#and someone referred to kristin as our lady

[coffeeflavored-tears]

thinking about a karlnapity hadestown au

[bigbrothermonopoly]

EPISODE 4:

HOH: ANDREW

EVICTED: SILENCE 8-4

JESS: 

Pandora's box. You are kidding me right? I'm done. bye.

JESS:

Actually jk jk. I'm not done. Clearly this was an inside job. Two people pooled their money together and clearly got it. The real question is... will this get back to me or not. I'm so discouraged right now. I feel like for some reason people don't trust me? I'm going for HOH right now but I ALSO don't want to hear what other people think I should do with it if I get it.BUT also I should worry about that if/when it happens. WE ARE MANIFESTING THIS WIN LADIES! This are still too shaky in this house. I need more answers. I need more people. I just need a pint and a side hoe and I'm good. Everyone seems to be pairing up and I feel like I have no one to turn to right now. We got: Kristine and Chris Brien and Madison Eve and Mackenzie APPARENTLY: Dem and Andrew Austin and Silence Gwen and herself.. Kori and his "I'm in the army" references Me and my paranoia. THAT'S A LOT OF DUO'S in this game. ugh. I JUST NEED A PERSON someone I can trust. Someone who I know is going to ride with me for a while and I just don't see that happening. Which means crackhead Jess will come out eventually. So yeehaw. Also Eve wanting to take out people I'm close with like Will and Brien... no. NO. NOPE. Not happening. 

EMMA:

I think i am safe this week right now i am just trying to maintain my relationships in the house its still a little bit hard to see whos in power but i am told i am safe this week i hope i can win either week 5 or week 6 hoh because thats when those hoh effects the game.

KRISTINE:

IMMA TELL U WHATS UP!!! My life is a mess. I bought a property and Emma has the other one. We just need to find out who has the last one. And I swear to lord Jesus if it’s Gwen I’m going to be PISSEDDDD. That girl has got to goooo. I’m really nervous about Andrew being HOH because I know Chris is in danger and he’s literally my #1 person in this game. Me him and Emma need to make it through this round. I hate that Chris made an alliance that included Gwen and Brian. Since Brian knows our secret and Gwen is a great social player and honestly a comp threat that no one is taking notice of. It IS only round 4 which is fine but still... I don’t want to compete against someone like Gwen. Because I’ve trusted that person before and got super screwed. Thankfully, Chris agrees with me. Anyways. Please send me more money :))) my Venmo is https://venmo.com/code?user_id=2882981236572160313 PLEASE SEND MONEY

JESS:

Who gave out free samples of crack to the house? Last night I had a weird call with Eve. Essentially it seems like she wants Mackenzie to be given a power of the next property we buy so she can control the power via Mackenzie. I feel so bad for Mackenzie because when I've spoken to her she seems kind of discouraged about the way Eve talks to her sometimes. Which I totally get because I'm sometimes kind of shook by it all.  I reassured Mackenzie not to take it personally I just think Eve gets a tad bit overexcited with everything and kind of just shoots her shot. BUT. If these bitches think I'm their bitch they are GREATLY mistaken. In what world does me not getting the power this time when I literally gave up a property and money for Eve to get a power last time, work? If I was them I'd be throwing the power at my someone who isn't in the duo to make me feel safe and secure. I'm not giving up money and another power again, it ain't happening again. Kristine is all in my pm's now trying to figure out what is going now when it soooo transparent she doesn't trust me. Either Emma told her what I said about her and I not talking or homegirl really thinks that I haven't been hearing that she was leaking I was in a trio with Tawni and Gwen last round? Andrew being in power is good for me. He said he won't be putting me up, Eve wastes her power (although I kind of wanted it for us Chris going opens up the game a little more and takes a number away from the other "side" I see forming), and I think Andrew doing this will put some doubt into people's heads. This is all good for my game because it pushes another couple targets in front of me. My only concern right now is that Eve is going to expose that I traded her for that property.

KORI:

Alright checklist for the past 24 hours... Got both utilities to make the Monopoly... Check. Received the option to Open Pandora's Box as a result, and Opened it... Check. Is likely to get fucked over as a result of whatever twist comes of it... Check. Lost HoH and wasn't even close with Andrew winning it... Check. Was told that I was supposedly safe this week by the HoH... Check. Watched the Light Blue Properties get snagged with not much way to speculate who has them... Check. Missed out on $80 in Live Comps because I stayed after a bit at work and was driving... Fucking Check. I think that's everything, guess now I'm just gonna twiddle my thumbs a bit and hope Andrew isn't gonna nominate or backdoor me.

AUSTIN:

Su Andrew is HoH this week and he has nominated Madison and Silence for eviction but....I heard that he wants to backdoor Chris. I’m 100% ok with Chris going home because he always wants information from me but he never wants to give me any info in return. I was also picked for veto and I do not want to win because my Power Trap alliance wants the veto not to be used while my Mandela Monocles alliance wants it used on Silence so either way it goes if I won I would be screwed. Basically I threw the veto competition.

CHRIS:

HAHAHAHAH , if this isn’t a backdoor, I’m stupid. I know this is the case. For all that don’t know, me and Andrew are rivals because I targeted him in the last HoH competition and had people go after him. This caused him to be very butt hurt and a little bitch. Like bro , it’s a HoH completion where your dominating.. of course I’m going to go after you. I don’t care you called me safe, you are a threat since day one. Now I have Dem coming to me telling me all this information like bro.. what is you doing 😂. Thanks for feeding me information, you are not even in my final 5 but thanks for helping me ! This house is great and I know this backdoor won’t go through unless I’m over my head. Andrew , next time you have a chance, you should of gone for the head. 

ANDREW:

episode 4 So my plan for this week as of right now I’m gonna nominate madison and silence because they didn’t message me saying anything If chris gets picked for veto eve is going to use her veto redraw Hopefully veto is used by the winner I backdoor Chris Baby goes bye bye But also this pandora’s box is more than likely to fuck with me this week :/ My prediction is vote flip but i’m just going to carry on as normal cause i can’t ruin my game due to paranoia also my top 2 allegiances rn are Eve and Jess Lowkey scary that im not in any set alliances yet cuz i know there do be some probably But its okay bc it might work to my advantage later on when im the free agent that these whores need ALSO MARk my words here. If William nominates me when he gets hoh hes a fucking FRAUD he made a deal w me safety for safety and its a good thing cause i was going to nominate his ass instead of silence So far everything is going according to plan and Chris will be out of the house by the end of this week, Obviously if me silence or madison win there will be veto use William said he would use veto aswell Only thing: i’m rly bad at puzzles I lowkey hate that I talk so much in the house chat but I cant help it............I dont want peeps to think im annoying...Sorry I just wnt to contribute to everything its like a disease There is no better feeling than having Chris shake in his boots :heart: You rly fucked with the wrong twink babe He thinks he has the votes to stay. I just have to laugh Especially since he tried to discredit me telling him I was a threat to his game with the simple words of "Bet" Bitch Ill show u bet rq. This is gonna be a split vote i cant wait for this to potentially blow up in my face I am deadass providing a list for SIlence on people he needs to campaign to Like this bitch is not leaving the house My loyalties 

GWEN:

I really want Chris to stay. We’ve become really close in this game. People don’t know how close we actually are. If they did, my alliance would probably just want him out. The vote will be split, and sides will be chosen. Eve is trying to threaten everyone into voting Chris out. She is saying it’s a unanimous vote. Please. It’s clearly split. She needs to goooooo. Please please Chris stay!!

JESS:

What a fucking mess this vote is. This is what happens when cocky people get cocky and assume they have people on lock. I adore Eve and Andrew but... they should have thought this out a little better. I just.. I'm just.. I'm fucking livid. I don't get where Miss Thing Evelyn gets off saying stuff like "That’s my plea, stick your neck out and you will be rewarded". What are you going to reward me with? You warming the seat on the block for me after I'm gone because I sided with you? Thanks but if I wanted a seat warmer I'd go to Target not Walmart. But in all honesty, it's not like I don't want to do this move. I 10000% was into the idea but that's because I was sold the dream of it. I thought Andrew had more pull than he actually does. I knew Eve didn't have as much pull as she thought but Andrew I was wrong about. I was in a decent spot. I think? Kind of cruising the middle and now that spot is being blown up because it is CLEAR Andrew/Eve don't want to be the only ones to take the fall for this move. BUT.. I don't trust Dem to 1000% not get paranoid and flip and I don't want to be sitting on the sinking ship fucking alone. Dem is apparently going to just vote Chris so I guess I'm going to vote for Chris and hope for the best at this point. 

AUSTIN:

This week has been CRAZY! Basically Andrew won HoH and he wants Chris gone but he wants to backdoor him so he puts up Madison and Silence. Madison ends up winning the veto and Andrew replaces her spot with Chris. My dilemma is that I am in an alliance with Chris and Silence. I think Chris needs to go first because he is very sketchy. Also Silence can go next week easily. On top of all of this, I have been put in 2 alliances that I didn’t even know were forming. Each alliance wants somebody different to go home but I’m hoping that we have enough votes to evict Chris. 

JESS:

Also Brien is a shady ass hoe and I will be exposing his relationship if he fucks me with this vote. Plus, I knew his ass bought a property and traded it Emma with Kristine and didn't tell me. He's keeping secrets from me and I'm not playing this game like season 1 Sansa I'm playing this game like last season Cersei. No fucks given. I'll probably die soon. His ass is playing the middle and if I win he is going UP. Sorry but this isn't the Bachelor it is BIG BROTHER.

WILLIAM:

I'm so excited cause it looks like this is the vote that will get the game going! I love everyone and want to stay together but like I'm so ready to draw this line in the sand and cause some chaos going!

WILLIAM:

I dont know what Eve's deal is with this threatening game tactic, telling people "The vote will be 12-0" or "Is you dont vote with me it will be a mistake" but I cant wait to see her face come eviction night 😈

KRISTINE:

Absolutely no way in hell i'm letting Chris get evicted. I refuse to let my #1 ally go home because of Andrew's ego being bruised. I'm hoping that my deal with Emma and Brien goes through and that she is able to use the power to basically threaten everyone into voting the way that they said they were going to vote. Again, I REFUSE to let Chris go home this week. Not that I have anything against Silence because he's just like... there but I'm more worried about who is staying versus who needs to go. Anyways, Emma better not be lying about using this power now... or else I will come for her. Chris is like my little brother who is older then me and I will protect him at all costs that I can!

EMMA:

MACKENZIE:

i am NOT looking forward to this vote??? i still don’t know what im doing but i think this is going to be a shitshow

KORI:

So Kristine has dropped a shit load of Tea on me, which has led me to question everything. APPARENTLY there's a Gwen-Chris-Kristine-Brien Alliance. Additionally there was a Chris-Austin-Dem-Kristine alliance. (Though that 2nd one is kaputz with Austin wanting Chris out and Dem being upset with Austin.) Emma got that Vote Reveal which presumably, Myself and Jess know, and I can only imagine Kristine and Brien probably know given they were the other Light Blue property holders that both agreed to give the properties to Emma. So at the very least that's not a power I have to outright fear because I know who has it, I know what the Utilities did. (Sortof, still waiting on that Pandora's Box) The Browns are presumably gone assuming that Veto Shuffle was a one time thing. (That power honestly makes sense since Early on it's Useful but later in the game it'd be worthless.) Unfortunately either Eve or me is being hustled and given that Eve has a biased opinion others know about in relation to this vote, I'm liable to believe more people would lie to Eve about voting Chris than me just because I'm not a biased person right now. If it weren't for the heart to heart me and Chris had as well as really hashing it out with Gwen I don't think I'd be keeping Chris, however based on what I know about the Chris-Dem-Kristine relationship (Thanks Kristine) I doubt Dem was actually with Eve for the vote anyway, which means for Chris to go I'd have had to convince either Gwen or Emma to vote him out which we all know is against their best interests. My best bet right now is to try and recover from any blunders from this round with as much social capital I can walk away with and hope whatever happens with Pandora's Box doesn't just completely screw me over. I'm just ready for this headache of a week to be over, but given it's a live comp next, I'm expecting this next round to be just as trash.

[everyoneisgay]

Hi Everyone! So I'm in a kinda awkward situation... I've been dating this lady for 7-ish months and spend a lot of time at her place. I recently found a few old mementos from her past lovers - love notes, journals, cards, gifts, etc. I'm finding it hard to not feel jealous (especially cuz I'm not as experienced as her when it comes to relationships, and I trash everything after the relationship is over)... What do you suggest we do? Do I have the right to feel upset and jealous about this?

Kristin Says:

Happy 7-months-ish relationship, Anonymous! I would like to begin by telling you that my first-ever girlfriend kept a journal for me during the summer that we fell in love. She wrote in it nearly every day, detailing so many of the moments we spent together, and at the end of the summer she gave it to me to keep. It was one of the most incredible gifts of all time... and it was given to me twenty years ago. I use those italics because holy shit how did I do *anything* twenty years ago, but also to underline this point: I am now married to an entirely different person and I still keep that journal in my house. It is a memento - exactly the word you used to describe the items in your question! - and a very powerful memento of a very important time in my life that I spent with another person who I loved dearly.

Keeping mementos of past loves, in my opinion, is a very normal (and vital!!) part of our lives. We are people, after all, so we don’t remember much of life’s detail as weeks, months, and years pass us by. When we share something important with another person, we grow. The people that we love and have loved are very big parts of who we are. So, your girlfriend holding on to milestones in her life does not mean that she is still in that place today - it simply means that the place she was once in was very important, and she wants to be able to remember certain pieces of it.

Do you have a right to feel upset and jealous?? Of course you do! We all have rights to feel our damn feelings, and finding those mementos stirred up a lot of feelings inside of you -- you are jealous and upset, and you also explained that some of these feelings might come from the fact that this is one of your very first relationships. So, you are probably thinking things like, “If she has these things it must mean she wants to be with those other people still!!” (to which I would say no it most certainly does not and please reference my memento-discussion above), or “I am probably not going to be as good of a girlfriend as those other people were!!” (to which I would say: you most certainly *are* going to be a wonderful girlfriend, but you will not be the same as they were, nor should you wish to be - she is with you because you are different!). 

My words probably won’t make all of those feelings go away, and I would encourage you to talk to your girlfriend about those feelings - but not in a way that makes her feel she has done something wrong. She hasn’t! You aren’t doing anything wrong by feeling these things either, but you should look to her to help you through those feelings. She might be able to explain to you why she keeps the things she keeps, or she might be able to just say to you, “Hey. I care about you right now, and that is what I want to focus on. I can remember things from my past fondly and not want them back - and  I would love it if you could work to trust my feelings for you.”

Whatever you do, don’t ask her to get rid of those memories. Often, in love, the tighter we try to hold someone, the more they wriggle away. The most powerful way to love a person is to let them be who they are right now while also loving the person that they once were (and all that that entails) and the person they are becoming as each and every day goes by.

[lolainblue]

Thunderbirds    Chapter 19

 T/W:  I wrote it, so there’s language and references to people touching other people’s bathing suit zones. And drinking.

      “Wake the fuck up Shan.”

      Jared gave the end of the bed a hard kick and I started to think I was stuck in the worst Groundhog's Day ever.  But this time there was no doubt about whether I had sobered up yet; I was still thoroughly drunk. After the shower, trying to sleep off the whiskey and the shitty day, I had passed out in my boxers.  Judging by the state of my head that hadn't been that long ago. I stuck my head under the pillow and was about to tell Jared to get lost when I heard a giggle. Fucking hell.  I was blind drunk and in my underwear and there were obviously people in the room. I grabbed a pillow and pulled it into my lap as I sat up.

  “What the fuck Jared.  Haven't you done enough damage for one day?”  He was standing next to my bed with two pretty women who were probably even drunker than I was. There was a brunette in tight jeans and a cut-off t-shirt and a blonde in a skintight blue dress. They were hanging on him and giggling, and all three of them seemed to be swaying just a little bit.  I wasn't sure if that was my head or if was them.  

   “Is this him?” the brunette asked.  “He's hot.”

  “This is him,” Jared answered, and that time I'd swear he was actually swaying.  “Girls, meet my brother Shannon.  Shannon, this is Amy,” he said, gesturing to the brunette “And, uh....” He paused while looking at the blonde.  She just kept giggling and waited for him to remember her name.  “Kristin? No Kirstin!” he finally said triumphantly.

  Kirstin sat down on the bed next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Jared told us all about what that awful girl did to you,” she said, running her hand up and down my arm. I wonder what that story looked like when Jared told it. I gave him a nasty look but he just shrugged it off.    “So, we came to help cheer you up.”

   Amy sat down on my other side and kissed my shoulder.  Oh for fuck's sake. I tried to clear my head. I knew this was just piling one bad decision on top of another, but that was easy to do when bad decisions got delivered to you like room service. I turned to tell Kirstin that maybe this wasn't the best night, but just like that someone's tongue was in my mouth and someone else's hand was in my boxers and I figured if I couldn't drink away the misery maybe I could fuck it away.  It wasn't like I could be unfaithful to a woman who was engaged to someone else right?  I dropped the pillow and grabbed hold of Kirstin, the one with her tongue down my throat.  As I pushed her back onto the bed I heard Jared close the door behind him.

   When I woke up again at least it wasn't to Jared kicking the fucking bed. But then again I was realizing I wasn't in a bed, I had passed out on the floor at some point and now had a mouthful of hotel carpet.  I sat up to see Amy and Kirsten balled up together on the bed.  The ringing in my head and the shitty way I felt on seeing them told me my little plan to distract myself had failed spectacularly.  I got up and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and get rid of the taste of whiskey and self-loathing.  Odd how often the two went together.  

   I woke the girls up and told them in no uncertain terms it was time to go.  They were too hungover themselves to protest much and soon I was locking the door behind them.  I climbed into the hot shower and stood there until my skin was almost raw, wishing I could just crash back into bed and sleep the day away.  But it was getting late, and it was a wonder no one had been to my room to get me up already.  We had interviews and sound checks scheduled and I needed to get something on my stomach.  I dressed and headed down to the hotel restaurant.

   The guys were already there, although it looked they had mostly finished eating. Their plates hadn't been cleared yet and there was a basket of biscuits sitting in the middle of the table.  I took one as I sat down and laid my head on the table while I waited for my coffee.

   “How was your night?” Jared asked with a snicker.  I didn't even bother acknowledging him.  He had his laptop out but was he was talking to Matt.  While I ate my biscuit I got an idea.

   As soon as I finished my coffee I grabbed Jared's laptop and headed to the small guest office facilities off the hotel lobby.  I hooked the laptop to their internet connection and opened a web search.  I had been feeling like I was two moves behind whatever chess game Jared and Jane were playing but it was time to catch up.  I entered Jane's name in the search bar.  

   Most of what came up was reviews for her new book (overwhelmingly positive, and from the little I had gotten through yesterday, well deserved) and references to some anthologies she had put together and published.  This was nice, but not helping.  With a little twist in my gut, I typed the word 'engaged' after her name and started a new search. Now I had his name: Angus McArdle.  One more search and a whole new picture emerged. No wonder Jane hadn't wanted to tell me about the guy.

   As far as I could tell, the whole “foreign correspondent” thing was just some sort of hobby.  Good ol' Angus was the son of some rich hoity-toity Australian family and from the looks of things his actual job was jetting about to private islands or showing up at fancy events in tuxedos with elegantly dressed women on his arm.  The term 'millionaire playboy' would not have been a stretch.  There were older pictures of him with a few models and some Aussie actress I had never heard of, but there were pictures of Jane there too. The older ones mostly referred to her as “unnamed female companion” or “unidentified lady friend” but the more recent ones identified her by name as his fiancee.  He was apparently quite the catch. Rich, handsome, well-educated, from a good family, and Jesus, how tall was this guy? I swear he looked like was about 6'3”.  He was like the anti-Shannon.  If this was what she was into now I was done for.

  Jared came into the office as I was scrolling past pictures of Mr. Perfect and Jane sunning themselves on a beach in Bali.  She had on the tiniest little black bikini and she looked amazing.  Even better than when I had known her in L.A..  But I guess she was quite the catch herself.  Even if she hadn't known it at the time, I had realized that first night that she was out of my league.  The years had just proven me right.

  “What the fuck are you doing bro?” Jared said from behind me.  I just kept scrolling.  Jared reached over and closed the laptop.  “Well, at least you see what you're dealing with now.  Left you pining away while she scrounged up a sugar daddy.”

    I really did not want to deal with more of Jared's bullshit today. “Really? That's what you took away from that?”

  “Joke will be on her the first time someone leaks pics of him and his mistress on that same beach,” Jared said disdainfully.  

   I whirled around in my seat.  “Okay man, what the hell is your deal with Jane all of the sudden? You haven't mentioned her name in probably a year, and now you're being all nasty about her.  Why do you even care? What is actually going on here?”

  “She's shown her true colors, Shannon." he said.

   “By getting married to a great guy?”

  “Yeah, I'm sure it's true love," he sneered.  "Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the expensive vacations or that huge rock he put on her finger or the house he's building her.  She'll do what it takes to get what she wants.  That should have been clear to you when she slept with you to get to me.  But for some reason, you don't see her for what she is.  I thought you'd come to your senses eventually but you're just as bad as ever.”

  “She's right.  You're still not over her picking me over you. I didn't think you even liked her that much.”

   “I am over it, it's not about that.  I didn't care about that two-faced little bitch then and I don't now.”

  “She's not who you think she is Jared.”

  “Maybe," he replied, "but she's definitely not who you think she is either.”

   I rubbed my hand over my face.  I was suddenly so tired of all of this. I just wanted to go back to two days ago when I was just fine with my fucked up life.  Better than fine. I was enjoying every minute of it.  Screw Jared and screw Jane.  I was done with all of this.

   Two weeks later I was asleep in my bunk when my phone rang.  Groggily I answered.

  “Shannon? I'm sorry if I woke you. It sounds like I woke you.”

  Shit. “Jane?” She was the last person I had expected to be calling me. I really didn't think I'd ever hear from her again. She must have kept my number when I called her the first time.

  “Yeah, it's Jane. How are you?” There was a pause on the line before she continued.  “I was hoping you would call again.”

    She was hoping I'd call again? After I made an ass of myself the last time and made her cry? “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?” she replied.  I could hear the confusion in her voice. It didn't slow me down any.

   “Why did you want me to call? Everything in your life is perfect. I'm just a speck of dust so far in the rearview mirror I'm surprised you still remember my name.”

  “What the hell, Shannon? Did you just wake up really bitchy? Because I remember our last conversation sounded a whole lot different.”

   What the fuck was I doing? She called you, Shannon.  She called you. Fucking talk to her.  “Yeah, maybe."  I took a deep breath and started again.  "What's up, Jane?”

   “I just wanted to talk to you.”  For the first time, I heard the tone of her voice.  She sounded tired and a little sad.  “Tell me what you're doing.”

   We were only a few sentences in but this whole conversation was giving me a weird feeling.  I didn't know what to tell her.  I couldn't imagine what she wanted.  So I just answered her question. “Sleeping.  I'm on the bus and I was sleeping.”

   “Oh. I'm sorry.”  She definitely sounded down.  I wondered what was actually going on.  “Should I let you go?”

   I peeked my head out of the curtain to see if it looked like anyone else was listening but I was the only one back in the bunk area. “No.  I'm up now.  It was just a nap. How are you?”

   She sighed.  “Exhausted.  This whole leg is really over scheduled and I'm not sleeping and I really need a day off.”

  Showing all the conversational finesse of a toddler I went straight for what I thought was her weakness.  “Why aren't you sleeping?”

  Silence. There was a lot of silence in my conversations with Jane, but I think more was said in those silences than the actual words. “Stress, I guess,” she finally answered but I think we both knew better.  “I thought I understood what I was in for with this book tour, it sounded like the most boring thing ever but I'm so tired and lonely.”

   I hadn't thought about that.  I had Jared and the guys but who did Jane have? “Isn't there someone traveling with you?” I asked her.

   “No. There's a host that meets me in each city that picks me up from the airport and drives me to things but other than that I'm on my own.”

   “I bet you miss Angus,” I said, trying not to sound too bitter.

    “I'm used to him not being around much,” she said. “I miss Roger but I'm kind of used to him being gone all the time too.”

   I hadn't even asked what he was up to.  “How is Roger? Where's he gone to all the time?”

  “He's good.  He's been working in Europe a lot.  Trying to decide what to do next. He's been really smart with his money from the beginning so it's not a huge deal but he's getting a little old for the runway stuff and it's all bound to slow down for him soon.”  

  Again there was silence. The gulf between us was huge and although I think we both wanted to close it I don't think either one of us had a clue how.  “I read your book. It was really good.”  

   “Oh. Thank you.” She didn't sound very excited.  “Did you guys play last night? How was the show?”

  “Great. Really great crowd.”  This conversation was going nowhere.  I took a deep breath and jumped back in.  “So, I looked up Angus.”

   “Oh good lord....” Jane mumbled.  But I had already walked through the door, I wasn't going to quit now.  

   “I see why you didn't want to tell me about him. He's quite the catch Jane.  Well done.”

  “Shannon I don't know what you think you know, but trust me...”

   I thought about what Jared had said. I wondered if he was the one that had the real handle on this situation. “So you're just going to follow him around and write, huh? Seems to me I made you a similar offer.  I guess mine didn't have enough zeros behind it.”

  “That's not how it is.” Jane's voice was tight, clipped.  “I knew you would start making assumptions.  That's the only reason I didn't tell you more about him.”

  “Then tell me how it is Jane.  I want to know.”  I did.  If she was happy, in love, I wanted to know.  I wanted that for her.  But if it was anything but, I felt like I needed to know that too, even if the truth was ugly.  I just needed to understand.

   “We met at NYU,” she finally responded.  “We sat next to each other at a Saturday writing workshop.  The workshop was terrible but we got to talking and just hit it off.  We started seeing each other for lunch a few days a week, then hanging out together more and more.  We were just friends.  We took a few vacations together, he brought his girlfriends along on some of them, I took a guy once.  He took me back to Australia to meet his family.  All as friends.  For years.”

   I silently wondered if she had just been biding her time, waiting for a chance to get her hooks into him.  Jared was getting into my head. She continued.  “About two years ago it changed, but it was really just a friends with benefits thing.  There was no romance, just...”

  “Fucking.” I filled in the blank she was unwilling to.  She didn't acknowledge me.

  “Eventually though he started to want more.  Started taking me out on proper dates, wanted to refer to me as his girlfriend.  But....”

   The silence again.  I hoped the blank that needed filling in here was that she was still too hung up on me but I was too chicken to say it.

   “I went along with it for a while.  I really did like him, like I said he's a great guy.” And then she said it. “But I was still too hung up on you.  I think all along I had just been waiting for the day I turned a corner and there you would be.”  I heard the catch in her voice that by now I knew meant she was about to start crying. Jane had always been a crier, she was a soft little marshmallow that wore her heart on her sleeve.  I felt like dirt.  How could I have ever thought she would be capable of the things Jared was accusing her of? Deceit on that scale seemed way beyond her. “But it never happened.  And here was this great guy, who was just crazy about me, who wanted more.  I figured fate needed a little help.  But I didn't have any way to get to you.  I thought maybe I could show up where you guys were playing one night, wait around with the groupies, maybe somehow get your attention.  But when I looked online....”

  Yeah, we both knew the next part.  I hoped she wasn't going to say it again.  “He ended up getting pretty serious.  And his family was pressuring him to settle down, they were getting tired of the gossip column items.  They would have liked me better if I came from a more well-to-do background, but they liked me a lot better than his other girlfriends. So we decided to get married.”

   This was ridiculous.  “Jane,  nowhere, in any part of that story, did I hear “and I just fell so in love with him”.  You didn't answer me when I asked you the last time either.  You are not in love with him at all, are you? Do you know how fucked up that is?”

   I heard the sniffles on the other end of the line.  Yeah, she was definitely crying now.  I waited for her to compose herself and answer.  It took a long time.  “I love him as a friend.  He knows I'm not in love with him.  He just doesn't know why.”

   I could feel the lump in my own throat.  I swallowed it down and summoned up the courage to ask.  Please let her answer be the one I need to hear.  “Why Jane?”

   I listened to her crying while my heart stuttered wildly.  Maybe this wasn't over after all.  I had lost all hope after my internet sleuthing attempt, I didn't think there was any way I could compete with this guy, but maybe I didn't have to.  Maybe he was the one that had to compete with me.  “Why Jane?”

  “Because I'm in love with you.  Still.  Probably always.”

    Yes! I felt like I had just scaled a mountain. “Then don't marry him. Fuck, Jane.  I'm telling you I still love you.  I'm telling you I want to be with you.  You just admitted you're in love with me.  So what the hell are we doing?”

   She stayed on that line crying, not answering, for at least a good ten minutes.  I was not about to hang up or give up though.  I held the line and waited.  

  “Where are you?” she finally asked.  “I've lost track.”

   I had no idea.  I leaned out of the bunk and yelled towards the front of the bus.  “What's the next stop?”

  “Tonight is Boise,” Tomo answered.  

  “Apparently Idaho,” I told her.  

   “I'm in Texas.” she laughed.  “I guess even broken hearts are bigger in Texas.”

   She really hadn't given me an answer.  “What does that have to do with anything?”

   She had stopped crying but her answer was so quiet, she sounded even more fragile.  “I don't know how to get out of this Shannon.  I don't know what to do. This wedding is a big deal...”

   “You call him up and you tell him the wedding is off.  That's how you get out of it.”

   “No one is going to understand.”

   “It shouldn't matter.  Either you love me or you don't.”

  “Indianapolis is in 10 days.  I'll figure this out.  I promise.”

   The silence settled in again.  I wasn't sure what she meant by figure it out.  I didn't understand how she could tell me she loved me and marry someone else.  None of this made a damn bit of sense. I needed to see her, and I didn't want to wait 10 days to do it.  

  “Where are you next?” I asked.

  “Nowhere near where you guys are going to be and I don't have any off days until the beginning of July.  Indianapolis is the 5th.  That's the best we can do.  But I will be there, I promise."  She got quiet again. "Shannon if I'm going to tank my whole life for you, you damn well better be sure that's what you want.”

   I hadn't thought about it like that.  I hadn't thought about her side of things much at all. Being married to a guy who was a good friend, who was crazy about you and could give you the things Angus could really wasn't that bad of a deal.  I guess I could see why she might have agreed. Was I just going to fuck her life up like I did my own? Everything I touched seemed to fall apart.  It hadn't been that way with Jane though.  I thought with her I could make it all work.

  “I'll be sure.  You be sure too.  Don't do this if it's not what you want.”

   Once again the phone conversation ended with the promise of that meeting. “I'll see you in Indianapolis Shannon.  I hope you have a great show tonight.”

   I held the phone for a while after she hung up.  I knew I needed to get my head straight, get my shit together, and I had 10 days to do it. One thing I knew for damn sure.  I wasn't going to tell Jared about any of this.

@msroxyblog @nikkitasevoli @meghan12151977 @snewsome756 @maliciousalishious

[illbefinealonereads]

Blog tour day! Allow me to tell you more about Husband Material by Emily Belden, as well as share an excerpt from the book.

Husband Material : A Novel Emily Belden On Sale Date: December 30, 2019 9781525805981, 1525805983 Trade Paperback $15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy 304 pages

Told in Emily Belden's signature edgy voice, a novel about a young widow's discovery of her late husband's secret and her journey toward hope and second-chance love.

Twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Rosen has a secret: she’s a widow. Ever since the fateful day that leveled her world, Charlotte has worked hard to move forward. Great job at a hot social media analytics company? Check. Roommate with no knowledge of her past? Check. Adorable dog? Check. All the while, she’s faithfully data-crunched her way through life, calculating the probability of risk—so she can avoid it.

Yet Charlotte’s algorithms could never have predicted that her late husband’s ashes would land squarely on her doorstep five years later. Stunned but determined, Charlotte sets out to find meaning in this sudden twist of fate, even if that includes facing her perfectly coiffed, and perfectly difficult, ex-mother-in-law—and her husband’s best friend, who seems to become a fixture at her side whether she likes it or not.

But soon a shocking secret surfaces, forcing Charlotte to answer questions she never knew to ask and to consider the possibility of forgiveness. And when a chance at new love arises, she’ll have to decide once and for all whether to follow the numbers or trust her heart.

Advance Praise for Husband Material

“Tackling thorny questions of widowhood and dating after trauma, Belden's second novel is witty, full of heart, and blindingly au courant. Packed with pop-culture references, it will appeal to fans of Sophie Kinsella, Rosie Walsh, and Plum Sykes. Belden writes twists and turns to keep readers hooked.” —Booklist

“Charming.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sensitive, thoughtful, and touching.” —Library Journal

“In this touching, witty, and timely book, Emily Belden deftly explores the complexities of human relationships in our increasingly tech-obsessed world. By turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, Husband Material beautifully demonstrates that you can't reduce love to a bunch of 1s and 0s.”

—Kristin Rockaway, author of How To Hack a Heartbreak

Buy Links: Harlequin Amazon Barnes & Noble Indie Bound Kobo Google Books

Author Bio: EMILY BELDEN is a journalist, social media marketer, and storyteller. She is the author of the novel Hot Mess and Eightysixed: A Memoir about Unforgettable Men, Mistakes, and Meals. She lives in Chicago. Visit her website at www.emilybelden.com or follow her on Twitter and Instagram, @emilybelden

Genre: Romance, Chick-Lit

Rating: 4/5 stars

Review: This was a very fun read for me. Belden writes in a style that I really enjoy, it feels fresh and light. Though the book tackled some heavy subjects, none of it was felt in the writing. The plot was paced well, and the way it progressed felt natural. The idea behind the book was beautifully executed. The characters were well developed and set up in a way that kept the book dynamic and entertaining. Though the characters aren’t relatable, straying from most books in the romance genre, Husband Material didn’t need to rely on that to make the book as enjoyable as it was. All it needed was the wit that Belden incorporated in it, and that was enough for me.

Excerpt:

Well, that’s a first.

And I’m not talking about the fact that I brought a date to a wedding I’m pretty sure didn’t warrant me a plus-one. I’m talking about grabbing a wedding card that just so happened to say “Congrats, Mr. & Mr.” on my way to cele­brate the nuptials of the most iconic heterosexual couple since George and Amal. This—and a king-sized KitKat bar from the checkout lane—is what I get for rushing through the greet­ing card aisle in Target while my Uber driver waited in the loading zone with his f lashers on.

It’s Monica and Danny’s big day. She’s my coworker, whose gorgeous face is constantly lining the glossy pages of Luxe LA magazine. Not only because she’s one of the leading ladies at Forbes’s new favorite company, The Influencer Firm, but because this socialite-turned-CEO is now married to Dan­iel Jones—head coach of the LA Galaxy, Los Angeles’s pro­fessional soccer team. If you’re thinking he must look like a derivative of an American David Beckham, you’re basicallythere. Let’s just hope their sense of humor is as good as their looks when they see the card I accidentally picked out.

Before I place it on the gift table, I stuff the envelope with a crisp hundred-dollar bill fresh from the ATM. Side note: I think wedding registries are bullshit. Everybody wants an ice cream maker until you have one and never use it, which is why I spring for cold, hard cash instead. I grab a black Sharpie marker from the guest book table, pop the cap off, and attempt to squeeze in a nondescript s after the second “Mr.,” hoping my makeshift, hand-drawn serif font letter doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. I blow on the fresh ink, then hold the pseudo Pinterest-fail an arm’s length away. That’ll do, I think to myself.

I lift a glass of red wine from a caterer’s tray as if we cho­reographed the move and check the time on my Apple Watch, which arguably isn’t the most fashionable accessory when dressing for a chic summer wedding. But aside from the fact that it doesn’t quite match my strapless pale yellow cocktail dress, it serves a much greater purpose for me. It keeps my data front and center, right where I want it, not on my phone buried somewhere deep in my purse. Bonus: the band, smack-dab on the middle of my wrist, also covers a tattoo I’ve been meaning to have lasered off.

Other than telling me the time, 7:30 p.m., it also serves up my most recent Tinder notifications. I’ve gotten four new matches since this morning, which isn’t bad for a) a Saturday, since most people do their Tindering while zoning out at work or bored in bed at night; and b) a pushing-thirty New York native whose most recent relationship was the love-hate one with a stubborn last ten pounds. That’s me, by the way. Charlotte Rosen.

Though present and accounted for now, the battle of Tide pen vs. toothpaste stain went on for longer than I intended back at my apartment, causing me to arrive about half an hour late to the cocktail hour. Which means I for sure missed Monica and Dan’s ceremony in its entirety. I, of all people, know that’srude. I’m someone who is hypersensitive to people’s arrival ten­dencies (well, to all measurable tendencies, to be honest; more on that later). But I’m sort of glad I missed the I Dos, as there is still something about witnessing the exchange of vows that makes me a little squeamish. I got married five years ago and, well, I’m not married anymore—let’s put it that way.

The good news is that with time, I can feel it’s definitely getting easier to come to things like this. To believe that the couple really will stay together through it all. To believe that there is such a thing as “the one”—even if it may actually be “the other” that I’m looking for this next go-round.

Late as I may be to the wedding party, there are some perks to my delayed arrival. Namely, the line at the bar has died down enough for me to trade up this mediocre red wine for a decent gin and tonic. Another perk? Several fresh platters of bacon-wrapped dates have just descended like UFOs onto the main floor of the venue, which happens to be a barn from the 1800s. Except this is Los Angeles, and there are no barns from the 1800s. So instead, every creaky floorboard, every corroded piece of siding, and every decrepit roof shingle has been sourced from deep in the countryside of southwest Iowa to create the sense that guests are surrounded by rolling fields, fragrant orchard blossoms, and fruiting trees. The reality being that just outside the wooden walls of the coveted, three-year-long-wait-list Oak Mill Barn stands honking, gridlocked traf­fic on the 405 and an accompanying smog alert.

As I continue to wait for my impromptu wedding date, Chad, to come back from the bathroom, I robotically swipe left on the first three guys who pop up on Bumble, another dating app I’m on, then finally decide to message a guy who looks like a bright-eyed Jason Bateman (you know, pre-Ozark) and is a stockbroker, according to his profile. We end up matching and he asks me for drinks. I vaguely accept. Wel­come to dating in LA.

I’ve conducted some research that has shown that after the age of thirty, it becomes exponentially harder to find your fu­ture husband. What number constitutes exponentially? I’m not sure yet, but I’m working on narrowing in on that because generalities don’t really cut it for me. Thinking through things logically like this centers me, calms me, and resets me—no matter what life throws my way. All that’s to say, I’m officially in my last good year of dating (and my last year of not having to include a night serum in my skin care regimen), and I’m determined not to wind up with my dog, my roommate, and a few low-maintenance houseplants as my sole life partners.

“Sorry that took so long,” says Chad, returning from the men’s room twenty minutes after leaving. “Did you know the bathroom at this place is an actual outhouse? Thank god it was leg day at the gym—I had to squat over the pot. My quads are burning nice now.”

Confession. I didn’t just bring a date to the wedding, I brought a blind date.

No worries, though. Monica knows how serious I am about the path to Mr. Right and supports the fact that I go on my fair share of dates to get me there quicker. Plus, he isn’t a total stranger; she knows him—or, she met him, rather. He attended her work event last week at the LA County Museum of Art and is supposedly this cute, single real estate something or other. Of course he tried to hit on her and, unlike most beau­tiful people in Los Angeles, Monica actually copped to being in a committed relationship with Danny. (Who doesn’t like to brag they’re marrying Mr. Galaxy himself?) So she did the next best thing and gave him her single coworker’s Instagram handle and told him to slide into my DMs. It’s a bold move on her part, but I appreciate her quick thinking and commit­ment to my cause, Operation: Reclassify My Marital Status.

Since Chad first messaged me a week ago, I’ve done my homework on him. And I’m not talking about just your basic cyber stalking. I’m talking about procuring and sifting through real, bona fide data. It’s essentially a version of what I’m paid to do for a living—track down all the “influencers,” people with a lot of fans and followers on the internet, and match them to events we plan for our clients so they can post on so­cial media and boost our clients’ profiles.

Some may think my side-project software, the one that com­putes how much of a match I am with someone, is a bit…much, but I don’t see it that way at all. I’m on the hunt for a man who is a true match for me—one who won’t just up and leave in the blink of an eye. I left things up to fate once and look how that turned out. I’ll be damned if I do it that way again.

While I studied up on Chad, I conducted a hefty “image search,” yielding about a hundred photos of him that have been uploaded across a variety of social platforms over the years. In real life, I’m pleased to say he checks out. Chad is over six feet tall, tanned, and toned, with coiffed Zac Efron hair that’s on the verge of being described as “a bit extra.” From the shoul­ders up, he’s an emoji. A walking, talking emoji. But as I step back and admire him in his expertly tailored suit, he looks like a contestant on The Bachelor. In retrospect, Chad is just the right amount of good-looking to complement my physical appearance, which can be described as a made-for-TV version of an otherwise good-looking actress.

“Something to drink, sir?” one of the caterers asks Chad.

“Yes. A spicy margarita. Unless… Wait. Do you make the margarita mix yourselves? Or is it, like, that sugary store-bought crap?”

Eek. I had forgotten my discovery that Chad is a bit of a…wellness guru. I guess so is everyone in LA, but I can’t help but be taken aback when I hear that there are people who actually care about the scientific makeup of margarita mix.

“Fuck it. Too many calories either way,” Chad announces before giving the waitress a chance to answer his question. “I’ll just take a whiskey.”

“Splash of Coke?”

“God, no. So many empty calories.”

With his drink order in, Chad rolls his neck around and pops bones I never knew existed. Then, one by one, the joints in his fingers. The sound makes me a bit queasy but I’m try­ing to focus on the positive, like his beautiful hazel eyes and the fact that cherry tomatoes and mini mozzarella balls with an injection of balsamic vinegar are the latest and greatest munchie to hit the floor.

Chad turns to me with a smile, his palm connecting with the small of my back. “Should we find our seats? What table are we at?”

Good question, I think to myself. I’m at table six. Chad is…on a fold-up chair we will have to ask a caterer to squeeze between me and Monica’s great-aunt Sally? I kind of forgot to mention to him that I didn’t really get an official okay to bring him tonight.

“Table six,” I say pleasantly with a smile.

“Six is my lucky number. Well, that, and nine, if you know what I mean,” Chad says with a wink accompanied by an ac­tual thumbs-up.

The waitress comes back with his whiskey neat, and he proposes we clink our glasses in a toast to meeting up as we make our way to the table. Still not over the lingering effects of his immature, pervysixty-nine joke, I reluctantly concede to do the cheers with the perpetual high-schooler.

“So, what did you think of Monica’s event?” I say to break the ice as we take our seats at the luckily empty round table.

“Well, I don’t really know what she does for a living, but she is fine as hell. I mean, that’s why I hit on her last week atthe LACMA. Sure, I saw the ring on her finger, but couldn’t resist saying hi to a goddess like her. My god, that woman is something else.”

I nod in agreement. Partly because, yes, Monica Hoang needs her own beauty column in Marie Claire, stat. And partly because I’m too shocked by his crass demeanor to really do or say anything else. Did I say Chad reminded me of a contes­tant on The Bachelor? I think I meant he reminds me of a guy who gets sent home on night one of The Bachelor.

“She said you’re a real estate…attorney, was it?” I awk­wardly segue. “What’s your favorite neighborhood in Los Angeles?”

It sounds like I’m interviewing him for a job, which in a way, I am. But had I known the conversation was going to be like forcefully wringing out a damp rag, just hoping to squeeze out something semidecent, I would have never invited him to join me at the wedding. In fact, I likely wouldn’t have gone through with a date, of any kind, at all. Conversation skills rank high on my list of preferred qualities in a mate. Looks like he’s the exception to the rule that attorneys are good lin­guists, because my app sure as shit didn’t predict this fail.

So how does my software work, then? Well, it’s all about compatibility. My algorithm is programmed to know what I like and what I’m looking for in the long term. So to see if a guy is a match, I comb through his online profiles, enter the facts I find out about him, and generate a report that indi­cates how likely he is to be my future husband or how likely we would be to get a divorce, for example. One of the most helpful stats is how likely we are to go on a second date. I’ve determined that anyone scoring above 70 percent means that chances are good we’d go out again. And, well, a second date is the first step to marriage. You get the point. Anyone below a 70, I ignore and move on. Chad pulled a 74, which is a solidC if you’re using a high school grading system. Not stellar, but certainly passable with room for improvement.

As it’s turning out, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

“Huh? I’m not in real estate,” he says with a confused look on his face.

“Oh, Monica said you were an attorney at Laird & Hutchin­son?”

“Well, yes, that’s the name of our firm. The Laird side is real estate. But they acquired Hutchinson a couple years ago, and that’s the side of the practice I work on.”

“What kind of law is Hutchinson?”

“We’re the ‘Life’s too short, get a divorce!’ guys. You’ve probably seen a few of our company’s billboards.”

Chad slides his business card my way, and as soon as I see the logo, I picture those billboards slathered all over the bus stop benches down Laurel Canyon Drive and feel physically ill. Not only because he’s in the business of making divorce seem cheeky, but also because I’m wondering what other things I might have missed or gotten wrong about Chad.

“Wait. So have you ever been divorced?” The question pops off my tongue involuntarily. As soon as the words come out, I remember he reserves the right to ask me the same question in return and immediately regret posing it. I’m not ready to explain the demise of my first marriage.

“Me? Nah. Never married.”

Luckily, a server reappears to take our dinner order. But let it be known that if Chad had asked, I would have explained that I didn’t give up on my life partner because I was frus­trated he failed to load a dishwasher in any sort of methodical way. I didn’t just get bored and say “screw it,” chalking the whole thing up as just a starter marriage (google it, this is a thing now). In fact, if anyone abruptly left anyone, he aban­doned me out of nowhere.

“Would you like the chicken and veggies or the short rib and scalloped potatoes?” the caterer asks me.

“Short rib and potatoes,” I say, a game-time decision made entirely by my growling stomach.

At that, Chad looks at me like I rolled into the Vatican wear­ing a tube top. “You sure about that, Char? There are so many hidden carbs in potatoes,” he whispers with a hint of disgust.

First off, Char is reserved for people with a little more ten­ure in my life, thankyouverymuch. And secondly—

“Yes, I’m sure. An extra scoop of potatoes if possible,” I say, loud enough for our waitress, who jots down the special instruction.

“Chicken for me. Extra veggies,” my 74 percent match re­quests.

There it is. His wellness obsession flaring up again. I’m racking my brain for what to say next to a guy who screams “dead end” to me.

 Excerpted from Husband Materialby Emily Belden, Copyright ©2019 by Emily Belden. Published by Graydon House Books.

[vendrholics-blog]

How To Go Blonde Without Destroying Your Hair

Remember when Selena Gomez arrived at the 2017 American Music Awards with a brand new platinum blonde bob? In a matter of hours, the superstar had traded in her signature, deep brunette color for a shade of rooty, icy white that was eventually dubbed "Nirvana blonde." Twitter was clogged with tweets and your local salon's phone was blowing up because, suddenly, everyone wanted to bleach their hair — and expected to do so overnight. Turns out, going that blonde isn't as simple as it seems.Still, we get the misconception. With stars like Gomez, Khloé Kardashian, Solange, Zoë Kravitz, Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff, Lucy Liu, Leighton Meester, Karlie Kloss, and Lady Gaga hopping from dark to blonde quicker than you can blink an eye, it seems that the process is a lot easier than it looks. Of course, if you've ever followed in their footsteps, you know that it definitely is not. It requires hours in a salon chair, hundreds of dollars, bottles of purple shampoo, and getting used to seeing strands of broken hair coating your floors on a regular basis.In reality, Gomez's new platinum bob took nine hours to complete. Celebrity hairstylists Riawna Capri and Nikki Lee from Nine Zero One salon revealed on Instagram that the singer's stellar new color was the result of a painstakingly-long process — and, celebrity or not, you should expect the same when looking for similar results. Still, that shouldn't deter you. If you have the itch to go platinum (we’re talking Ansel-Elgort -courtside-at-a-Knicks-game platinum), then go for it. Sure, it's a lot of work, but there's a reason why so many people love the experience — if only for a few months.We consulted Hollywood hair color experts — Kristin Ess, Aura Friedman, and Rita Hazan — to find out everything the average person needs to know before going platinum. Their insider tips, ahead.

Is there anyone who shouldn't go platinum? The best thing to keep in mind is your hair type and texture. If you have naturally dry or fragile hair, or if you've chemically treated your strands with perms or relaxers, then forcing it to cook underneath bleach and heat will most likely contribute to fast damage, says Hazan. If your hair is healthy and not prone to breakage, then find a good colorist (this isn’t something you’ll want to buy off Groupon or do at home) and book a consultation to discuss your expectations and the most realistic results, then go home and sleep on it before jumping in.Will I feel different with platinum hair? Going blonde — any blonde — is a big life change. Roxie Darling, NYC hair colorist, put it best: “Dramatically changing your color is life-changing. As a platinum blonde, you become a beacon. People's eyes are drawn to light, so you can expect people to be more attracted to you."How many rounds of bleach will it take to get platinum hair? There are several ways to take someone platinum, so the consult is key. Some colorists, like Friedman, prefer to take most clients platinum in one round of bleach. (That means the peroxide mix won’t touch the same piece of hair more than once.) If your hair has naturally red or orange undertones, a colorist might paint your hair over two to three appointments to lift the color evenly. And others, like Ess, prefer micro-highlighting the hair in a longer, more precise process to avoid flat results.Still, how your colorist bleaches your hair depends on a few variables, like the volume developer, the bleaching agents, how thick or fine your hair is, and whether or not they use a bond-strengthening product, like Olaplex (but more on that later). All of this will ultimately gauge how long the bleach stays on your hair, how many rounds of bleach you'll need, and how many appointments it could take.My hair isn’t the silvery platinum I want. Why? Everyone’s hair is different, which means you won’t know how well your hair color will lift until you get the bleach on it. If you leave the salon after the first appointment and aren’t Daenerys-Targaryen white yet, then your colorist will likely recommend you come back in about a month (no sooner to avoid damage) for another round of bleaching. “This will require much less processing than the first time," says Ess. "But don’t go more than four weeks before your second appointment in order to avoid getting yellow-y, blonde bands. If the root gets too long you run the risk of inconsistent processing.”Photo: SAV/GC Images.

Will my hair break? Yes, chances are good you will have at least a little breakage. Ess always tells her clients to be prepared for some, but hope for minimal damage. "I just like to be realistic and it’s always a great surprise if there’s no breakage when you’re done," she explains. "When you’re trying to get that much pigment out of the hair, typically you can expect at least a little, no matter how much bond-building or pre-deep conditioning you do to prep the hair.”I keep hearing about Olaplex — what is it and do I need it? The more you bleach your hair, the more the hair’s protein bonds break down. If you hear the name Olaplex it’s probably your colorist referring to Olaplex’s in-salon system that, essentially, glues broken protein bonds back together to make the bleaching process a bit safer on the hair shaft.However, not every colorists uses Olaplex or its many bond-repairing alternatives. The use of Olaplex No. 1 can slow down the cooking process of the bleach, potentially leaving you in the chair a lot longer or affecting your final color. But ask if it's something you're interested in trying.Will my colorist tone my hair? Yes, toner manipulates the color of the blonde to suit your skin tone and hair texture. It’s also the portion of the coloring process that could include a gloss (tinted or clear) to enhance shine or create a smudged, shadow root to soften the overall look.How long will it take to bleach my hair? Your coloring appointment will definitely vary on how quickly your natural color lifts underneath the bleach, the condition of your hair, and whether or not it’s bleached already. A color appointment, from root touch-up to a full process, could take anywhere between two to ten hours — or more.Photo: Mireya Acierto/Getty Images.

How often should I book a root touch-up appointment after I go platinum? “Book an appointment with your colorist every five to seven weeks, depending on how fast your hair grows," says Friedman. "Coming too soon or too late can result in overlapping and breakage.” However, if your hair grows fast or slow, this could take you to four or eight weeks — timing your appointments will have a slight learning curve.Should I wash my hair before my appointment? No, but check with your colorist for exact timing — some prefer a client shampoos 24 hours before and others say up to 72 or more. However, as a rule of thumb, avoid washing your hair for a day or so before a color appointment. This allows your hair's natural oils to build up on the scalp, which helps create a barrier to protect your skin from the bleach.Does the bleach burn as bad as people say? Depending on your scalp's sensitivity and the last time you shampooed your hair, it's possible for the bleach to burn pretty bad — or feel fine. Some say it's unbearable and some say it's no biggie, so communicate with your colorist and prepare for at least a little stinging.How soon can I wash my hair after bleaching it? Wait between three to seven days, at least, so the natural oils on the scalp will build up, protecting it from going brittle and drying out.Photo: Bauer-Griffin/GC Images.

Can I use Olaplex at home? Yes, you can buy Olaplex No. 3 for at-home use. Essentially, it's the retail-friendly version of the in-salon formula. It rebuilds broken bonds and protects hair from future damage prior to the next color appointment. Want to go a step further? Olaplex now makes its own shampoo and conditioner. If you're not looking to splurge on Olaplex, there are alternative, bond-rebuilding systems you can use at home.Should I be using a weekly hair mask? Yes, in fact, Friedman even suggests swapping out your regular conditioner altogether for a deep conditioning mask instead. “A mask is going to be much more concentrated and nourishing," she explains. "Clients only need a small amount of this instead of a handful of regular conditioner. Leave on for at least five minutes after cleansing the hair, or hang out with it for a few hours at home for extra conditioning." Here are some of our favorite hair masks for every budget.What other hair product swaps will I need to make? First things first: Get a purple shampoo. If you notice your hair turning a little orange or red, wash it with a tinted shampoo or hair mask to instantly correct the brassy color. Friedman also suggests using a cleansing milk instead of shampoo after your first platinum appointment. “A detergent- and sulfate-free product will clean hair of any excess dirt, oil, and product without leaving it overly stripped and dry like normal shampoo does,” she explains. “Make sure to distribute this product evenly over the scalp as it does not produce as many suds as a regular shampoo.” Friedman also says to keep in mind how you wash your hair. For example, use the palm of your hands instead of your fingertips to gently massage the scalp.Are there other products I can swap into my routine that will reduce frizz and breakage? You'll need a comb or brush that won't tug while detangling since hair is most prone to breakage when wet. Regular bath towels can cause frizz, so Friedman suggests using a microfiber hair towel, like the Aquis Hair Towel — or just use an old, soft T-shirt. “It’s important not to scrub or be aggressive with towel drying, as this will cause breakage," she explains.Photo: Robert Kamau/GC Images.

How long can I realistically keep my platinum hair without risking permanent damage? “Realistically, you can stay platinum for a year,” Hazan says. Going platinum long-term is never a good idea because it can be very damaging. Hazan suggests if you are going to stay platinum for years, consider keeping your hair regularly trimmed into a shorter style to avoid excessive breakage.How do you I know if it’s time to cut my losses? If you’ve been bleaching your hair for years, you might notice strands appearing translucent — this means the shaft is weakened and dangerously close to breaking off. Got a lot of those? It’s time to call your colorist for a color overhaul.I’m ready to quit a life of platinum hair — now what? Good news: It’s much easier to go darker than it is to go lighter. However, it will take a few sessions. Why? Continuous bleaching causes the hair to become extremely porous and lack moisture retention, that’s why anyone who dyes their hair with demi-permanent glosses, like pink, purple, or blue, will have to visit their colorist for frequent touch-ups. In short, the hair shaft is so bloated it doesn’t hold moisture or color all that well. Because of this, Hazan recommends using a semi-permanent dye to cover platinum because it’s much less harsh on hair that’s already in such a fragile state and it tends to last longer on bleached hair.Photo: Marc Piasecki/GC Images. Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?7 Hairstyles That Make Growing Out A Bob Easy The Cheapest Way To Heal Damaged Hair — Without Leaving Your HouseThe International Hair Trends You Won't See On Instagram Read the full article

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Can’t Get Enough of Your Favourite TV Shows? Tune In to These Podcasts

Fall is a great time of year, because with it comes cooling temperatures, TIFF, fashion month, pumpkin spice everything, and fall TV season, aka the time when a slate of new and returning shows hits our screens. Shameless is back, The Good Place is back, This Is Us is back, How To Get Away With Murder is back. Murphy Brown—the reboot—just had its season premiere, as did Forever, starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, and Kidding, with Jim Carrey.

So yes, there’s a LOT of new TV to watch. Even so, it’s hard to let go of old favourites. Particularly now, when just watching the news can feel like an assault on our nerves, it’s comforting to be able to return to familiar characters and plotlines whose trajectory we already know. No mean surprises, no sudden deaths, no disappointing narrative turns. The night of the Kavanaugh hearings last week, I watched three episodes of Gilmore Girls back-to-back in some sort of fugue state, Lorelai and Rory’s banter washing over me like a soothing hot shower. And I know I’m not the only one who turns to President Bartlet & Co when we desperately feel like we need a window into a saner West Wing than the one we’ve got right in real life. But when even re-runs aren’t enough (or you’ve cycled through them way too many times to revisit again) there’s yet another avenue of comfort: podcasts. Yep, there’s a veritable gold mine out there of podcasts about cult favourite television shows, in which the hosts dive into the nitty-gritty of it all, recapping favourite episodes, dissecting intricate plotlines, or just shooting the breeze with the show’s creators and cast.

But the nostalgia factor isn’t all these podcasts have going for them. Considering how much TV is at our disposal thanks to streaming services, we now have the opportunity to binge shows we never watched when they were on the air. (Mad Men has been languishing in my Netflix queue for longer than I care to admit.) And as one colleague of mine pointed out, it’s nice to have someone to “discuss” those shows with long after they’re off the air and no one’s talking about them anymore. That’s kind of how I felt even when The Americans was ON the air, because it felt like I was the only one in my friend circle watching the damn thing (your loss). Which is why I especially loved tuning in to its podcast every week, in which the host would dive into the various plot points and developments with the writers, directors and cast.

So whether you’re craving an extra dose of nostalgia or freaking out over a plot twist the rest of the world already freaked out about, like, four years ago, there’s somewhere you can go to scratch that itch. Scroll through for a list of our favourite podcasts about beloved, off-the-air TV shows.

Gilmore Guys The hosts of this podcast are two guys (duh) who share a great dynamic: one, Kevin Porter, is a self-declared superfan and the other, Demi Adejuyigbe (fun fact: he’s currently a writer on one of the best things on TV right now, The Good Place), has never watched the show before. This obviously, makes for great entertainment as the two take the hit show episode by episode, analyzing, quipping about and unpacking everything from its zillion pop culture references to the mile-a-minute dialogue to its feminist storylines. Stars like Scott Patterson, who plays Luke Danes, and Liza Weil, who plays Paris Gellar, also appear on the show, as do the Gilmore Girls themselves.

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Happy June 3rd! Today on the last episode of #GilmoreGuys we talk to Lauren Graham! Thanks for listening ❤️

A post shared by Gilmore Guys (@gilmoreguysshow) on Jun 3, 2017 at 10:00am PDT

The Americans Podcast Warning: you must only listen to this podcast after you’ve watched the episode it talks about because it contains hella spoilers. Hosted by Slate’s June Thomas, the podcast goes behind the scenes of each episode, studying it from various angles. Pretty much every major player on the show has been on the podcast, from the two leads Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell to the showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields to the costume and set designers, because those elements are as important on a period piece as the characters themselves. This show is so rife with tension, psychological drama, and moral and ethical dilemmas that hearing directly from the people who put it all together really helps to make sense of some of the complex themes it deals with.

The West Wing Weekly Co-hosted by Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on the show, and musician Hrishikesh Hirway, this podcast is for all the West Wing nerds out there. It launched in 2016 and is still going strong, “taking a fine-tooth comb to each episode of [the] political drama,” as the New York Times puts it. The podcast has brought on all the big names associated with the series, from show creator Aaron Sorkin himself to director Tommy Schlamme to actors Martin Sheen, Bradley Whitford and Allison Janney. Trump’s antics too much for you? Find solace with this show, new episodes of which drop every Wednesday.

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Last night was so much fun. We couldn't have asked for a better way to end our tour. Thanks to special guest Aaron Sorkin, surprise guest Emily Procter, and everyone who came to the show. 🛫

A post shared by The West Wing Weekly (@thewestwingweekly) on Apr 24, 2018 at 7:48am PDT

Breaking Bad Insider There are dozens of podcasts out there dedicated to this cult show but this is the one to listen to, because it’s hosted by Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, and Kelley Dixon, the show’s editor. The cast and crew of the series, obviously, make regular appearances.

Buffering the Vampire Slayer Named one of TIME’s Top 50 Podcasts of 2018, this bi-weekly show hosted by Buffy aficionados Jenny Owen Youngs and Kristin Russo wades into all the thorny aspects of this OG feminist show. As TIME explains, the ladies “obsess over how the series upended sexist tropes, analyze the undeniable sexual chemistry between Buffy and Faith and… also wrestle with Xander’s problematic one-liners and Joss Whedon’s imperfect portrayal of women.” The best part though? Each instalment ends with an original song written by the two, inspired by that week’s episode.

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We are BACK!! Alongside *two* episodes we’ve also released *two* songs & our very first vinyl!!!! Featuring @jennyowenyoungs as Buffy & @benthornewill as our Angel (!!), and with a gorgeous cover design by @kristinetuna — you now have music to accompany your tears! 💔😭 You can hear Angel’s song at the end of today’s I Will Remember You episode of @angelontopcast & Buffy’s song at the end of our episode — songs are available today for our patrons & you can pre-order the vinyl using the link in our bio!

A post shared by Buffering the Vampire Slayer (@bufferingcast) on Oct 3, 2018 at 6:09am PDT

Seinfeld: The Post-Show Recap Rob Cesternino and Akiva Wienerkur’s mission was to wade through every single episode of Seinfeld’s nine-season run and they did just that in the three years of this podcast, from 2014 to 2017. Now that all 180 episodes of the cult hit are behind them, the duo is fielding ideas and suggestions from listeners about what they should do next. Their attempt to figure out what their next podcast should be about IS what their next podcast is all about. Er, yes, it’s all very meta. Bizarro Jerry would approve.

Best of Friends Podcast Okay, I don’t know what kind of magical alchemy went into the writing of this show, because its jokes somehow just don’t get old, even countless viewings later. I genuinely believe I will never tire of re-watching this show, and for all the other FRIENDS buffs who feel similarly, this is an amazing podcast to help feed your addiction. Over the course of two years, its hosts Erin Mallory Long and Jamie Woodham waxed lyrical about every single glorious episode of the show, and now it seems, according to this Instagram post, that they’re coming back with more. Stay tuned.

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    DETROIT (AP) — Former presidents and preachers joined a parade of pop stars Friday in a singing, hip-swaying, piano-pounding farewell to Aretha Franklin, remembering the Queen of Soul as a powerful force for musical and political change and a steadfast friend.

In a send-off both grand and personal, an all-star lineup of mourners filled the same Detroit church that hosted Rosa Parks’ funeral and offered prayers, songs and dozens of tributes. Guests included former President Bill Clinton, former first lady Hillary Clinton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson.

Robinson, the Motown great, remembered first hearing Franklin play piano when he was just 8 and remained close to her for the rest of her life, talking for hours at a time. “You’re so special,” he said, before crooning a few lines from his song “Really Gonna Miss You,” with the line “really gonna be different without you.”

Bill Clinton described himself as an Aretha Franklin “groupie” whom he had loved since college days. He traced her life’s journey, praising her as someone who “lived with courage, not without fear, but overcoming her fears.”

He remembered attending her last public performance, at Elton John’s AIDS Foundation benefit in November in New York. She looked “desperately ill” but managed to greet him by standing and saying, “How you doin,’ baby?”

Clinton ended by noting that her career spanned from vinyl records to cellphones. He held the microphone near his iPhone and played a snippet of Franklin’s classic “Think,” the audience clapping along.

“It’s the key to freedom!” Clinton said.

Expected to last several hours, the service encompassed many elements, emotions and grand entrances that were hallmarks of her more than six decades on sacred and secular stages.

Ariana Grande sang one of the Queen’s biggest hits, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and Faith Hill performed “What a Friend We Have In Jesus.” The Aretha Franklin Orchestra performed a medley featuring “I Say a Little Prayer,” ”Angel” and other songs she was known for, along with such gospel numbers as “I Love the Lord” and “Walk in the Light.”

Barbara Sampson read a statement from former President George W. Bush, saying that Franklin would continue to inspire future generations. The Rev. Al Sharpton read a statement from former President Barack Obama, who wrote that Franklin’s “work reflected the very best of the American story.”

Sharpton received loud cheers when he criticized President Donald Trump for saying that the singer “worked for” him as he responded to her death. “She performed for you,” Sharpton said of Franklin, who had sung at Trump-owned venues. “She worked for us.”

“She gave us pride. She gave us a regal bar to reach. She represented the best in our community,” Sharpton said.

Many noted her longtime commitment to civil rights and lasting concern for the poor. Her friend Greg Mathis, the award-winning reality show host and retired Michigan judge, recalled his last conversation with her. They talked about the tainted water supply in Flint. “You go up there and sock it to ’em,” she urged Mathis, paraphrasing the “sock it to me” refrain from “Respect.”

Franklin died Aug. 16 at age 76.

Her body arrived early Friday in a 1940 Cadillac LaSalle hearse. She wore a shimmering gold dress, with sequined heels — the fourth outfit Franklin was clothed in during a week of events leading up to her funeral.

The casket was carried to the church that also took Franklin’s father, the renowned minister C.L. Franklin, to his and Parks’ final resting place at Woodlawn Cemetery, where the singer will join them. Pink Cadillacs filled the street outside the church, a reference to a Franklin hit from the 1980s, “Freeway of Love.”

Program covers showed a young Franklin, with a slight smile and sunglasses perched on her nose, and the caption “A Celebration Fit For The Queen.” Large bouquets of pink, lavender, yellow and white flowers flanked her casket.

Floral arrangements from singers such as Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett and from the family of the late Otis Redding, whose “Respect” Franklin transformed and made her signature song, were set up in a hallway outside the sanctuary.

Detroit plans to honor one of its most famous residents. Mayor Mike Duggan announced during the service that the city would rename the riverfront amphitheater Chene Park to “Aretha Franklin Park.”

Bishop Charles Ellis III of Greater Grace knows well the boldface guest list and surrounding pomp and circumstance, but he has a higher mission in mind.

“It is my goal and my aim to ensure that people leave here with some kind of spiritual awakening,” Ellis said. “This is not a concert, this is not a show, this is not an awards production. This is a real life that has been lived, that a person regardless of how famous she became, no matter how many people she touched around the world, she still could not escape death.”

Family members, among them granddaughter Victorie Franklin and niece Cristal Franklin, spoke with awe and affection as they remembered a world-famous performer who also loved gossip and kept pictures of loved ones on her piano.

Grandson Jordan directed his remarks directly to Franklin, frequently stopping to fight back tears.

“I’m sad today, because I’m losing my friend. But I know the imprint she left on this world can never be removed. You showed the world God’s love, and there’s nothing more honorable.”

___

Associated Press writers Josh Replogle and Kristin M. Hall contributed to this report.

READ MORE STORIES ON BLACKAMERICAWEB.COM:

Aretha Franklin Laid To Rest In Epic, Hours Long Funeral

Highlights Of The Aretha Franklin Funeral Service

Traci Braxton Reveals Sad Reason Why Phaedra Parks Joined ‘Braxton Family Values’

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Go to Source Aretha Franklin Laid To Rest In Epic, Hours Long Funeral     DETROIT (AP) — Former presidents and preachers joined a parade of pop stars Friday in a singing, hip-swaying, piano-pounding farewell to…

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Butcher to serve at least 15 years for killing yoga instructor

Butcher to serve at least 15 years for killing yoga instructor https://ift.tt/2PxZCIf Butcher to serve at least 15 years for killing yoga instructor

HALIFAX — The stepfather of a Montreal-born businesswoman and yoga instructor has denounced the “misogyny and entitlement” of the Halifax man who was ordered Wednesday to serve at least 15 years in prison for her murder.

Nicholas Butcher stabbed his common-law partner, 32-year-old Kristin Johnston, to death inside her Halifax-area home on March 26, 2016. He was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder in April.

Halifax yoga instructor Kristin Johnston (right) and Canadian opera singer Measha Brueggergosman are shown in a handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

The conviction carries an automatic life sentence, but Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Joshua Arnold ruled Wednesday that the 36-year-old man would be able to apply for parole after serving 15 years, less 880 days for time served.

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Tom Bourne, Johnston’s stepfather, told reporters afterwards he was always taught to forgive people.

“But what I have to forgive here with respect to this is pretty significant,” said Bourne outside of the courtroom.

“I have to forgive the stabbing death of Kristin; the misogyny and entitlement, cruelty and objectification of Krissy; his 10 hours of stalking behaviours and his controlling behaviours; his invasion of her privacy.”

Bourne said his natural instinct would be to “do to him what he did to her,” but that he has to try and move past that feeling.

“I can only speak for myself here, but if I don’t manage to forgive him, I’m going to be pretty twisted and beaten up forever,” he said.

Bourne said Johnston’s death has caused “misery” and “suffering” to her mother, her father, her siblings, and so many others.

“What was particularly hard to deal with was the trashing of Krissy’s reputation during the trial,” said Bourne, likely referring to how Butcher claimed he was acting in self defence when he stabbed Johnston.

“Not content with killing her, he proceeded to try and kill her reputation.”

Arnold recounted the harrowing details of the murder Wednesday as Butcher, wearing a dark suit and glasses, sat emotionless at his lawyer’s bench.

He described how Butcher read Johnston’s Facebook messages, which discussed her desire to end their relationship.

Butcher twice showed up unannounced to an apartment where Johnston was hanging out with friends, the second time finding her becoming intimate with someone. Butcher then demanded she return home with him.

“Shortly after they arrived (home), Kristin Johnston changed her clothes and was lying in bed at her most vulnerable. Mr. Butcher then murdered Ms. Johnston. He put a pillow over her face and stabbed, slashed and cut her in the neck 10 times,” said Arnold.

“Mr. Butcher then attempted suicide by cutting his own arm with a knife and a razor lying next to Ms. Johnston in bed. When this did not work, he stabbed himself in the neck 13 times. When this did not work, Mr. Butcher retrieved a mitre saw from storage in the basement, brought it to the bedroom, and then cut his own arm off.”

The jury heard that Butcher’s right hand had been surgically reattached.

Arnold said Butcher — who has a law degree — lived a “pro-social” lifestyle before the murder and does not have any prior involvement with the criminal justice system.

But he noted there was some indication of “forethought” prior to Johnston’s death.

“The nature of his offence, and the circumstances surrounding its commission, the actions of Mr. Butcher stalking Ms. Johnston during the evening he murdered her, murdering his common-law partner while she was at her most vulnerable, and in her own home, and in her own bed, warrant a significant increase beyond the 10-year minimum,” he said.

“The circumstances of his crime overwhelm his previous good character.”

A Halifax Regional Police photo of the murder scene, part of the evidence from the Nicholas Butcher murder trial, is seen at Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday, April 12, 2018.

Parole eligibility for second-degree murder must be set between 10 and 25 years.

Johnston, whose brother owned a Bikram yoga studio in her hometown of Montreal, came to Halifax in 2011 with dreams of opening her own studio.

She was quickly embraced by the local yoga community, becoming known as a kind and determined businesswoman with a magnetic personality.

“Kristin Johnston’s family, friends and community loved her and miss her. People gravitated to her. She was the glue that bonded her family, and bonded many other groups of friends, including the peaceful yoga community,” Arnold noted in his decision.

Despite her passion, Johnston’s studio shuttered about a month before her death.

Friends testified at the trial that Johnston wanted to leave her Halifax life behind, and was “ready for a new chapter” in Tofino, B.C., where her sister lived.

Evidence from the Nicholas Butcher murder trial, including this floor plan of the murder scene, is seen at Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday, April 12, 2018.

Crown lawyer Carla Ball had argued Butcher should not be allowed to apply for parole for 17 years, noting that he and Johnston were in a domestic relationship.

Prosecutor Tanya Carter said the decision sends a strong message of deterrence.

“As my colleague Ms. Ball had mentioned during our submission, we have seen an upward shift over the years, and that’s reflective of courts giving greater significance to the significant breach of trust that exists in domestic homicide,” said Carter.

“Being in the relationship gives the murderer the opportunity, the access to that person that someone else wouldn’t have. As we argued, the facts suggest she was asleep and unable to defend herself.”

Defence lawyer Peter Planetta had argued his client should be eligible for parole after 10 years, pointing to mitigating factors such as his clean record and prospects for rehabilitation.

Planetta said Wednesday’s ruling was disappointing for his client.

“At the end of the day, this is a terrible tragedy,” said Planetta just after Butcher was escorted out of the courtroom by sheriffs.

“There’s a young lady who’s dead and a young man, both of them had promising lives, and one person is dead and the other one is sentenced to life in prison. That’s certainly not going to be any solace to the victim’s family and whatever the outcome of this hearing was not going to be satisfactory to Mr. Butcher either.”

//<![CDATA[ ( function() { pnLoadVideo( "videos", "2doyRqfgt7s", "pn_video_740164", "", "", {"is_mobile":""} ); } )(); //]]> Canoe Click for update news world news https://ift.tt/2MMzlY2 world news

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https://ift.tt/2MMFhQH to serve at least 15 years for killing yoga instructorhttps://ift.tt/2PxZCIf Butcher to serve at least 15 years for killing yoga instructor For update news visit All Bd Newspaper

HALIFAX — The stepfather of a Montreal-born businesswoman and yoga instructor has denounced the “misogyny and entitlement” of the Halifax man who was ordered Wednesday to serve at least 15 years in prison for her murder.

Nicholas Butcher stabbed his common-law partner, 32-year-old Kristin Johnston, to death inside her Halifax-area home on March 26, 2016. He was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder in April.

Halifax yoga instructor Kristin Johnston (right) and Canadian opera singer Measha Brueggergosman are shown in a handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

The conviction carries an automatic life sentence, but Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Joshua Arnold ruled Wednesday that the 36-year-old man would be able to apply for parole after serving 15 years, less 880 days for time served.

//

Tom Bourne, Johnston’s stepfather, told reporters afterwards he was always taught to forgive people.

“But what I have to forgive here with respect to this is pretty significant,” said Bourne outside of the courtroom.

“I have to forgive the stabbing death of Kristin; the misogyny and entitlement, cruelty and objectification of Krissy; his 10 hours of stalking behaviours and his controlling behaviours; his invasion of her privacy.”

Bourne said his natural instinct would be to “do to him what he did to her,” but that he has to try and move past that feeling.

“I can only speak for myself here, but if I don’t manage to forgive him, I’m going to be pretty twisted and beaten up forever,” he said.

Bourne said Johnston’s death has caused “misery” and “suffering” to her mother, her father, her siblings, and so many others.

“What was particularly hard to deal with was the trashing of Krissy’s reputation during the trial,” said Bourne, likely referring to how Butcher claimed he was acting in self defence when he stabbed Johnston.

“Not content with killing her, he proceeded to try and kill her reputation.”

Arnold recounted the harrowing details of the murder Wednesday as Butcher, wearing a dark suit and glasses, sat emotionless at his lawyer’s bench.

He described how Butcher read Johnston’s Facebook messages, which discussed her desire to end their relationship.

Butcher twice showed up unannounced to an apartment where Johnston was hanging out with friends, the second time finding her becoming intimate with someone. Butcher then demanded she return home with him.

“Shortly after they arrived (home), Kristin Johnston changed her clothes and was lying in bed at her most vulnerable. Mr. Butcher then murdered Ms. Johnston. He put a pillow over her face and stabbed, slashed and cut her in the neck 10 times,” said Arnold.

“Mr. Butcher then attempted suicide by cutting his own arm with a knife and a razor lying next to Ms. Johnston in bed. When this did not work, he stabbed himself in the neck 13 times. When this did not work, Mr. Butcher retrieved a mitre saw from storage in the basement, brought it to the bedroom, and then cut his own arm off.”

The jury heard that Butcher’s right hand had been surgically reattached.

Arnold said Butcher — who has a law degree — lived a “pro-social” lifestyle before the murder and does not have any prior involvement with the criminal justice system.

But he noted there was some indication of “forethought” prior to Johnston’s death.

“The nature of his offence, and the circumstances surrounding its commission, the actions of Mr. Butcher stalking Ms. Johnston during the evening he murdered her, murdering his common-law partner while she was at her most vulnerable, and in her own home, and in her own bed, warrant a significant increase beyond the 10-year minimum,” he said.

“The circumstances of his crime overwhelm his previous good character.”

A Halifax Regional Police photo of the murder scene, part of the evidence from the Nicholas Butcher murder trial, is seen at Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday, April 12, 2018.

Parole eligibility for second-degree murder must be set between 10 and 25 years.

Johnston, whose brother owned a Bikram yoga studio in her hometown of Montreal, came to Halifax in 2011 with dreams of opening her own studio.

She was quickly embraced by the local yoga community, becoming known as a kind and determined businesswoman with a magnetic personality.

“Kristin Johnston’s family, friends and community loved her and miss her. People gravitated to her. She was the glue that bonded her family, and bonded many other groups of friends, including the peaceful yoga community,” Arnold noted in his decision.

Despite her passion, Johnston’s studio shuttered about a month before her death.

Friends testified at the trial that Johnston wanted to leave her Halifax life behind, and was “ready for a new chapter” in Tofino, B.C., where her sister lived.

Evidence from the Nicholas Butcher murder trial, including this floor plan of the murder scene, is seen at Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday, April 12, 2018.

Crown lawyer Carla Ball had argued Butcher should not be allowed to apply for parole for 17 years, noting that he and Johnston were in a domestic relationship.

Prosecutor Tanya Carter said the decision sends a strong message of deterrence.

“As my colleague Ms. Ball had mentioned during our submission, we have seen an upward shift over the years, and that’s reflective of courts giving greater significance to the significant breach of trust that exists in domestic homicide,” said Carter.

“Being in the relationship gives the murderer the opportunity, the access to that person that someone else wouldn’t have. As we argued, the facts suggest she was asleep and unable to defend herself.”

Defence lawyer Peter Planetta had argued his client should be eligible for parole after 10 years, pointing to mitigating factors such as his clean record and prospects for rehabilitation.

Planetta said Wednesday’s ruling was disappointing for his client.

“At the end of the day, this is a terrible tragedy,” said Planetta just after Butcher was escorted out of the courtroom by sheriffs.

“There’s a young lady who’s dead and a young man, both of them had promising lives, and one person is dead and the other one is sentenced to life in prison. That’s certainly not going to be any solace to the victim’s family and whatever the outcome of this hearing was not going to be satisfactory to Mr. Butcher either.”

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[kidsviral-blog]

13 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Listening To Music

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13 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Listening To Music

There’s a reason you can’t get that one song out of your head.

1. Listening to sad music provokes more nostalgia than sadness.

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FOX

A study published last year in PLOS One looked into why people seek out and actually like listening to sad music.

People in the study reported that sad music brought up “a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder,” write the study authors.

Surprisingly, nostalgia, rather than sadness, was the most frequently reported emotion.

2. Repetitive choruses are the key to a hit song.

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youtube.com

Joseph Nunes at the University of South Carolina looked into what makes a song commercially successful in a paper published last year in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

“Once you got on the hot 100, the more you repeated the chorus, the more word repetition, the less complex the song, the better it did,” Nunes told NPR earlier this year.

In fact, for each extra repetition of the chorus “a song’’s likelihood of making it to Number One, as opposed to staying at the bottom of the Billboard chart, increases by 14.5 percent,” Nunes and his co-authors wrote. There is a limit, though. Nunes and his colleagues saw a “ceiling affect”, above which more repetitions harmed, instead of helped, a song’s chances.

3. The “mere exposure effect” makes us like certain music just because we hear it a lot.

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Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

But, crucially, there’s a point at which it then really really starts to grate – and you get an inverted-U graph like the one above.

In an essay at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas, explains why repetition makes us like music: “People seem to misattribute their increased perceptual fluency – their improved ability to process the triangle or the picture or the melody – not to the prior experience, but to some quality of the object itself.”

Basically, hearing a song you’ve heard before makes you feel clever, because your brain has already figured it out.

4. The mere exposure effect might also explain why Christmas music is so divisive.

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thefrisky.com

The “mere exposure effect” could have something to do with our love/hate relationship with Christmas music. We get exposed to a ton of it in a very short amount of time, which can take us all the way up the inverted-U graph and down again very quickly.

At the beginning of December, you might be feeling pretty good about hearing some festive tunes, but by the end you’re likely to be burnt out.

5. We mishear lyrics because of the powerful role expectations play in our hearing.

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giphy.com

In the 1950s a Harper’s magazine writer coined the term “Mondegreens” for misheard lyrics, in reference to a Scottish folk song in which she heard the words “Lady Mondegreen” instead of “laid him on the green”.

This happens because the meaning we create from songs doesn’t come entirely from what we hear.

“There’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,” Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, told PRI last November, but “there’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the expectations in our brain”.

6. You might be more likely to keep mishearing a lyric if you find the incorrect version amusing.

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buzzfeed.com

A study published in PLOS One last year argued that the wittier you find your misheard version, the more likely you are to keep hearing it.

(Oh, but in “Blank Space” Taylor Swift definitely does sing “Starbucks lovers”, I’m sorry you are all just wrong.)

7. “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls is officially the UK’s catchiest song.

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perezhilton.com

Scientists collected data from 12,000 people in an online game called Hooked on Music, created in collaboration between researchers and the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi) in Manchester.

People were played clips, selected from more than 1,000 of best-selling songs since the ’40s, and had to indicate once they recognised the song. The average time it took to recognise a song was five seconds.

But the Spice Girls’ debut single “Wannabe” took people an average of just 2.29 seconds to recognise, according to the BBC.

8. Album sales in a particular genre of music go up as the music gets simpler.

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giphy.com

“This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation once commercial or mainstream success sets in,” say authors of the study that was published in PLOS One.

9. People get chills listening to all different sorts of music.

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Summit Entertainment

Ever got goosebumps when listening to your favourite music? It turns out that it’s not the type of music that dictates whether you’ll get chills, but how much you’re into it.

A paper published in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science found that musical preference didn’t make a difference when trying to predict whether someone is likely to get chills when listening to music.

In fact the study, which involved 196 mostly young adults from the University of North Carolina, found that “openness to experience” was the biggest predictor of who would get chills when listening to music. Openness to experience is a factor that predicts how much someone is into music, explains Williamson in a blog post about the paper. Essentially, this means that if you’re really into your music, whatever that music is, you’re likely to get the occasional shiver down your spine.

10. Music that gives you chills might make you more generous too.

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giphy.com

Research published last year in the journal Frontiers In Psychology found that people were more likely to choose to give money to others if their favourite chill-inducing was playing. If music that they said they didn’t like was playing instead, they gave significantly less money. Just 22 people took part, so take the results with a pinch of salt, but it’s an intriguing finding.

11. Songs that get stuck in your head are called “earworms”.

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Victoria Williamson, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, has researched why a certain song gets stuck in your head. Earworms can have several triggers, she explained to the BBC in 2012.

Some are obvious: having heard the song recently and repeatedly can contribute. But so can seeing a single word that reminds you of that song (for example, Williamson says walking into a shoe shop called Faith led to George Michael’s song of the same name being stuck in her head all afternoon).

Even stress can trigger an earworm. One participant in an online survey Williamson organised got a song stuck in her head during a big exam when she was 16 – then at every stressful life event since then it reappeared, even years later.

12. The best way to get rid of an earworm might be to get a different song stuck in there.

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Buena Vista

Trying to specifically not think about a particular thing is very hard, and tends to make you think more about it that you would have otherwise. So just thinking your way out of an earworm is not going to work.

Here’s some information that might help, though: Recent thoughts are likely to come back if you aren’t actually finished with the thought, according to a paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology. This fits with a different study published in PLOS One, in which some people report that playing your earworm all the way through, either in real life or in your head, can get rid of it.

If that doesn’t work, one way to game the system is to listen to specific music you don’t mind having stuck in your head. Then at least you can choose your earworm.

13. Cows produce more milk when listening to relaxing music.

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BC DAIRY ASSOCIATION

And finally… as reported by the BBC in 2001, listening to relaxing music can lead to cows producing more milk. The study involved 1,000 cows being exposed to fast, slow, or no music for 12 hours a day over a nine-week period.

When listening to the slow music (e.g. “Everybody Hurts” by REM) the cows produced 3% more milk per day than when they listened to fast music (e.g. “Space Cowboy” by Jamiroquai).

“Calming music can improve milk yield, probably because it reduces stress,” Dr Adrian North, who carried out the study, told the BBC.

According to Modern Farmer, music is something the dairy industry had been playing about with before the psychologists got involved too. Dairy farmer Kristine Spadgenske from Minnesota told them: “At our farm you can always tell when the radio is not on because the cows are way more jumpy and less likely to come into the parlor.”

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/im-just-gonna-shake-shake-shake-shake-shake

[getyourgossip0-blog]

Beth Ditto, interview: 'I realise now what an integral part of Gossip I was'

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Beth Ditto, interview: 'I realise now what an integral part of Gossip I was'

Think of a word to describe singer Beth Ditto and “confident” would be up there. The singer has posed naked on the front of both Love magazine and NME and now, after a two-year break, she has her musical confidence back, too.

“I realised doing this album how influential I was in Gossip,” she says. “When I showed people the album and some songs, they said:‘That is like Gossip’, and I was like: ‘Well, I was a third of the band’, but I realise now what an integral part I was.

“I’ve always been confident, but doing this album has shown me what I can do”

“I’ve always been confident, but doing this album has shown me what I can do.” Fake Sugar, out next month, isn’t Ditto’s first solo work – she released an EP in 2011 while still in the band – but the process was different this time.

“I had worked with James Ford and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco before, so there was an ease, as we knew how to work with one another and went with a more electro vibe,” she says.

US singer and songwriter Beth Ditto performs during the 51st Montreux Jazz Festival on July 3, 2017 in Montreux. / AFP PHOTO / Fabrice COFFRINI

“With this album, I felt more vulnerable and it was more intimate. Finding the people I would work with was like speed-dating. We’d do some songs and just see how we worked with one another. There were some people to whom I just said: ‘I think we would totally be friends but this isn’t working’.

“There is a level of trust when you work with someone. You have to gel and have something. For example, if I said I loved Abba and you said you hated everything about them, there would be certain things we wouldn’t agree on.”

Read more at: Brett Anderson, interview: ‘I’m not one for salacious gossip’

Shame interview: ‘Everyone’s political – it’s just whether they choose to share it

Kate Nash, interview: ‘My record label dumped me by text’

She also hired session players to sound out her ideas. “I’m used to sitting there forever in a band, trying to get it right. With them, it was like performing miracles.”

Now 37, Ditto grew up in the small Arkansas town of Judsonia, raised as one of seven by her mother. After leaving her home state at the age of 18, she helped to form Gossip in Olympia, Washington, more than 2,000 miles away, on the West Coast.

“I was running away from the bad parts of Southern culture”

“I was running away from the bad parts of Southern culture,” she says. “I’m old enough now and so grateful for my family that I can finally embrace the good in where I grew up.”

It was in 2006 that Gossip went from punk to mainstream when their single “Standing in the Way of Control” became a mega-hit and was used in promotion material for E4 teen drama Skins.

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The band split two years ago. “When Nathan [Howdeshell co-founder of the band] decided to leave the band, he went back to Arkansas,” she says. “I felt like the future of the band fell to me. I felt like, if we fail, it’s my fault and if we succeed, it is my fault, so the decision was made for me, really.

“It took a while for me to decide to do my own album, but once I did, it was all done in six months”

“I knew from that moment that there was no way I was going back to Arkansas. It took a while for me to decide to do my own album, but once I did, it was all done in six months.”

Going solo was more of a learning curve than she had expected. “I had to be more technical than I had been before,” she explains. “I didn’t know about pitch or notes, really. In Gossip, we couldn’t read music, we just knew how to communicate and had our own language – but this was different: I had to know what I was talking about.”

Beth Ditto of Gossip performs during the Etam Fashion Show Spring/Summer 2011 Collection Launch at Grand Palais on January 24, 2011 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images For Etam)

Since leaving Gossip, Ditto has also launched a plus-sized luxury line with Jean Paul Gaultier, posed in an Alexander Wang portrait series, modelled for Marc Jacobs on the runway and in print, and appeared in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

“I don’t think about that stuff like: ‘This is good for my career’.” she says. “It’s like; ‘This’ll be hilarious fun’.”

Fake Sugar is about love, loss, looking back and moving forward

Fake Sugar, which started as 80 songs, is about love, loss, looking back and moving forward, a “mash-up of driving blues, malt-shop pop, swooning rock and countrified soul”.

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“I wanted this album to sound more Southern than it does,” she says, “but when I try for an idea and don’t succeed, it usually ends up better.” It wasn’t a conscious decision to move away from Gossip’s dancey garage-punk, she says, it just happened organically.

“Songs are just songs. They aren’t a commodity, they don’t reflect who you are as a person”

Was she nervous about people hearing her new material? “No,” she laughs. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I think coming from a punk background, songs are just songs. They aren’t a commodity, they don’t reflect who you are as a person, so I just think if people are going to like it, they’ll like it.

“Some people like Pink, some like Lady Gaga everyone is different, so you can’t please everyone. I just wanted to feel that I had done my best and put the best out there, and I think I have.”

Singer Beth Ditto of the band Gossip performs during day two of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 2010, in Indio, California. (Photo by Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)

She is looking forward to touring the album. “I love playing the UK,” she smiles. “On this tour, because the venues are more intimate when I am at the front, it is like being with friends.”

She considered calling the album “Music for Moms” in joking reference to Gossip’s 2009 LP Music for Men and her own settling down. In 2013, she married her girlfriend Kristin Ogata – the two have been best friends since they were 18. “This is adulthood, baby,” Ditto smiles.

As for the name Fake Sugar, it seems there is no hidden meaning. “I just like the sound of those two words,” she explains. “I thought about how it would sound if my mum or a genteel aunt said it, and it worked.”

Beth Ditto plays Glasgow O2 ABC, on 25 May; Cambridge Junction on 29 May; Electric Brixton, London, on 30 May; and Brighton Concorde 2 on 31 May. ‘Fake Sugar’ is out on 16 June on Virgin Records

Read more at: Lady Gaga, Arena Birmingham, review: ‘A deepening talent’

Lady Gaga joins Prince William in fight against mental health taboo

Alexandra Burke interview: ‘I didn’t know how to react on TV. I couldn’t do anything right’

[maischwartz566]

Volunteer Recap and Lessons Learned

This is the only picture I took all day. That’s how hard I was working. Also, I’m terrible at taking pictures.

On Sunday, I was up bright and early (wait, it was before bright and early) to volunteer at Iron Girl Columbia.  I had to be at the race site at 4:30, which meant leaving my house before 4.  I had friends telling me I was crazy, but really, it was something I needed to do.  I get so much from volunteers at races that I need to give back.  Besides, volunteering at races is so much fun!  (Except for that early thing.)

Iron Girl Columbia is a sprint distance race, and the race gets a lot of beginners, but don’t let that fool you – this course isn’t a waltz.  The swim is .62 miles, the bike is a hilly 16 miles, and the run is 3.5 miles.  So it’s longer than your average sprint.  But it’s a great challenge.

I worked at body marking until I destroyed two different markers, then headed to swim finish.  I definitely learned a lot about racing at swim finish.  I’ve worked at the finish before, but I’m usually further back.  This time, I was at the edge of the water.  There were a bunch of people stationed at swim finish, and we’re definitely ready to deal with a lot of issues that come up.  Thankfully, we didn’t have to deal with any of them.

Well, there was one.  And ladies, I need to talk to you about this problem.  I was unaware it existed.

Our coordinator referred to it as “suit check” and then made his wife explain it.  Sometimes, women do the swim in looser fitting attire, and as they get out of the water, their top pulls down and there are boobs all over the place.  So we had to remind ladies to pull up their suits on many occasions.  I only got flashed once, so that’s a good thing.

But let’s give this some thought here.  If you’re doing the full race and not just the relay, you shouldn’t be wearing a top loose enough that it can fall down that much.  If you are, it’s clearly not supportive enough.  (I suppose there are likely women out there who don’t need a sports bra to run, but those were not the women we had to remind.)  Even if you’re wearing a sports bra, if you can fall out of it, it’s not the right size or shape for your body.

Yes, oftentimes when lady triathletes get out of the swim, they grab the top of their kit and bra and yank them up, because when you stand up and all that water drains out, it’s natural that your kit will pull down a bit.  But it shouldn’t actually be going anywhere significant.  I usually have to pull my top back up over my bra because it has slid down a bit, but the bra has gone nowhere.

So take a look at what you’re wearing and maybe consider something a bit more supportive.

Now, back to the race.  The volunteers at swim finish aren’t allowed to touch you, as that’s technically outside assistance.  The boat ramp was slippery in spots, and it was tough to not be able to reach out to help, but we wanted to follow the rules.  There was an older woman who I offered an arm to, and it wasn’t an issue, and if someone seriously needed help, we obviously would have provided it.

Unfortunately, this race had a hard time cutoff for the end of the swim, and there were still some ladies making their way in.  The last two ladies out of the water before the cutoff were probably very confused as to why we were screaming so much at them to keep swimming and practically shoved them towards transition.  But once the cutoff hit, Kristin and I walked further into the water and offered assistance to the ladies getting out of the water.  They couldn’t be double DQed after all.  But it was heartbreaking to watch.  One woman had two spectators waiting for her, and they knew she hadn’t made the cutoff.  I very much appreciated that they weren’t angry at us, instead they just kept cheering.  The woman exited the water and started crying because she was so overwhelmed that she finished.  Her friends were hugging her and the volunteer captain came over to give her the bad news, at which point, she just started sobbing.  They were awesome to be there for her and remind her that she had finished the swim, and that was a huge accomplishment (and it is!)

A few of the other people were angry (understandable), and the poor volunteer coordinator had to deal with their anger.  If you find yourself in this situation, remember that the volunteers aren’t the ones who made the rules.  In this case, it came from the police – we couldn’t let any cyclists out onto the road after a certain time.  The volunteers just often end up being the ones who have to give the info.

After swim finish, Kristin and I headed to the run course to cheer.  After about an hour of this, my energy was seriously flagging.  I had wanted to be there for the end of the race, but I was exhausted, and ended up leaving a little after 11.  I still had a great time and was so glad that I took the time to volunteer.  I’m definitely putting the race on my schedule for next year to volunteer again.

The post Volunteer Recap and Lessons Learned appeared first on Elbowglitter.

[kidsviral-blog]

My Boyfriend Loves Fat Women

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My Boyfriend Loves Fat Women

As a fat woman myself, I’m still struggling with how I feel about it.

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Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

Ironically enough, I met my boyfriend during the thinnest month of my life.

I was at a friend’s birthday party at a bar when I saw my future boyfriend Brian from across the room, talking to the birthday boy. Brian was the type of guy I spent most of high school and college and my entire adult life pining after and never getting: slim, with dark hair and glasses, his jeans torn in all the best places. He had a beautiful mouth that was excitedly saying things I couldn’t hear, but was making everyone around him laugh.

If I had still been at my heaviest weight, I never would have approached Brian. As a fat woman, I have been taught that there is an order of operations for love: First, you get thin; then, you can date who you want. Until you do the first thing, the second thing is impossible. So for many women who struggle with their weight, it becomes a fight not just for their health or well-being, but a struggle to just be worthy of the love so many people take for granted.

Most of my life, my weight has felt like a search light from above that continually hounds me, putting the spotlight on my body even when I just want to hide. My third-grade class unofficially voted me “class pig” — a title I embraced with great gusto, because the alternative meant no friends. When I was 10, my dad ripped a box of Apple Jacks out of my hand while I was pouring myself a second bowl of cereal, and told me that I was “going to turn into a goddamn pumpkin.” The summer I turned 14, I was sweating my life out every day for an hour during swim team practice. Still, when I put on a bikini one day, my mother wouldn’t stop talking about my belly fat until I just wanted to throw the bikini away and never wear one again. I have always hated my body, and in retrospect, I’m not sure I was ever given the chance to love it.

But on the day I met Brian, I had just spent the previous year slowly winnowing off 50 pounds, almost entirely due to unemployment. I wasn’t buying a lot of food, and was spending much of my free time developing a nervous running habit that led me to spend hours every day trotting in circles around my neighborhood, trying to go somewhere even as my career was jogging in place.

So I was feeling brave, the stupid kind of courage that comes from unexpectedly having a body you never thought you’d inhabit, and wondering what kinds of things it might let you get away with. And I walked that crazy all the way over to the other side of the bar, and introduced myself to him.

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There was a three-hour period — between the moment Brian first kissed me, and the moment when I learned that Brian was predominantly attracted to bigger women — when I felt like I could do anything. In my mind, I had done the impossible. Seducing a thin and attractive person was like taking bronze, silver, and gold in the Former Fat Girl Olympics.

At some point that night, I remember lying next to him, still feeling unbelievably cocky from my victory, when Brian mentioned that I wasn’t normally his type.

My inner Douchebag Alert went off. Oh god, I thought. Is this the part where he lets me know how nice he is for throwing my chubby ass a bone?

“What’s normally your type?” I asked him, bracing myself for the part where he not-so-subtly intimated that he can usually do better than me.

I did not get the response I expected.

“I like bigger ladies,” Brian replied. “Very big ladies, actually.” He sounded as calm and as normal as if he were telling me the weather. He was not ashamed. I suddenly realized that this was not an attempt to put me down, but rather just a thing (a completely normal thing, to him) that he was disclosing about himself. In other words: It was conversation.

But the little part of me inside that had been cheering for hours suddenly got very quiet. But I am your type, I thought sadly. In that moment, I know that Brian had been saying that he didn’t consider me to be big, but I know as well as anyone that people can’t fundamentally change who they are attracted to. Brian was still attracted to fat girls, and I was one of them.

This, of course, did not take away from how into Brian I was. We started dating almost immediately, and became inseparable. When I described him to people, I would tend to use celebrities who I was currently in love with as a frame of reference:

“He’s exactly like a dark-haired Ben Folds, but younger, and with better skin.”

“He looks just like an American version of John Oliver, but with better teeth, and a more attractive nose.”

“Brian looks like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters,” I said once during a Halloween party, apropos of absolutely nothing. “But, like, even better looking.”

It was during this time that I started slowly putting the weight back on. Not because Brian was doing anything to sabotage me — he was and is supportive of my wanting to eat well and exercise. It was just a result of being in a happy relationship, suddenly having a full-time job, and life getting in the way. Normal things.

Six months into our relationship, I found myself in a very desperate laundry situation. I put on a sundress that I thought might be a little too backless for my current weight.

“I figure if worst comes to worst, I can just find a wall to stand against, or walk backward a lot,” I said to Brian as I put it on, trying to preemptively apologize for an outfit that I was pretty sure was riding the line between flattering and gross.

Brian, however, loved the dress. Maybe even a little too much — I spent a lot of time while wearing it swatting his hands away from the open back. I felt happy wearing it, beautiful. Soon, I was wearing it all the time.

Then, I wore it to a party. Late in the evening, Brian turned to a mutual friend of ours, and eagerly, drunkenly opined: “Doesn’t Kristin look amazing in that dress?”

The silence that followed felt like the moment before someone hits the button on a dunk tank, and you know that you are about to tumble, helpless, into a frosty tub of punishment. I realized, belatedly, obviously, that to Brian, I did look amazing in that dress. Because I looked fat.

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When you are a fat person who is losing weight, people will come out of the woodwork to let you know how “amazing” you look — even my psychiatrist called me “the incredible shrinking woman” at nearly every appointment. Well-meaning people felt this constant need to make it plain that I was somehow better once I had lost weight, and it only made it that much more painful when people stop telling you how good you look, and stop saying anything at all.

For the first time since I had started dating Brian, I looked at myself and realized that my body, almost without my realizing it, was reverting to back to its former fat state. This is the real you, I thought. The other you was just a disguise. But you couldn’t fool everyone forever.

And the fewer compliments about my body that I got from other people, the more I would get from Brian. It got to the point where compliments from Brian were actually painful to hear — every time he said “You look beautiful,” all I could hear was “You look fat.”

I started trying on outfits in front of Brian in order to get his opinion. It was a good system. Anything he liked, I wouldn’t wear.

It was during this time that I started being mean to myself — really, truly unkind. I looked at myself for hours in the mirror the way a child might gawk at an ugly person on the street. I would push and pull the rolls of fat on my stomach with my hands as flat as I could, and try to imagine what my lower half would look like, unencumbered by what I had done to it. I’d meet every compliment Brian gave me with something equally cruel about myself. It was like my self-image was in a tennis match, and it was more important for me to be right than for me to feel good.

Brian’s expressions when I would rip myself to shreds eventually moved from sympathy to frustration.

“I love your body,” Brian would say, carefully. “Because Kristin lives in your body.”

Even though I was and am loved, I still didn’t feel that way — because in my mind, I had not earned it. You won, I would try to tell myself. You still earned love while gaining weight.

Then I went to an appointment with my psychiatrist, and for the first time in years, she said nothing about my body. Nothing at all.

No, I didn’t win, I would tell myself instead. I got what I wanted, but I didn’t do the work. That’s cheating. I cheated.

And though Brian is and has always been open and confident with his preferences, they started to embarrass me. Once at a party, he mentioned that Rebel Wilson was hot to a group of people we were talking to. A short silence followed, during which I actually moonwalked away from the conversation, as though trying to physically escape before a comparison between Rebel Wilson and myself could catch up to me.

Which is ridiculous. Rebel Wilson is fabulous. Why would I not want that for myself?

And what would happen if I lost all this weight? I would wonder to myself bitterly. Would Brian still feel the same way? Was I doomed to either be conventionally attractive or someone’s fetish object?

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Brian gets tired of my self-hatred. He has limits, he’s human, and more important, he’s a human who loves me and finds me attractive, and is frustrated with having to defend those choices to me, of all people.

Once, we were at a bar, and I saw a very large woman sitting at the edge of the bar. “Do you think she’s cute?” I asked Brian, in a way that clearly indicated she was not. It was a petty, mean question, and one I already knew the answer to. But I found myself wanting to hear him say it, like I could trick Brian into openly admitting that his idea of beautiful — and that his ideas about me — were so obviously, incredibly wrong.

“Yes, I do.” Brian said, not taking the bait. “She’s very pretty. What is your problem? Do you want another beer?”

One of the things I’ve come to understand is that, when you’re single, hating your body is more or less a victimless crime, if you don’t count yourself. When you get into a relationship, however, it becomes a constant referendum on the tastes and judgment of the person who loves you.

The other problem was that, the more that I poke at myself, the more Brian pokes at himself as well. While he is objectively not a very big person, he’s succumed a little bit to the 10 to 15 pounds everyone gains when they are happy and in love. But one morning, I saw him looking at himself in the mirror, grabbing the small pudge from his stomach, and agonizing about how much he felt it made him into a terrible person.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. Because it so obviously was — he was trying to grab handfuls of his tummy for emphasis, but was struggling to even get one hand full.

“No, it isn’t,” he shot back, in that angry, desperate tone of voice I have so often used. “I am just a fat person, now.”

No, you’re not, I thought, and I wondered how many times Brian had felt like this: frustrated, annoyed, and helpless as he watched me tear down a thing he loved.

The thing that I have struggled the most with understanding is that, just like I am not just a fat girl, Brian is not just someone who likes fat girls. He is someone who has made it through this life, one that is inundated with social mores about what is OK and not OK in terms of physical attraction, and he is unmoved by any of it. How he handles this attraction is actually one of the most attractive things about him. He knows that his is not a popular opinion, and wastes no time caring about that fact.

I wish I could say that I am 100% OK with myself. I still do the thing where, when people compliment pictures of myself that I hate, I will wonder just how bad I look in all the other photos they aren’t complimenting.

But I do little things. When a couple of co-workers and I published this post about “one size fits all” clothing last December, I was terrified at the types of things people would say about my body. But when people were so overwhelmingly positive toward me, it reminded me of how important it is not to be your own biggest censor. I let myself believe the nice things people said.

Two years ago, I didn’t even realize they made bikinis in a size 18 — turns out that they do. Lots of cute ones. And this year, I intend to buy one, and wear it to the beach. And I will enjoy that no one will be able to complain to me about my belly fat (without looking like a crazy person). I will enjoy how excited that makes Brian, to see me happy in my own skin. I will let him enjoy the thing he loves without tearing it down. But more importantly, I will work to earn love from me, who is the person who will always play the hardest to get. I will flirt as hard as I can, and I will win myself back.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kristinchirico/my-boyfriend-loves-fat-women