked itself with over and over again—exacting vengeance on the wrongdoers of the world, acting as the “world’s police force.” The world, which has wronged him/us, suffers God’s/our vindication through punishment. And, as in Isaiah, there can be no stopping the necessary anger of this solitary fury. As a nation, we’ve so often made a complete turn towards identifying with and as God, especially when it comes to vengeance and outrage on a national scale. Righteous and proud isolation, then, has so often been our chosen position: With or without the world, we willhave vengeance, and through this vengeance, justice. 

So, no: I do not turn to Isaiah anymore. Instead, I turn to two other prophetic books. Paradoxically, these books grant solace because they offer none, whether through anger or through satisfying justice. I don’t feel nihilistic when reading these books, though I feel that in reading them, I can admit the depth to which our out-of-balance world is, indeed, harming us. It feels right and important to acknowledge that what matters, matters now, and that we shouldn’t wait for a perfectly redeemed afterlife. These are books of keening, of sackcloth and ashes, of judgment that bends not only on our enemies, but the entire world: Lamentations and Habakkuk. 

*          *          *

Habakkuk and Lamentations cry out for justice—but it is a justice that cannot be rendered according to our dictates:

You see, O LORD, how I am wronged; do me justice! You see all their vindictiveness, all their plots against me. You hear their insults, O LORD, the whispered murmurings of my foes, against me all the day; Whether they sit or stand, see, I am their taunt song. Requite them as they deserve, O LORD, according to their deeds; Give them hardness of heart, as your curse upon them; Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under your heavens! (Lamentations 3: 59-66).

The prophet here begs for vengeance, yearns for the vindictive destruction of his enemies. Yet, there is no righteous response from God. Indeed, the book ends thus: “You, O LORD, are enthroned forever; your throne stands from age to age. Why, then, should you forget us, abandon us so long a time? Lead us back to you, O LORD, that we may be restored: give us anew such days as we had of old. For now you have indeed rejected us, and in full measure turned your wrath against us.” (Lamentations 5: 19-22). 

Turning towards reparation, Lamentations offers a vision distinct from Isaiah or Jeremiah. As many Jewish commentators have mentioned, it is a vision that names a distinct temporal and ethical vision that is geared towards atonement and reparation, and not towards individual self-fulfillment through the redemption of grace. This is a vision that Christianity, writ large, has studiously avoided. Reparation, while not the antithesis of redemption, is nevertheless a different way altogether of atoning. It means acknowledging and redressing harm in the present. It means seeking forgiveness as an active presence in the world, rather than building towards an afterlife. Reparation does not see sin as something washed away; even when forgiven, it is not forgotten or left behind (and so, hopefully, it is not repeated).

 In October 2018, on another road trip, this time from Indiana to Connecticut, I spent the night in Pittsburgh at the house of my dear friend, Liz Reich. (It was exactly two weeks before the Tree of Life synagogue was violently attacked by a white supremacist.) On the night I saw her, Liz broke out a beautiful tequila, and we got to talking about our faith traditions. She explained, excitedly, that I was missing something important, and it was likely due to my cultural Christianity. Judaism’s robust attention to the prophetic books yields a form of atonement quite different from Christianity’s emphasis on salvation; the rituals on Yom Kippur, in particular, stress a communal repentance that forms a conscious act of reparation.

I realized that this longstanding attention to atonement and redress informs my friend Mollie Eisenberg’s Passover Seder, in which Alicia Ostriker, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, FDR, and Muriel Rukeyser form a constellation of justice-driven thought, all of them bearing witness and demanding repair. As someone outside of the tradition, I’m moved by how many Seder Hagaddot are collaboratively constituted by an accretion of thoughts and sympathies across time and space.

The recognition, in Lamentations, is of disastrous and grievous harm done to God; of the sundering of a covenant. Restoration is begged—but, importantly, it is a restoration that will not be granted according to our rules. Instead, it will remake the world, and not in any image we might conjure. Although “such days as we had of old” are begged of God, these days cannot and will not return. Lamentations is not a book of vengeance against one’s enemies, but a terrifying recognition of the slow violence being rendered unto usdue to the harms we ourselves have inflicted on others. In Lamentations, the prophet means how we have harmed our covenant with God. For the purposes of this essay, and for the purposes of life in the US in the twenty-first century, it may well be a book about the ways we have harmed our covenants with each other, and the commandments we have been given: To be loving, to be devoted, to refuse to harm.

*          *          *

I consider Lamentations’ spectacular keening a poem uniquely suited for our time.

We have harmed the world beyond all hope, we have harmed future generations in ways that are grievous to the extreme. 

We have refused to atone for the sins of chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and genocide, and have indeed built our nation in the valley of these dry bones (bones that, as Ezekiel reminds us, will rise up). 

We beg for restoration (for America to be “great again”) but we do not turn towards loving justice; instead, we demand that our feelings of exceptionalism be redeemed as our specific birthright.

We define righteousness for ourselves (and make it tautological and self-fulfilling), rather than as something larger, something external and communal. 

We celebrate freedom while we cage migrants (children, adults, asylum seekers, refugees, wanderers, hopers) in squalor and order those sequestered to drink out of the same toilet bowls in which they relieve themselves.

This kind of hubristic demand—for exceptionalism, for self-asserted righteousness—is looked upon in horror in Lamentations, and it is angrily condemned in Habakkuk. If Lamentations begs for forgiveness and restoration, recognition, and embrace, then Habakkuk shouts out a vision of justice, redress, and reparation. Habakkuk lays out a vision of world-shaking, world-remaking justice that smashes any scale of human recognition. There is no redemption, because there can never be redemption. There can only be reparation.

*          *          *

For the last several years, Habakkuk has been the book I have turned to most urgently and often. Even before I quoted Habakkuk on Facebook in the early morning of June 12, 2016, I turned to it after the murder of Trayvon Martin. Two years after Trayvon was killed, and a year after his murderer was declared not guilty, Michael Brown was killed. After no charges were brought against the police officer who murdered him, I mourned Michael with a Bible in my lap and the television blaring in front of me. Habakkuk, once more, lay open.

*          *          *

Habakkuk is one of those books of the Bible that’s often more notable for its name than anything else. When I was a child, it was one of those Vacation Bible School gems of knowledge that helped one win prizes for remembering all 66 books of the Protestant Bible (and still brings forth an image of a “Ha-backpack,” which is what I first thought the name was, which in my mind’s eye was a backpack that looked like a book, strapped onto an old, bearded man). To my adult mind, Habakkuk blends the early anger of Isaiah with the mourning of Lamentations almost perfectly: The prophet stands helpless, watching fury and grief wash by and through him. Habakkuk begins with a scream to the cosmos befitting Job in his hour of deepest pain: 

How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord. This is why the law is benumbed, and judgment is never rendered: Because the wicked circumvent the just; that is why judgment comes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1: 1-4)

Habakkuk was watching helplessly when Eric Garner’s executioner broke his throat and choked his breath. Habakkuk gushes forth as Sandra Bland’s blood still cries out for justice. Habakkuk screams when humans are encaged. Habakkuk shouts when the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims demand that something, anything be done to prevent gun violence. Habakkuk was the form my melancholy took when the Parkland shooting destroyed the lives of not only a school, but solidified a young generation’s traumas. My soul sought Habakkuk when the Pulse shooting rendered me sick with grief, imagining the desperation felt by the people at the club that night, who were there to find ways to give shape to the love they felt. I find Habbakuk in Orlando, Birmingham, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Poway, Christchurch, and countless other places woven together in the horrifying tapestry of white supremacist violations of sacred spaces. It’s what I was reading while editing this essay, refreshing the news from El Paso and Dayton. Habakkuk wails, “You do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin?”

*          *          *

See who this reminds you of. After rendering his complaint, Habakkuk receives God’s word: 

Then the LORD answered me and said: write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. … He who opens wide his throat like the nether world, and is insatiable as death, who gathers to himself all the nations, and rallies to himself all the people—Shall not all these take up a taunt against him, satire and epigrams about him, to say: Woe to him who stores up what is not his: How long can it last! He loads himself down with debts. Shall not your creditors rise suddenly? Shall not they who make you tremble awake? You shall become their spoil! Because you despoiled many peoples all the rest of the nations shall despoil you; Because of men’s blood shed, and violence done to the land, to the city and to all who dwell in it. Woe to him who pursues evil gain for his household, setting his nest on high to escape the reach of misfortune! (Habakkuk 2: 2, 5-10) 

Eat the rich, indeed. Habakkuk’s God censures anyone “who stores up what is not his.” The temptation, of course, is to turn immediately to the man elected president in 2016; yet he is no fulfillment of any prophecy. No, the “he” here, in our time, is more than that man: It’s capitalism, it’s the despoiling of nature, it’s violence against women, it’s racism, it’s genocide. It’s the United States of America, which set its nest on high, and through its supposedly virtuous anger and its vehement righteousness “despoiled many peoples,” built a world through “violence done to the land.” Habakkuk’s God deplores everything that the United States lays claim to in pursuit of its laudable ideals, the “evil gain for [its] household” in its quest to build John Winthrop’s shining “city on a hill,” an ideal that has morphed into the “nest on high” that God roundly condemns to the prophet.

*          *          *

Habakkuk ends with a canticle, and it gives me shivers to think about it sung aloud. It is to be sung “to a plaintive tune,” accompanied “with stringed instruments.” Watching God wreak his havoc on the earth, the prophet sings: “Is your anger against the streams, O LORD? …. Bared and ready is your bow, filled with arrows is your quiver. Into streams you split the earth; at sight of you the mountains tremble. A torrent of rain descends; the ocean gives forth its roar. The sun forgets to rise, the moon remains in its shelter” (Habakkuk 3: 8-11). As God tramples the nations, Habakkuk fearfully sings, “I hear, and my body trembles; at the sound, my lips quiver. Decay invades my bones, my legs tremble beneath me. I await the day of distress that will come upon the people who attack us” (Habakkuk 3:16). 

I love the phrase, “decay invades my bones,” and I looked up the King James Version of verse 16 to see how the archaic English would render the lines (to be frank, I also love that this is a “3:16” that sounds nothinglike the other, more famous one): “When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he cometh up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops.” The KJV spells out the bodily effects of God’s vengeance: The belly quakes, the lips quiver, trembling abounds in the soul. “Decay invades my bones” is powerful, but “rottenness entered into my bones” is gratuitous and emphatic; it conveys a filthy sense of God’s rendered vengeance. God is not only creation, here, but visceral de-creation—he is not only abundance, but abjection, not only restoration, but rottenness.

*          *          *

In Habakkuk’s final chapter, God storms through the earth like the mythic vision of Lake Okeechobee that Zora Neale Hurston conveys in Their Eyes Were Watching God: 

Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be-conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel. 

God in Habakkuk destroys the world throughthe world; the world has turned against humankind, because humankind has turned against the world. It is Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joanand Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilationcombined: a world that can no longer be contained, that can no longer be understood and interpreted, and all because we have flayed it and betrayed it. This is a world in which our butchery has been turned against us, in which justice means that we must bear witness to and suffer the terrible, overwhelming shape that it takes. This is not because justice must always be awful; no, as Habakkuk notes at the very beginning, it is because the world is out of balance. There is no justice because the greedy, the violent, the bigoted, and the tyrannical have bent justice towards their own benefit. Justice has become a means of justifying wealth’s creation and sustenance; it is not about love or truth. Justice has been betrayed, and so it can no longer be used to address the broken world. Reparation, instead, is required.

*          *          *

Why do some of us have to witness and bear the destruction of a world—a destruction that we did not make? It makes no sense that those of us who have suffered through coloniality, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and the abusive ways that heteronormativity and patriarchy have been used as cudgels, must then also have the world collapse around us. But then another question arises: If that world isn’t torn asunder, then are we in danger of inheriting or continuing that very world? And another: Can a violent world ever stop being violent? Yes, Habakkuk and Lamentations tell us—but it must be undone, and a new world must be willed into being. The world must be repaired—and we must forget about our narratives of redemption.

Otherwise, we are left begging for mercy in the apocalypse, as the late W.S. Merwin expresses in his 1967 poem “For a Coming Extinction”(which my partner Brandon Menke emailed to his friends this spring for National Poetry Month). Merwin asks that a Gray whale (along with its calves, as well as sea cows, Great Auks, gorillas, and other animals he calls “Our sacrifices”) bear our witness to God. In his cutting final stanza, Merwin commands,

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Merwin’s bitterness pervades the poem, and his prophetic witness demands that we join his lamentation, that we understand precisely the contours of the world we have created. Merwin’s fury, rejecting the structuring bounds of punctuation and order throughout the poem, tosses aside the redeeming god of human invention in favor of a terrible deity who, surely, will render only one judgement. The poem reminds me of how Lamentations and Habakkuk (in opposition to how the American Christian imaginary has taken and used Isaiah and Jeremiah) form twinned elegies. Their keening, wailing verses do not conclude with visions of fulfillment or glory. 

It is no wonder, honestly, that we do not often meditate on these books, and that culturally, we rarely search for consolation within them. These two prophets stare, open-eyed and weeping, as God tears apart creation. And they know, in that destruction, there is re-creation—but not redemption. What is left on the other side? What does paradise look like? 

In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.

There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had; of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise. 

The final paragraphs of Toni Morrison’s Paradiseimagine reparation, rather than redemption; Lamentations and Habakkuk do, too. “Now [we] will rest before shouldering the endless work [we] were created to do down here in paradise.” Paradise is down,and not up; it is here, and not there. But in order to make paradise happen down here, the world’s structural violence must be un-created, and the world must be undone and refashioned through reparation.

*          *          *

There’s another prophetic book I should mention, one that an exceptional prophet of our age, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., consistently referenced: Amos. The night before he was assassinated, Dr. King gave his extraordinary “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, in support of the striking sanitation workers. About a third of the way through the speech, King looks out at the crowd assembled in the Mason Temple and gathers himself. With the crowd’s participation (which The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute wonderfully transcribes), King builds a vision of prophetic witness: 

We are going on. We need all of you. You know, what’s beautiful to me is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. (Amen) It’s a marvelous picture. (Yes) Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somewhere the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones (Yes), and whenever injustice is around he must tell it. (Yes) Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, who said, “When God Speaks, who can but prophesy?” (Yes) Again with Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” (Yes) Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me (Yes), because He hath anointed me (Yes), and He’s anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.” (Go ahead)

This whole essay, I’ve been suggesting in a wayward way that the problem with the dominant Christian interpretation of the prophets has been on insisting that Jesus is the messiah, that he’s the fulfillment of what has been re-titled, in an ambitious act of revision, the Old Testament. In making them subservient to Christianity’s interpretive directives, the prophetic books have had their remarkable heft distorted. 

Dr. King directly links Amos and Jesus not through messianic fulfillment, but through anointment and appointment. Anyone can be anointed, and anyone can be appointed. As a great moral philosopher, this is the link Jesus himself drew to the Hebrew Bible he knew so well, and it’s the heart of his radical message: Anyone and everyone can be the child of God, and anyone and everyone can be anointed. By insisting that Jesus’ anointing makes him the only messiah, American Christian civil religion has staked its hopes on salvation in a world to come, at the expense of the world that exists.

 What we should acknowledge instead is that we only have a partial vision, or, perhaps, many partial visions. And what Habakkuk and Lamentations give us is not redemption, can never be redemption—the gift is, instead, to always and ever repair and restore. And, indeed, the gift is one we share with our friends and our neighbors, in ever expanding circles of recognition and care.

Here, now, this is our task: Reparation. In the wake of endless harm, we must make reparations, and in doing so, admit that the world is larger than us. We must insist on and face towards truth and beauty even in their absence, and refuse to abide in a world built on the souls and bones of others. *

Thank you to Briallen Hopper for the in-depth editing of this essay, and for the kindness of including this essay in Killing the Buddha. Thank you, too, to Brandon Menke, for a patient and considerate eye. Thank you to Yolanda Robles and Jay Miller for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. 

[cassiejade]

Oh my, what a month! September seemed to fly by and October felt like it just dragged by. Octobers a great month so I didn’t mind., but I’m looking at this list of 20 plus books and I’m just in disbelief at myself. Apparently, I didn’t do anything this month other than reading. Again, not a complaint, just disbelief.

  Wildcard by Marie Lu my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this, I wasn’t expecting the direction it went in and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn my rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I was very disappointed by this, I found the story to be very slow paced and all the characters were just terrible. I also wasn’t shocked by the big plot twist that happened.

Iron Gold by Pierce Brown my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The biggest issue I have with this is that nothing happened for the first 250 pages and then you got some semblance of an idea of what is going to happen. I also started to not like Darrow and I was hoping for a POV from Mustang but that didn’t happen.

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien my rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

I loved this even though it took me so long to read, I just wasn’t in the mood for it for the longest time. I loved seeing more about the Ents and always wanted to see more of them in the movies. There was this hilarious line about the Ents wives that had me cracking up for so long, I can’t find the quote right now but it was that they put the Ent Wives somewhere and now they can’t find them, I was dying when I was reading it.

  Dracula by Bram Stoker my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I am happy I finally read this even though I had some problems with it. I loved the journal entries and Mina Harker, everything else kinda bored me.

Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J Maas my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I actually really liked this, I enjoyed the story and how everything came together. Plus Poison Ivy makes an appearance and she is my favorite of all time, and I was very pleased with her portrayal.

Antigoddess by Kendare Blake my rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed this, I wasn’t blown away by this yet it was a fun twist. It’s not a retelling it’s just set in modern times. I wish there had been more gods introduced though.

Mortal Gods by Kendare Blake my rating 4 out of 5 stars

This one is probably the best in the trilogy, in my opinion anyways. I loved seeing Ares come in and the direction of the story was great.

  The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need by Susan Thurman my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I think the information discussed was very helpful, however, the delivery and the way the pages are set are incredibly overwhelming. I do think that this will be very helpful to refer to when writing but I don’t recommend as a sit-down and read.

Emma by Jane Austen my rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Unfortunately, this was not my favorite Jane Austen book. I didn’t like a lot of the characters and had a hard time with the plot, it was very slow and seemed to drag on at points. I will be giving this a reread maybe next year, just to see if my feelings change.

Ungodly by Kendare Blake my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I am so happy this is over, this wasn’t bad but I just hated one of the main characters, Cassandra was just the worst and she was so frustrating to deal with.

The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding by Alexandra Bracken my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed this but it didn’t blow me away, I loved the characters and thought that they were hilarious, especially Alastor, he was making me laugh so much.

  Sea Witch by Sarah Henning my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed this a lot, it was so dark and the mystery unfolded at a great pace.

Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death by Amy Chu my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I loved this so much and I am so sad that it seems to just be a standalone! The art in this is just gorgeous and I want to thank the artists for making Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn look like real women, not cartoon pin-ups.

Darth Vader Vol 1: Vader by Kieron Gillen My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I loved this so much! The story has a bit to be desired but the art was so fun and just felt very accurate to star wars in a visual way. Darth Vader is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

Spider Gwen Vol 0- Most Wanted by Jason Latour (Writer), Robbi Rodriguez (Artist) my rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I was so disappointed in this, it was a reread and while I love the artwork I hated the storyline, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue with the series.

  Atheists Who Kneel and Pray by Tarryn Fisher my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I love new adult romances that have musicians and artists and this romance between an artist and his muse was delightful. I feel head over heels for both David and Yara, well more for Yaras lifestyle. I liked her nomadic and mysterious ways. I was very annoyed by everyone’s lack of communication though.

Daughter of The Burning City by Amanda Foody my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This was very slow at first but the descriptions of the world kept me feeling intrigued to learn more and the mystery slowly started to envelop me. This kept me guessing and it didn’t go in the direction I thought it was going to go, which is good, it wasn’t as predictable as I thought it would be.

Little Monsters  by Kara Thomas my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this, I found myself absorbed into the story right away and I would sit down and just fly through 80 pages. There were thriller tropes that I don’t love especially the spotlight effect, I don’t usually care for that one. It just doesn’t seem realistic to me and in this case, everything was circumstantial at best.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman my rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I’ve got some mixed feelings about this, on its own it was fine, but Goodreads says that this is an installation in a series with American Gods and I just don’t see where any kind of connection is, it feels like a standalone novel and one of the characters makes an appearance in American Gods. Aside from all that, the story was fine, the plot points were all tied together nicely enough, the characters were great, it was just lacking something to set it apart from other books with similar tropes.

Hocus Pocus by A.W. Jantha my rating: 2 out of 5 stars

This book is divided into two parts. Part one is a novelization of the movie and I think it translated well enough, it was basically a play by play of the movie and I did enjoy it. But then. Then we come to the sequel and the trainwreck that follows. It started off well enough but I did have some issues with the timeline and how Max and Alison were able to graduate, go to college, get their law degree, get certified to teach and have a 16-year-old daughter in 25 years, just seems to be cutting it close to me. It was also incredibly cheesy and it didn’t need to be that way. I also had some issues with the narration, there was a lot of “this character walked up to the door and they opened the door and walked through the door” Everything was spelled out and could have been massively improved with a few rewrites.

It by Stephen King my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I am so proud of myself for reading this, it didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would, there were moments where I had to set the book down and just take a minute or two. These characters were so fleshed out and felt so real along with the town, it feels like I could pack up and move to Derry it feels that real.

Shattered Blue by  Lauren Bird Horowitz my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed this well enough while listening to the audiobook but thinking back on it, I feel underwhelmed by it overall. Everything just felt average, I did love the play on colored Fae, that was a fun twist and there was not enough poetry throughout the story.

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux my rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I really liked this, I actually went into this thinking it was a reread but I dont think I’ve read this before! I enjoyed the writing style, there was this kind of investigation feel that gave the book a crime drama feel to it. There are moments of frustration but overall I thought it was pretty good.

Quite a “meh” reading month for me, a lot of 3 stars, a few 4s and more 2 star reads then I was expecting.

Favorite of the Month: The Two Towers Least Favorite of the Month: Hocus Pocus and the All New Sequel

    October Wrap Up 2018 Oh my, what a month! September seemed to fly by and October felt like it just dragged by.

[theconservativebrief]

The second half of 2018’s fall TV premiere week brings with it a slew of comedies, new and old, as the afterlife dwellers of NBC’s The Good Place move on to a new location and scene stealer Lil Rel Howery finally gets his own sitcom with Fox’s Rel (which technically debuted a few weeks ago but moves to its regular time slot this week).

But the week’s biggest “new” series is Murphy Brown, the 1988 stalwart that has returned for its first season since 1998, with most of the original cast in tow. (It’s the 11th season of Murphy Brown overall.) Does Candice Bergen still have it? Do you even have to ask that question? (You saw Book Club, right? Good movie!)

Oh, and there’s also a show where God friends somebody on Facebook, and it’s nowhere near as bad as that sounds. Promise!

Few of these shows are great, and as critics, we often have limited information on whether they’ll get better. (It’s rare to impossible for broadcast networks, especially, to send out many episodes for review beyond the first couple.) But there’s something in all of these shows worth checking out, especially if you’re a particular fan of their genres.

(A note: We’ve only given ratings to shows where we feel we’ve seen enough episodes to judge how successful they will be long-term, which for right now is just Murphy Brown and The Good Place. In the case of both shows, we’ve seen new unaired episodes in addition to prior seasons.)

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Good news: The Good Place is back.

The NBC comedy is one of the best shows currently airing. It’s smart, it’s touching, it’s funny, it’s well-acted — and even in its third season, it’s firing on all cylinders.

Season three picks up where season two ended, with our heroes sent back to Earth to test out Michael’s (Ted Danson) theory that, given the opportunity, they would change their lives enough to make it into the Good Place.

Of course, saving the souls of everyone’s favorite humans — self-professed “trash bag” Eleanor (Kristen Bell), mortally indecisive Chidi (William Jackson Harper), navel-gazing socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jacksonville, Florida’s very own Jason (Manny Jacinto) — isn’t quite that easy. But it wouldn’t be The Good Place if it was.

From the start, showrunner Mike Schur has been perfecting the art of subverting expectations and throwing curveballs into the story at a rate that would cripple pretty much any other show. The new season doesn’t let up in that regard, as its twists and turns pull off a three-season hat trick.

That it works comes down to the fact that nothing on The Good Place is done for shock value; at the risk of sounding preachy, it’s all in service of a larger arc, as well as a reminder — whether you believe in the existence of a Good Place or not — to be good, even when it seems impossible. —Karen Han

The Good Place debuts Thursday at 8 pm Eastern on NBC. Don’t miss it, ya dink!

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The first three episodes of the new season of Murphy Brown, which reunites liberal lion news anchor Murphy and most of her pals at a cable news morning show, aren’t very good. The jokes are mostly easy potshots at Donald Trump (would you believe that Murphy calls him “orange” in the first episode?!), and the live studio audience is so over-mic’ed that every little utterance they make sounds like wild laughter and applause.

In the 2018 revival, Murphy and her friends are hosting a sort of Fox & Friends for the type of left-leaning folks who watch Murphy Brown. And putting Murphy in the hollow confines of a morning show could be fun! But the new Murphy Brown doesn’t even try to explore these contradictions, or the sheer anachronism of the show’s existence in this era.

It instead exists in a world in which support for Trump is inexplicable and if the press just found the right words to speak, it might make him disappear; this is a show that takes every opportunity to harangue America, Republicans, and the press for not having the calm, collected wisdom of Murphy Brown.

And yet there’s something here. For as sitcom-silly as it is for Murphy to be dragged into a tweet war with the president in the season premiere, the heroine of this revival serves as a specific panacea to people old enough to remember Murphy Brown, peddling a kind of sitting-on-your-couch activism designed not to effect change but, instead, to make you feel less alone in these scary times.

And every so often, there’s a flash of the old show’s panache, or a line reading that Bergen knocks dead, or a flicker of terror at how bad things have gotten and how bad they could still get, and the show comes to life, for a moment at least. It’s not good, but it’s comforting. —Todd VanDerWerff

Murphy Brown season 11 debuts Thursday at 9:30 pm Eastern on CBS, with a special 35-minute episode. For much more on Murphy old and new, read our comprehensive explainer.

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On paper, the premise of God Friended Me sounds so very, very stupid. Miles, an atheist played by the effortlessly charming Brandon Micheal Hall, hosts a podcast where he dunks on believers. And then one day, he receives a Facebook friend request from “God.” He accepts the friend request, and God suggests other friends, who turn out to be part of a massive puzzle that could only be assembled by someone omniscient.

Does Miles start believing in God as a result? Nah. To God Friended Me’s credit, the show lets Miles think that what’s happening to him involves either the actual God … or such a sophisticated artificial intelligence that it seems like God but is, instead, just really good at predicting what people are going to do. (Shades of the late, lamented Person of Interest!)

Miles spends a lot of the pilot trying to figure out who “God” is, like he’s not in a TV show where it will take him 100 episodes or more to solve the mystery (and where he will almost certainly learn that “God” is actually God or, like, a conglomerate of psychic rabbis). But somehow, God Friended Me has a good shot at wearing down your (very reasonable) defenses.

Hall earns my earlier descriptor of “effortlessly charming,” bearing even more of the load than he did on ABC’s one-season-and-done comedy The Mayor. And the series has surrounded him with equally likable supporting players, including Violett Beane as a journalist who joins his cause, and Joe Morton as his — dramatic irony!!! — minister father?!

If God Friended Me were at all cynical about its premise, it would be unbearable. Instead, it’s earnest and cheesy and a little stupid, which turns out to be the right approach. When the puzzle pieces snap into place, it works, the viewer’s cynicism be damned, because it’s silly in the way that a golden retriever licking your face is silly — you eventually just kind of give in and laugh about it. —TV

God Friended Me debuts Sunday, September 30, at 8:30 pm Eastern on CBS. If you grew up in the Protestant Church, try singing the title to the tune of “Love Lifted Me.” You will never be able to stop. You’re welcome.

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The mileage you get out of Rel will likely depend on how much you like its namesake, Lil Rel Howery. On the bright side, objectively speaking, Howery has charm to spare, and after supporting turns in Get Out and Insecure, it’s nice to see him as a leading man. Rel’s creators, Josh Rabinowitz and Kevin Barnett (The Carmichael Show), also seem to be keenly aware of their star’s strengths, as the show’s pilot opens with a monologue that depends entirely on how well Howery can sell a scene where he’s essentially talking to himself.

That said, Howery is stuck doing most of the heavy lifting. Rel is based on Howery’s own life — his character is named Lil Rel and, like Howery, is divorced with two children and from the West Side of Chicago — but the specifics and depths that such a correlation ought to provide aren’t quite there. At least, not in the pilot.

Though Rel occasionally plays a little too hard into its multi-camera comedy format (audience laughs are a difficult thing to master; if a show relies on them too much, they become annoying rather than helpful), there’s clearly potential for growth. The natural rapport between Howery and the rest of the cast, including Jessica Moore as Lil Rel’s longtime friend, Jordan L. Jones as his brother, and Sinbad as his father, is great, even if they’re aiming wider with their jokes than Howery, who seems to have something a little more substantive in mind as far as the long game is concerned.

Which is all to say, if you’re a fan of Howery’s work, Rel is worth tuning in to. The series has the potential to become something special — just a little further into the season. —KH

REL airs Sundays at 9:30 pm Eastern on Fox.

Last Man Standing (Friday, 8 pm) returns after a year off the air, with some cast changes and a new network — it used to be on ABC; now it’s on Fox. Tim Allen is still front and center, though. We’ll post more comprehensive thoughts soon, but if you liked Last Man Standing in its first go-round, you will probably like its return episodes.

Last Man Standing’s Fox debut is followed by The Cool Kids (Friday, 8:30 pm), which gathers a lot of great actors (David Alan Grier! Martin Mull! Vicki Lawrence! Leslie Jordan!) only to strand them in a bland story about retirement home shenanigans. With a cast this good and a co-creator like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day, there’s a world in which The Cool Kids evolves rapidly into something truly funny. It’s probably just not this world.

Also, NBC’s Saturday Night Live (Saturday, 11:30 pm Eastern/8:30 pm Pacific) is back this weekend and live coast to coast. Obviously, we haven’t seen it, but the series’ season premieres are often among the best episodes of the season. This one is hosted by Adam Driver with musical guest Kanye West. Keep an eye out for the debut of new cast member Ego Nwodim.

Original Source -> 4 TV shows to check out, from The Good Place to Lil Rel Howery’s new show

via The Conservative Brief

[lilydawsonfield]

Wink wink

Times have changed. No wrong. Change has changed. Change used to happen over time. Time used to happen over time. Time used to take time. Time has changed.

Point being, back in the day -- yes, now that we are 50++, we often use phrases like “back in the day” or “back in the good ‘ol days”. Younger people (now meaning younger than 40) don’t think the good ‘ol days were so fascinating. These young folk have absolutely no concept of time because they are usually out in cyberspace where profile pictures or avatars might just represent the  fantasy in the mind of the creator; but never truly are the person.  Or are they?

A profile picture might be dated, such as happened to me on my Match-dot-com date when my blind date turned out to be in his 80′s yet in his profile picture, he stood upon a yacht, looking like Robert Redford and I don’t mean now, I mean then. But similarly, I neglected to update my Linkedin profile picture which was taken at Renee’s high school graduation in the height of my  mid-life crisis which started at 40 and ended at 55.My profile picture therefore, was taken at the height of an extraordinary biological surge of desire which consummated in an insanely inappropriate but out-of-bounds wild love affair which quickly brought down both marriages. I sympathize when I see a middle-aged guy not only acting like a teenager, but seemingly living out his wildest teenage fantasy with no holds barred. This midlife crisis isn’t necessarily willed behavior.  It’s a lot like puberty; out of your personal control.

But I’m straying from my original thesis which I thought of while jogging around Prospect Pond this morning in the relatively cool heat. Last week I had a job interview with a young hotshot (39 years old).  When I recounted my experience to Jason, who is now 19, I kept referring to Scott as a “young hotshot”. Jason’s response, “Mom, Mom...39 isn’t young.”

Scott’s interest in me as a potential “Executive Assistant/Bookkeeper” originated from his paid Linkedin search. I received a very “professional” kind of email from Scott. I like the word professional and I use it all the time. But really, professional language in the age of the internet has become standardized and phony, especially among younger people (those 40 and down). And maybe it always was, but it’s only more obvious these days. Everybody uses the same phrases and the same words. “Kind Regards” sounds phony. But phony has become normalized and much of the customer service is now scripted. Worse, it’s automated. Worse the automation is humanized.

Scott winks. He didn’t wink the moment we met. Instead his brown eyes expression betrayed his immediate loss of interest in my candidacy. Which believe it or not, didn’t bother me. But seeing as I’d shown up for this blind date, Scott saw it through. We sat in a conference room across from one another.  Scott smiled a false smile and winked as he began to tell me about his preferred interview style. He wanted to chat. So we chatted and I felt perfectly comfortable being me. Scott said he is a workaholic and a Christian.  He was raised a Catholic, but now attends a Christian non-denominational church. He doesn’t agree with some of their bible teachings. “Christ Church of Oakbrook” I guessed. “Camels squeezing through the eye of the needle” I guessed Perhaps Scott was telling me about his religious perspectives because I told him I currently work at a church where everybody’s atheist and the minister is a married lesbian.

Scott’s business is distilleries and breweries, not owning them; advising them. There were lots and lots of liquor bottles in Scott’s well-appointed offices, which were spacious and overlooked the man-made lake outside walls of picture windows. Scott’s first question was “Do you like alcohol” and his second question was “What kind?” I told him I’m into craft beer and I could see this was a disappointing answer for him.

Later, he explained that socially, he liked a neat kind of drink; you don’t need to make a cocktail, just add a splash of something. I said yes, I agree, I like martinis since they are pure alcohol, but I also like to have my beer chaser. Scott said he and his wife, who now is tied down at home with the two babies, which is why Scott now needs an assistant. According to the website, his wife is the DOO (Director of Operations) which was formerly called the Administrative Assistant, which back in the day we called the secretary, which now is a dirty word and understandably so, like stewardess, it recollects the fact that women were second class citizens back in the good ‘ol days.

[nicholemhearn]

Libertarian Origins, Libertarian Influence, and the Ruling American Right

At the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has responded to my recent essay on the way libertarian antipathy to democracy has influenced the small-government, free-market right. Somin’s gracious and thoughtful reply is most welcome. However, I’m afraid he has misunderstood my argument and the scope of my claims. I’m sure this is as much my my fault  as his, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify.

My argument, as Somin reconstructs it, is that libertarians are hostile to democracy due to an “absolutist conception of property rights,” this hostility has “infected the mainstream Republican right,” and has become “a major factor in [the right’s] undermining of various key norms of liberal democracy.” But this is totally wrong, Somin argues, because libertarian skepticism about democracy isn’t driven primarily by property rights absolutism, and “it is not a significant contributor to the pathologies of the conservative right.”  

Somin does not dispute that libertarians are generally skeptical of and often hostile to democracy. It’s agreed on all sides that libertarians tend to be down on democracy.  The contested questions then are “Why?” and “How much influence have libertarian anti-democracy ideas had on actual Republicans?”  

I’m largely unmoved by Somin’s response. First, he somewhat misstates my view about the source of libertarian hostility to democracy. Second, Somin’s implicit theory of influence is overly intellectualized and unreasonably demanding, which allows him to wave off otherwise undeniable libertarian influence on Republican politics.    

My argument is not, as Somin says, that property-rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. This actually gets my diagnostic narrative backwards, which is why Somin’s response seems to me orthogonal to the argument I tried to make. That said, my argument wasn’t as clear as it might have been. I failed to clearly distinguish my story about the genealogy or history of certain libertarian ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other, the influence of those ideas in our political culture. I’ll try to clear that up.

But Somin and I are also running into a different confusion around the usage of “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism.” I’ll clear this up first.

Classical liberalism versus libertarianism: semantics and substance

I’ve told a historical story, which Somin doesn’t really address, that tries to say something about what distinguishes libertarianism from classical liberalism. In my story, there’s speciation in the intellectual lineage. Libertarianism branches off from classical liberalism, and the speciation event is the emergence of property-rights absolutism. It’s true that, as a matter of history and political sociology, classical liberals and libertarians continued to make common cause, and that, as a matter of linguistic usage, it became common to refer to classical liberals as “libertarians.” But in the context of a historical claim that a radical view about the inviolability of property rights accounts for the emergence of libertarianism as a philosophical and political stance distinct from classical liberalism, it begs the question to casually lump classical liberals and libertarians together.

Somin writes:

In modern times, the two most significant libertarian critics of majoritarian democracy were economists F.A. Hayek and James Buchanan (one of the founders of public choice theory). Neither of them favored absolute property rights either. Buchanan even advocated a 100% inheritance tax. Wilkinson tries sidestep this by classifying Hayek and Buchanan as “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” But whatever terminology we use, it is pretty obvious that Hayek and Buchanan’s ideas (combined with more recent works flowing from the same traditions) are the most influential bases for most modern libertarian skepticism about democracy. And these theories are not based on any notion of absolute property rights.

I’m not sidestepping anything by labeling Hayek and Buchanan “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” I’m saying that they aren’t libertarians in  the sense I’m interested in, precisely because they aren’t property rights absolutists.

Cleaving libertarianism from classical liberalism at the property rights joint is neither historically nor philosophically arbitrary. Consider this passage from Samuel Freeman, a distinguished liberal political philosopher:

It is commonly held that libertarianism is a liberal view. Also, many who affirm classical liberalism call themselves libertarians and vice versa. I argue that libertarianism’s resemblance to liberalism is superficial; in the end, libertarians reject essential liberal institutions. Correctly understood, libertarianism resembles a view that liberalism historically defined itself against, the doctrine of private political power that underlies feudalism. Like feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified political power as based in a network of private contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to liberalism, that political power is a public power, to be impartially exercised for the common good.    

I resisted this for a long time, but I’ve come around to Freeman’s view. The implications for classical liberal/libertarian relations are profound. If Freeman’s right, classical liberalism isn’t simply a “soft” or less “principled” version of libertarianism. Rather, the distinction is that classical liberalism is a form of liberalism and libertarianism isn’t.

Now, I don’t think the distinction is really so starkly binary as that, since there’s a range of more-or-less strict views about the (in)violability of property rights.  Still, it remains that classical liberalism is in conversation with the dominant liberal view (which Freeman calls “high liberalism”) on the question of the status of economic rights and liberties in a way that libertarianism is not. Should we grant economic liberties the same legal protections afforded to civil and political liberties, and thereby further restrict the scope of democratic choice by expanding the list of basic rights? Classical liberals say “Yes.” High liberals (e.g., Rawlsians like Freeman) say “No.”  

Absolutist rights-based libertarianism isn’t really part of this conversation at all. It’s effectively an argument against liberalism and the legitimacy of liberal political institutions, which is why it’s so confusing that the folk taxonomy lumps libertarianism and classical liberalism together,  and sets them against standard left-liberalism. The dispute between liberalism and hardcore libertarianism concerns whether it’s possible to justify democratic political authority at all. The dispute within liberalism, about the status of economic rights and the legitimate scope of democratic decision-making, is much smaller than that.  

From this perspective, Somin and I both are firmly on Team Liberal. Our philosophical differences are actually exceedingly small. We both disagree with “high liberals” like Freeman more than we disagree with one another. And we disagree with liberals like Freeman less than we disagree with, say, Ron Paul.  Likewise, Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy, who I mentioned at the outset of my essay as an example of a libertarian democracy skeptic, isn’t libertarian, in this sense, either—as he has explained himself. Brennan, like me, is an updated classical liberal—he uses the term “neoclassical liberal.”

Political labels are confusing, and I encouraged confusion about labels myself by identifying Hayek and Buchanan as classical liberals rather than libertarians, in accordance with my historical theory about the emergence of libertarianism, but followed common usage at the outset of my piece when I identified Somin, Brennan, and Bryan Caplan as libertarians, despite the fact that none of them are property rights absolutists.

This is confusing, but I don’t think it is fundamentally confused. Brennan and Caplan (I’m a little less sure about Somin) are very culturally libertarian, in much the way that some atheists are culturally Jewish or Catholic of Mormon. And that’s why it makes sense to see their books as libertarian critiques of democracy, despite the fact that none of them is a property rights absolutist, and none of them argues from notably libertarian premises.

Each of these books is based, in one way or another, on the voter ignorance literature, which doesn’t really have an ideological valence. What’s interesting is that libertarians or ex-libertarians (starting with Jeffrey Friedman at Critical Review), already relatively disenchanted about democracy, were first to latch onto the deep implications of profound public obliviousness, and laid out the dire picture with a sort of told-you-so glee. Standard liberals, burdened with a romantic attachment to an idealistic vision of democracy, have fought these implications kicking and screaming, and are only now starting to square up, rather morosely, to the bleakness of the picture.

Political philosophies exist and develop in time, and political movements and identities are social and historical. Classical liberals and libertarians have been involved in the same institutions, going to the same meetings, and attending the same parties since libertarianism got off the ground. This has libertarianized the views of classical liberals a good deal. Moreover, many new-style classical liberals, like me, came through radical libertarianism, which has continued to shape our views both as a foil and as a filter through which we can’t help but continue to experience the world.

Influence is complicated. You can change your mind without changing your heart. Doctrinal communities structure our thoughts, sentiments, and group attachments long after we’ve strayed from orthodoxy or left the group. It’s impossible to understand how political ideas influence political culture without understanding this.

What drives libertarian antipathy to democracy, again?

I strongly agree with Somin that classical liberal ideas have been a very influential source of libertarian skepticism about democracy, but these ideas aren’t distinctively libertarian. I also agree that, in elite academic and legal circles, classical liberal democracy skepticism is much more influential than radical rights-based libertarian democracy skepticism. No one doubts that Hayek and Buchanan are classier than Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, and less likely to be sneered at in a university seminar room. But this doesn’t imply, logically or empirically, that radical libertarian democracy skepticism has not had a big influence on the political culture of the right.  

Classical liberals have always opposed unconstrained majoritarian democracy. Madisonian anti-majoritarianism is a pervasive background influence on American liberalism, left and right. My genealogical/historical argument is that the specifically modern classical liberal fear of democracy was rooted in the worry that unconstrained democratic majorities, in the grip of radical socialist ideals of economic justice, would redistribute their way into penury and tyranny. Hayek is the representative figure here. His worries about democracy’s vulnerability to dangerous ideological fads motivated his constitutionalism and his conservative-ish defense of the independent political authority of the common law and established social norms against romantic majoritarians. This work has been enormously influential, and I’m a huge fan. (That I generally agree with Hayek’s view of democracy didn’t come across to some readers.)  

The next step in my story, which I’ll expand on here, is that other, even more vehemently anti-socialist classical liberals, such as Isabel Patterson and Ayn Rand, were animated by the exact same worries, but feared that refurbished classical liberal anti-majoritarianism was too morally and rhetorically insipid to stem the surging red tide.

Hayek thought that, in order to survive, liberalism needed to be updated and refreshed for the modern era. But Hayek frankly acknowledged that the fate of the liberal order ultimately depends on vagaries of public sentiment, and he visibly struggled with the problem of how to make liberalism as inspiring as socialism without dishonoring the complexity of truth. If you’re worried about the survival of liberal capitalism, this is unnerving.

Rand took the problem of inspiration and moral passion head on. She developed a radical, individualist moral and political theory expressly designed to neutralize radical socialism, sold it to the masses by weaving it into thrilling anti-collectivist propaganda, and insulated it from criticism by packing it all inside a cult of reason.

So, again, my claim is that modern classical liberal worries about democracy largely motivated absolutist theories of property rights, like Rand’s, which created a new political philosophy distinct from classical liberalism. The initial political point of libertarian property rights theory was to serve as a countervailing cultural force to the idea that leveling redistribution is a requirement of justice, and to popular myths about the unique authority and legitimacy of unlimited majoritarian sovereignty.

This is the sense in which Somin is wrong to say that I’m arguing that property rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. On the contrary, I’m arguing that classical liberal democracy skepticism drove the adoption of property rights absolutism, which launched libertarianism as a distinct ideology.

The gospel according to Murray Rothbard

I’ve suggested that the theory of rights in Rand’s fiction and nonfiction was the, um, fountainhead of libertarianism as a distinct philosophy and political movement. Her influence has been enormous. The opinions of millions, including some extremely powerful people, have been shaped by her books. But much of Rand’s influence has been indirect, flowing through the almost mind-boggling sway of Murray Rothbard. Pausing to detail the various channels of Rothbard’s influence will help make my claim about the influence of libertarianism on the ruling American right much less abstract.   

Rothbard, effectively Jesus to Rand’s John the Baptist, created the orthodox, hardcore libertarian catechism by sprinkling Rand’s absolutist rights-based individualism with a pinch of secularized Catholic natural law doctrine and fusing it to Ludwig von Mises’ economic theories. As Jacob Levy recently noted, a smart historian looking to spin a gripping dark yarn about the influence of libertarian ideas on the American right would pass right over James Buchanan, a high-minded scholar’s scholar, and fix on Rothbard, an obscure but colorful figure who has exerted extraordinary influence on American political culture at every level of brow. high, middle and low.

On the high-brow side, Rothbard directly influenced the great Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which made hardcore libertarianism academically respectable, was a Rothbardian defense of the minimal state again’s Rothbard’s own anarchism. Untold thousands of undergrad and grad students have been exposed to libertarian ideas through Nozick’s reputable version of Rothbard and Rand.

At the cultural middle, Rothbard was a major influence on the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, who co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane. According to David Gordon, Koch “met Rothbard and was so impressed with him and his ideas that he decided to endow an organization to promote libertarian theory and policies.” More than a few of us here at Niskanen worked at that organization for more than a few years. It is not without influence.

On the low-brow side, Rothbard

[avaelf-blog]

Dear Jason,

I knew you for a week but you followed me for 10 years. You was in me with everything I did. You changed everything I did. You tried to fix me that night. What you didn’t know was I was broken long before you. I was broken from a physical abusive father. I was broken from an abusive mother. I was broken from all the attention I was suppose to get as a child looking from their parents.

I don’t know which path lead me to you. All of them? One of them? I remember as a child, getting out of the house, I was fairly happy. Running the woods, pretending I was some knight on horseback to save a princess (is that what you was fixing?). If I wasn’t out saving the princess in my shiny armor, I was in my room, reading a book. Which of these paths lead me to you, Jason? Both? One? Neither?

Or was it the path that was scared when her parents was home because they yelled? Because she wasn’t good enough. Or something wrong? Her father was gone by then. She just has small memories of him beating her at 2 or 3. Maybe you, Jason, can be the only one to answer this question. “What is wrong with me that need fixing?” Get back to me on that. So maybe this is the path that lead me to you, perhaps.

I don’t know what happened to knight in shining armor. Maybe I grew up? Maybe I didn’t have a princess to save? I stopped going outside and running around. I will go outside and sit. But not run. I would sleep for hours. My cousin pulling me out of bed. My cousin was the one was introduced the drinks to me. Maybe this was the path? Or was it the depression? Or both? Maybe if I never self-medicated with alcohol, I would have never ran into you.

When I drank I felt. You see, I don’t think you know how this depression works. People think it is just sad like a downcast. What til later in the day. When you are emotionally drained and can’t feel anything. While, at the bottom of a bottle you feel everything. That is why I kept drinking. Weed, weed made me eat, and I needed to do that since I stopped. What no one tells you is that when you feel everything, you feel everything.

I met Shawna at one of the parties with my cousin. She was sweet. I connected to her because she came from a broken home like me. Another mistake. Another path. I tried to tell her what you did to me. Remember? You moved on to Shawna by that following Tuesday and she called me crazy and jealous. I tried to warn her. She didn’t believe me. I didn’t report you because of that. I would be the crazy jealous ex. My bad, I should have. A month later, I saw bruises on her and felt bad for her, offered support and she walked away from me.

Next path to you was going to that damned house. You know what that house meant to me? It was safe. We got away from lives a bit. Hell, I even brought homework there! Yes, it was the party house at night. But have you been there during the day? I was there most everyday. At the table of truth, passing a joint, drinking a beer. You know the rules of the table of truth? Every time, you got the joint, you had to say your truth, whatever that may be. It was therapeutic. Those people, they were my friends, for a time. I will admit, this is where my rep came. Every chick that came into that house I had to hit on. Had to. I was 14. My hormones were raging. Well, Jason, we both know you can’t pass up a lady, or else I wouldn’t writing this letter to you, asshole. The difference between you and me, I can take a loss. You win some, you lose some. Some can actually say no and you can actually fucking accept it! Even a maybe or a I don't know is a default no! Hell, since we are on the subject, YES MEANS YES, so unless you get a yes, it is a default no! So my mistake for being a teenager. I didn’t realize that would get me raped. Also just because I like different genders, is that what you meant by fixing me? I really don’t know what you were trying to fix.

Next mistake. I had a crush on you. A huge crush. You really made me see crushes differently after that. I saw you as perfect. If you was just a little different, you know no rape, no abuse, we could have made it work for a little bit. I remember sitting there by the table watching the sun in that black silk hair. You know you I had a think to never be with a hispanic guy which is weird because I am hispanic. Jason, you were the only hispanic guy I ever thought I wanted to be with and you changed my mind fast. You had the greenest eyes from your mother. You looked cute with those glasses, harmless. I guess sharks can wear glasses.

I should have seen signs. They tell you the signs of abusive relationships. Hell if I walked to the bathroom without your permission you flipped. But we wasn’t in a relationship. I was just trying to get you. Guess I succeeded. Go me.

Talking about signs. There was signs all that Saturday. Raining all day. But I always loved the rain. I still do. You didn’t take that away from me. Everything went wrong that day. A lot of yelling from my parents. A lot of falling and slipping that day. Nothing working. I had a migraine that day. My cousin begging me to go her party. I should have went, maybe my princess was there. Another path. I ran out of conditioner in the shower. I wish that was my biggest problem that night. I broke my brush again because of my thick hair. All these little problems and none of them were all that big. I wanted to look so perfect for you. I guess did. I remember my cousin saying “go get him”. Got him cous. Got him.

Remember before when I said at the bottom of a bottle you feel everything. You feel everything. That night went kinda fast. Us kissing went kinda fast. Btw Jason, I never told this, never had the chance, however, I have had girls who never kissed a girl before and can literally kiss better than you. Should probably work on that. Up you started pulling off my clothes.

Time stopped. I felt the band's bass hit my soul as it dropped. I knew how drunk I was. I knew how high I was. I knew once I started saying no, you wouldn’t care. You never did care.

I was always the knight saving people. I saved people! No one saved me. I never needed to be saved. But that night, I did. And no one was there to save me. No one could me. You choose that night because you knew how defenseless I would be. I thought I choose you, but it was you who choose me. The broken one.

If you ask me anything about that night, I could tell you, the smells? You mean of your breath that was cinnamon from your gum? Is that I hate cinnamon gum or cinnamon toothpaste? Yeah, it smells like you. It is a trigger. I hate the name Jason. I think of you. My therapist said you can’t hate someone if you don’t love them first. I disagree. I was never in love with you nor did I know you good enough to love you. Yet, I hate you.

Jason, why did you whisper in my ear? Why “I fixed you”? Why not “I’m sorry”? I would hate you less with a I’m sorry. At least then, you have a soul. But I fixed you? Why does everyone keeps trying to fix me?! My parents. My friends. My therapist. You. What is so wrong with just me that I need fixed?! And who the hell do you think you are that you can fix me? What was you fixing? The same thing everyone else was or something else? Cause I am not fixed. I am way beyond fucking broken now no thanks to you.

I have this theory, Jason, you are broken. Not broken like me. A different kind of broken. But broken. Maybe you should be fixed before you go trying to fix others.

A thing you probably didn’t know. I was virgin that night. I wasn't that morning but night I started out one. I remember even after that people telling me “that should be a special night, save it for someone special” “a night to remember”. Yeah, I remember it better it much better than those who willing gave it away. I guess technically it is a special night with a special someone. Thanks for that. I have to choke back tears every time.  So now I will never get back that night and I will never get my special night. Yeah, you fixed me up good.

I think you can understand why I got an abortion. I am sure you didn’t want a child from that night either. Not only do I want you to have to go through everything you did to me but Jason. I want you to walk up to Planned parenthood with christians yelling at “don’t do it” “it’s wrong” I can understand those statements but a guy protesting yelled “stop being a slut and take care of the kid”. I want you to live through that. I want you to go through that depression of being shamed as you are getting an abortion at 14 for a rape child that happened when you were a fucking virgin! Thank you for putting me through that Jason. You are so amazing as a human. High fucking five. I am an atheist but I would build a hell just for you. On repeat of you getting raped just how you did to me, and pregnant and aborted.

This letter is not me forgiving. No. I will forgive you. But you will not have power over me no longer.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #266

“... and buried deep beneath the waves, betrayed by family, to his nation with his last breath cried: beware the daughter of the sea.”

What's the last thing you looked up in the dictionary? Shit, it's right on the tip of my tongue... I was making sure I was using it right, which I was. Do you ever listen to instrumental music? Rarely, and if I do, it's normally game soundtracks. Who did you last sit on? I'm hoping you mean like... on their lap lmao in which case it'd probably be Jason. No one wants my fat ass to sit on their lap nowadays. What do you think about wind? I HATE wind, unless it's hot and there's a nice breeze. Has there been anyone that you wanted to get to know but never did? Well of course. That happened in high school a lot. What's the last thing you looked at that reminded you of someone? Teddy's picture on my shelf. Have your parents ever tried to commit suicide? Not that I know of. I couldn't even begin to imagine either of those trying that. Do you have a gag reflex? A VERY STRONG ONE. Would you rather have sex before you're married or wait till marriage? I don't care. Tbh by now, I kinda think before is wiser only to ensure you two are compatible in that area. It wouldn't matter to me personally, but I know that's important to some people and can cause issues and built-up bitterness. Just use protection, Christ. Have you ever let someone hit you? Um no? Do you have friends in other states/countries? Plenty. Been on the Internet since before I was even a pre-teen, talking to strangers lmao. Do you ever pay attention during church? I would try to back then, but I never succeeded well because my mind would wander out of boredom. Do you have self-control? That very much depends on the situation. I can be EXTREMELY impulsive, but in other cases hold it together. Have you ever broken a window? No. When was the last time you freaked someone out? I'm sure it was a few nights ago when I had another nightmare and woke up screaming. Mom always yells my name to snap me out of it. Have you ever gone on a date with a weirdo? No. Who's the last person you called a bitch? I don’t know. Is anyone in your family disabled? Yes. What do you want for Christmas? It's hella early to think about it, but I'm quite certain I'll be asking for a treadmill. How many moles do you have? I don't think I have any? Aren't freckles and moles different? Do you own any comic books? No. What is the nastiest dare you have ever committed? I don't know. I never did really nasty ones because I wasn't stupid. Do you know anyone who has been raped? Almost, anyway. Idk if I know anyone to really has been... I hope not. Are you an atheist? No. I think there's... something. Have you ever owned a goldfish? Well yeah, from like, carnival games and stuff. Who was the last person to call you beautiful? I dunno, probably a family member when I changed my FB profile picture. How many times have you been stung by a bee? Once. Those fuckin hornets better stay the holy fuck away from me. What was the last flavor of gum you chewed? Probably something fruity. When was the last time you used tape? Ummm probably when I had to tape the side of my laptop screen a bit. When was the last time you said fuck? A couple questions ago in this survey lmao. Have you ever stolen something? Only this pink crayon I thought was beautiful at Sunday school oof. Who would you like to kiss right now? Maaaan there's three people I would so long I wasn't involved with anyone else. Mark of course lol, Jason, or Sara. Who was the last person you told to 'Shut the fuck up' to? Ha ha, probably playfully to Sara. Why were you last nervous? So I joined this group on deviantART called the Guiding Light Project, which is about mental health help and positivity, and there is a list of people seeking help and what their problem is. I decided to reach out to two people I really thought I could help, and one was a guy. Men make me so nervous that I was very nervous sending him a message, but it's going very well. Whose pants did you last take off? Uhhhh. OH YEAH HEY when I was hanging out with Colleen and she got me to change her son's diaper. Hate hate hate hated it. I do not ever need kids. When was the last time you were disturbed? Hm. I'm sure over something I saw on Facebook. NO, WAIT. Sara, do not read this. When I was at Ashley's, we were watching Naked and Afraid, and they caught a chameleon to cook for food. I almost screamed. Poor thing looked terrified when the guy grabbed him. Why did you last feel awkward? Also when messaging that guy. When was the last time you got in a fight with your best friend? It's been a long time. Have you ever asked someone for a tampon? Only a friend. Who was the last person you read a book to? My niece had me read a book like fifty times. Who is the person you say the naughtiest things to? Ha ha, Sara when we're having our stupid fangirl moments. Who was the last person to send you a letter? Sara. It's still on my shelf. :') How do you feel about war? I’m a pacifist, so guess. Do you like cupcakes or muffins more? Hm, maybe cupcakes. Have you ever pushed someone on purpose? Yes. Have you ever slapped someone in the face? No. Do you have any tough life decisions to make soon? Nothing major. At what time of the day do you usually have the most energy? In the morning, once I've passed the drowsy phase. Magenta, aqua, or coral? Coral. Do you like the color orchid? Ye! Would you rather be a wedding photographer or a nature photographer? Uhhh I literally want to be both? I'm *realistically* more interested in shooting weddings for the income, but if I had my way, I'd be perfectly financially content being a nature photographer. Man, I hope that happens. Have you ever had an ulcer? No. Are you interested in health and wellness? "Rather than interests, I consider them two very important things I should always try to pay attention to. Health is very important." <<<< This. Would you ever be a fitness coach? HA no. Do you ever question whether something that makes you uncomfortable is a good thing or not? That's a very good question. This can definitely lead to you questioning flawed morals, so in that sense, it sure can be. In other ways though, it can certainly be a bad thing. Do you think for yourself? Yes. I am, generally, very opinionated and follow my gut instinct. Do you live life on your own terms, or do you do what everyone tells you to do? The former, usually. I can be AWFUL at making decisions though, so I definitely consider advice. What color is your bike? I don't have a bike. Are you due for a hike? There is physically no way I could handle a hike in my current shape. Muscle atrophy in the legs is not fuckin' fun, and with hyperhidrosis and THIS heat? Oh, hunny. Have you ever created a themed scrapbook? As a kid, I fainty remember having one? How often do you eat dessert? Very rarely. I don't need it. What's the trendiest item you own? Oh boy, I don't have a clue. I don't even know what's "trendy." Did you pull an all-nighter last night? No. When was the last time you wrote an essay? My first semester of this year. Do you enjoy writing essays? I actually do if it's a subject I'm passionate about. Do you enjoy learning? Yeah! What is your favorite fairytale? Fuckin fight me if you say Shrek isn't one. What is your favorite name that starts with a "Z"? I have no idea. Maybe Zena, though I prefer it with an "x." Have you ever felt like you were going to throw up while you were at school? Yes. I have before. Do you own a princess crown? No. When was the last time you were jealous of someone? Ugh... with how bad my PTSD has been lately, I've been having periodic episodes of raging hate and jealousy of the girl he dated after me, thinking things like, "what if he loved her more," "what if he also told her this or that," etc. They're not even together anymore, but my brain doesn't care. Do you know anyone with an eating disorder? Maybe? What was the last thing you killed? I think an earwig-ish thing. Whose number did you last get? The girl's who adopted Bentley. When was the last time you used a public bathroom? Probably not since an appointment with my psychiatrist some time ago. Have you ever used someone for money? Wow, no. Do you have manners? I honestly think I have great manners. Have you ever woken up and realized that yesterday really happened? That was ABSOLUTELY the day after the breakup. It didn't at all feel real when it was even happening. When was the last time that you had a pet that died? Last November is when we had to put Teddy to sleep. God, I miss that baby boy. Or did Mitsu die later? I don't recall for sure. Do you know anyone who retired at a young age? I mean, probably. I'm just unaware. When was the last time you took a taxi/Uber? Where were you going? Never, actually. We don't really have those here. Have you ever been diagnosed (by a professional) with OCD? Yes. Do you know any married gay couples? Distantly. Who is your favorite person to spend time with? SARA! I feel like kids having a sleepover when I've been with her. Is there anything you should tell someone, but don’t want to? Yes. Have you ever woken up somewhere and not known how you got there? I don't believe so. Do you live somewhere where recreational marijuana is legal? No. Have you ever quit a job with no notice? No. Do you have nightmares often? HA, it's just about a nightly basis now. Have you ever been on any sort of government assistance? I've gotten loans for school and stuff. Does that count? Did you have your own bedroom when you were growing up? No, I shared it with my little sister. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic? Pessimistic. Are you comfortable with your weight? Fuck no. How often do you listen to classic rock? Semi-frequently. Not as much as I did in high school. What about country? Just about never ever. Do you know anyone inside and out? I don't think that's possible. Is anyone in your family sick? Both Mom and Grammy are fighting cancer right now. I don't think my grandma has much time left. She can't walk on her own anymore. What kind of camera do you have? A Canon EOS Rebel T6. What is something you know you shouldn’t do, but do anyways? Download music. What is the most amount of money you have ever lost? Idk. Is photography one of your interests? Of course, I aim to make a career out of it. Do you know your neighbors very well? I personally don't. The person to the right of us, though, my mom knows decently and is a total and complete sweetheart. Have you ever hurt yourself just to get attention? "Kind of (I hurt myself for my own purposes, but I did want attention paid to it), when I was a teenager, because I desperately needed someone to treat me with compassion and, like, take the shit that was happening to me seriously." <<<< I don't like admitting this, but it's happened. I want to emphasize that it was not the primary reason and was rather impulsive anger and self-hate, BUT for the mentioned reasons, I did want this shit taken seriously and realize I really needed help. Has anyone ever called you conceited? No. Do you write ever write poetry just to get your feelings out? Certainly. Not like I used to, though. Who were you last really mad at? REALLY mad? I'm not sure, but probably Mom. What is a sad song that you like? "Terrible Things" by Mayday Parade has been in my head lately. What is a rumor people tell about you? I don't know of any. The only rumor that I know has ever been spread about me was that Jason and I had a baby in high school. Despite the fact I was slim then lmao. If you were given 1,000 acres of land with no strings attached, what would you do with it? Definitely plant a forest around a house I'd like to model myself, dig a nice pond for more wildlife... a lot of stuff that would benefit nature. If you had to flee their home country, where would you live? Canada. Do you think psychic abilities exist? Which one would you like to have? No. I'd like to uhhhh... predict the future when I will it myself, I guess. What’s a skill or craft that you would like to master, but haven’t? I wish I could draw exactly what I see in my head. How did you find out Santa isn’t real? My mom just told me. What’s a personality trait that you wish you had? CONFIDENCE!!!!!!! Do you believe in getting revenge on those who do wrong by you? If so, how do you go about it? Noooo no no. That creates so many more problems. If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family think you’d had done? That's a great question. If you could shop for free at one store, what would it be? For the sake of being smart, Wal-Mart. Necessities are there. Do you have any pets? If so, what are they? I have a Siamese-esque cat and a champagne ball python. I'm currently DESPERATELY trying to talk Mom into a Mexican red knee tarantula... and I really want a hognose snake. What event in your life would make a good movie? The breakup and my recovery. If you could dedicate your life to solving one problem, what would it be? Discrimination. Where do you find meaning in your life? Quite honestly, I don't feel it has much meaning currently. I'm not doing shit worthwhile. Do you believe things happen for a reason? Hell no. What do you think is a conspiracy? Honestly, I believe in quite a few. The one I believe in most was that the government was 120% involved in 911. Research. It is unbelievable. I'm very dubious that the "first" moon landing was real, either. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence it was on a soundstage. Why? America wanted to beat Russia in the space race. I love conspiracies. Do you believe in the afterlife? How do you picture it? Yes. I don't quite know how I picture it, but I lean towards like... this nirvanic state of peace and knowledge, and unity between the dead. What’s a superstition you believe in? I don’t believe in any superstitions. None. What is the dumbest way you’ve ever been injured? YOOOOOO when I was at Colleen's in-law's having dinner once, I literally took a large bite of rice RIGHT WHEN IT CAME OFF THE STOVE. I didn't know it'd only just been removed. My tongue was burned for weeks on end. Do you mind conflict? Hell yes I mind. I'm terrified of confrontation. If you could start a charity what would it be for? Something with mental health. Maybe to help those who can't afford help/therapy. If you were a cryptid (bigfoot, mothman, ect.) what would you be? I'm already a cryptid. What’s your ideal temperature and weather? Hm... like 55 and partly cloudy. What topic could you give a 20-minute presentation on with no preparation? Gay rights. Have you ever worn those drunk goggles? Yes, for D.A.R.E. in elementary school. Can you agree to disagree, or usually get upset over conflicting views? It depends on the subject of course, but I'm normally very good at agreeing to disagree. Rodeos – entertaining, or cruel? Animal fucking cruelty. Dumbasses getting gored are well-deserved. Who is the best female rocker? Why? Lita Ford is a badass. Slays on the guitar and is just cool. What color of roses do you find the prettiest? I actually like the classic, deep red. Have you ever accidentally found porn when looking for something else? I don't think so. Why do so many fans with OTP’s insist that their ship is real? I don't really know, but it's annoying. Some people are just friends, y'know. Being similar/compatible does not equate to actually liking each other like that, and the feral ones are just... wow. Do you draw fanart of anything? Not anymore. There's soooo many pictures I'd love to draw of Mark, but I literally love him so much I don't want to disgrace his face with my poor ability to make shit proportional lmao. Favorite thing to see in museums? Fossils! Have you ever seen an unwrapped mummy in person? No. What things have people shamed you for? My AvPD doesn't want me to think about this. Are there any 'adult stores’ in your area? Probably at some point. Have you been inside of them/shopped there before? No. Do you watch The Masked Singer? Any theories? No.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #242

“i don’t miss you, i miss the misery.”

How many pairs of converse shoes do you own? Hm... three or four? Any other names your parents planned to give you? The only one I *think* I remember is Katelyn. Thank fuck I dodged that bullet. Which is the most beautiful place you know? The mountains between NC and TN, if I remember correctly. I was very young. What do you work with? I don't work period & I hate it. Have you ever hit an animal with your car? Thank Christ no. Favorite ride at the amusement park? I guess ferris wheels. Favorite beauty essential in your bathroom cabinet? I don't have a "favorite" considering I don't use any regularly. Do you have many followers on your Tumblr? Nah. Do you tan easily? I burn like toast, man. Are you expecting something in the mail? No. Do you inspire others? Idk. What do you collect? Meerkat stuff and Silent Hill merch. Do you like cats? Hell yes!!! Are you healthy? If you excuse my weight and muscle atrophy, I'm actually pretty healthy, according to a billion tests I've gotten done when trying to discover *why* I had such awful pain in my legs. Have you ever been out of state? Yeah. Can you always blame your acts on that you were just too drunk? Fuck no. Three things you try to avoid as much as possible: Well dying lmao, getting hurt, public speaking. How many times have you been overseas? Zero. Do you use to have someone in mind when shopping for underwear? Wait what the fuck- What accent do you have? I don't really have one, although I do have a southern tone with some words sometimes I suppose. I also do say things like "y'all" or "fixing to (do something)," so I use some Southern terminology. Where would you like to live? The mountains of western NC. Sigh. Do you follow fashion? No. Do you have a big butt? Ever heard of Hank Hill Ass Syndrome? I have Hank Hill Ass Syndrome. Your worst job nightmare is: Customer service EVER again. Who’s the coolest rapper in the world? Idk and idc. Do you count how long you and your gf/bf have been together? I mean yeah, I think anniversaries are worth celebration. Healthy relationships aren't always easy to maintain; to remain in love takes forgiveness, loyalty, dedication... all that. It shouldn't be hard, but it takes effort. Have you graduated? High school, anyway. Rihanna or Lady Gaga? Lady Gaga, definitely. Do you use fake eyelashes? No. What’s your worst interior design nightmare: I dunno. Probably just being very crammed? What makeup brands do you use? I don't have any particular ones; I don't wear makeup enough. What’s the worst kind of rejection you could give someone? I genuinely feel it to be how Jason did so with me. Three and a half years in a very serious relationship, and he out of the blue breaks up with me over Facebook because my depression became "too much." Like by NOW I understand I can't shame him for wanting to be happy, but the way he did it was fucking cruel and tore me apart. Like especially when this person was your refuge from daily pain and pretty much your god and future (never make someone that, holy holy HOLY shit don't), that individual just suddenly having enough and breaking contact off like that was emotional murder. Do you have a crush on someone right now? Well yeah, but it's like... a "tamed" one? Is that an accurate word? Like I understand it just can't work right now, but it doesn't stop me from liking her. Is there anyone that many people think is hot, but you don’t? I'm sure there's someone. Do you sort and organize your clothes in some kind of way? Sorta. When somebody intimidates you, how do you usually act around them? Nervous, skittish, more awkward than usual. Is your favorite singer in a band or does he or she ride solo? Brendon Urie is in P!atD and Patrick Stump is in Fall Out Boy. Freddie Mercury was the vocalist of Queen. Did your parents ever hang your old artwork up on the walls? Yeah, Mom still has some up lmao. How often do you wear chapstick? Only when my lips are actually chapped. Do you walk around your house with your shoes on or do you take them off? Definitely off. What is the weirdest obsession you’ve ever had? Collecting stickers, maybe? How many of the seven deadly sins have you fulfilled today? Sloth is on the daily lmao, gluttony, and lust. Should guys always kiss the girl on a first date? Not always, of course not. It depends on the comfort level, and I would ALWAYS ask first. Which band has the corniest music videos? Corniest lyrics? I don't really watch music videos, and idk about lyrics. What subject is/was hardest for you in school? Math. Have any songs ever inspired you to play an instrument? No. Do you ever use Pandora? No. Are you better with creative writing or writing essays? I think I'm good at both, but I probably excel in creative writing. When was the last time you were rick rolled? No clue. What is the weirdest animal you’ve ever seen as a pet? Seen, I guess a chinchilla, though that's not really "weird." If you had to change one, would you rather change your hair or your eyes? Eyes. When was the last time you had a ‘she-mergency’? I had to look this up to be certain what that even was lmao. Probably some time I started my period at school and had to use folded toilet paper or something for a while. Which sounds creepier: sleeping in the attic or the basement? I'd say it depends on the make-up of each and its cleanliness. What was your favorite computer game as a kid? I think it was called The Amazon Trail 3? It was a damaged disc however, so it froze a lot. I think I only finished it once or twice; even knowing it would likely crash, I just liked playing it as far as I could. Have you ever tried on your mom’s wedding ring? No. Any shows on TV that you flat out refuse to start watching? 13 Reasons Why, to name perhaps the #1. What is your opinion on fruitcake? NO. Here’s a tough one. Would you rather marry your cousin or a dog? Oh fuck off, neither. Who did you last dream about? I can't remember what it was about, but I know Mark was in it lmao. Do you have trouble remembering important things? Sometimes. My memory is atrocious. Which animal can you imitate the best? Audibly? Probably a cat. Which is harder - walking in the snow or sand? Sand. I FUCKING hate walking through sand. It's one reason I don't like the beach. Do you like sour candy? oml YES. If anyone, who did you sit with at lunch today? N/A Have you gotten any injuries lately? If so, what and how? Not anything I can remember. Are you a clumsy person? You have no idea. How about disorganized? I'm oddly split down the middle. Last male you talked to in person? My dad. Have you ever had a sunburn? Oh boy, I've gotten past that. Try sun poisoning. Are you thinking about asking anyone out? No. Pink lemonade or regular lemonade? PINK! Chocolate or strawberry milk? Oh boy, chocolate. I tried strawberry as a child and absolutely loathed it beyond words known to man, and I will not be giving it a second chance. I remember it pristinely. Disgusting. What volume is the ringer on your phone? It's on vibrate. Have you ever won a contest on the radio? No. Do you often write on yourself? I never do, 'less we're talking about tattoos lol. Is there writing on the shirt you are currently wearing? No. Frosted flakes or frosted mini wheats? I hate the latter, so I guess frosted flakes, though I don't really remember how they taste. Do mushrooms really add flavor to food? I hate them, so they obviously have enough flavor for me to notice them... What about onions? Yes. Are you a fan of Thai food? I've actually never had Thai food. How about Indian food? Same as above. Have you ever tried sushi? No. In your opinion, who would be the best president? I don't know. What was the last thing you spent more than $20 on? I have no ide- oh wait I paid for Teddy's surgery with... money I don't know from whence it came? Was it financial aid money? Idr. Do you wear actual designated ‘pajamas’ to bed? Pj pants and a tank top. When was the last time you were tempted to do something you’d later regret? Probably take a nap late in the day, ending in me being unable to sleep well at night. Thankfully, I decided against it. Have you ever had feelings for your best friend’s significant other? Yes. Well, not current best friend, but a former one. How many times did you ride in a car today? Zero. Are you comfortable in your own skin? Fuck no. What's absolutely splendid is even when/if I lose the weight I aim to, I'm going to have loose skin that literally might make me hate my body more until I without argument muster up the money to get it surgically removed. Are you in a good mood right now? I'm alright. When was the last time you had an ice cream cone? Been quite a while. Did you eat breakfast this morning? Yeah, had some cereal. Have you ever been in a cemetery at midnight? No. Do you live on your own? No. I don't even think I could tolerate living alone because of my depression and how loneliness can severely trigger it. I'm realistically probably not moving out until it'll be with an s/o. If not, who do you live with? I live with my mom, my sister's dog, and my cat and snake. How old are your siblings, if you have any? I have a lot, and I don't know the ages of all of them, only my two immediate sisters: 26 and 21. Have you ever had a crush on a sibling’s friend? No. Have you donated blood in the last 2 years? No. What was the last free t-shirt you received from? School. Is there anything you are looking forward to at the moment? February 4th, baby. Tattoo gets fixed up by an artist I like far more. Him not having an open booking until then should say enough. Are you an atheist? No. Are you Asian? No. Are you fluent in another language? No. Are you in the military? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Are you an artist? Not professional, but I enjoy making art. Are you a musician? No. Are you an athlete? Oh, hunny- Do you have a favorite flower? I really like orchids. Where was the last place you went that was more than an hour away? Great question... The trip to my therapist is about an hour, but not over. Why were you going there? For therapy. Who was the last person to tell you you looked nice? Probably Mom, idk. Have you ever been to a nude beach? Hell no, I wouldn't even if I was in great shape. How many websites do you have an account for? WHEW I have no idea, A LOT over all the years. Have you ever paid for any kind of online membership? Well, WoW is an online game, so a subscription, though because I obviously don't have my own money, I'm sadly rich enough in the game to use monthly tokens. Do you try clothes on before you buy them? Not always. I try to avoid it because I just hate doing it. What would you do if you knew a robber was in your house? Well I obviously don't know how I'd react on impulse, but I'd imagine myself locking my door and then climbing out the window. Then run like a motherfucker up the road some to a neighbor's, or hide in the nearby woods and call Mom. What’s your favorite type of pizza? Meat lovers sobs in wannabe-vegetarian. Have you ever been afraid of falling in love? Yes, very. Who’d you last see in a tux? I don't know. Do you record any TV shows and watch them later? No. Do you have difficulty pronouncing any words? Yeah, particularly "breakfast." I tend to put a "t" after the "k." Do you have your own computer? Yeah. Out of everyone you know, who was the most heart? My mom. Who’s the bravest person you know? Oh man, that's hard. I know a lot of brave people. Who would you want to have your back if things got tough? More than anyone in the world, Mom. Have your friends ever given you answers to homework, last minute? Yeah. Have you ever dated someone who was real sportsy? No. Have you ever done something terrible, but took forever to feel bad? By this point in time, I consider how I spoke to Jason before going to the ER multiple times absolutely terrible, and yes, it did take a very long time for me to realize just how cruel it was. Now it's fucking HARD to accept I ever said what I did. Have you ever read Shakespeare? Yes. Can anyone really change anyone that doesn’t wanna change? Nope. Do you think that anyone currently has a crush on you? I would assume Sara still does, but again, we know a relationship between us just isn't wise right now. What profession do you admire the most? The most? Man, that's hard to decide. Probably those that risk their lives for others, like firefighters, cops (yes, I am aware some abuse their power, but good cops deserve all the respect in the world), etc. Have you ever made a fake profile, for any reason? I don't believe so, no. What’s the hardest lesson you’ve ever had to learn? Bad things happen to good people and no, the universe does not care. Have you ever questioned your sexuality? Well obviously.