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abyssal-memories-and-dreams · 4 years

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I just had a crazy idea - how about a scenario/imagine where fem reader is a first year Pomefiore and fangirls over Vil like Sebek does with Malleus and one day they're having a heated argument over who is cooler Malleus or Vil and end up making out in the end

Hi, Luv! Thank you so much for the request! I hope that you don’t mind that this turned out to be more of a one-shot than a scenario - I had so many ideas to write for this that I thought I couldn’t do it justice as a scenario. Still, I hope you enjoy, Anon!

~Agree to Disagree~ Sebek Zigvolt x Fem! (S/O)

“Young Master could surpass Vil Schoenheit in any way anytime he wants to!”

“Please, I’ll know that when I see it... or him, anyhow...”

(S/O) scoffed in her seat at Sebek’s declaration, watching as his face soured into an even deeper frown. Neither knew how long this rivalry had been going on, and quite frankly, they didn’t care. They were both first-year students at Night Raven College with a passion for those they cared about. The only problem? They constantly bashed each other because of who they devoted themselves too.

While Sebek would die to protect Malleus’s life, (S/O) had other priorities being a Pomfiore student. She absolutely adored your dorm leader Vil Schoenheit, from his makeup to his skincare routine to his influence on Magicam. In her eyes, he was an absolute God among men. However, Sebek didn’t share that same sentiment with (S/O), often finding reasons why Malleus was superior to Vil in any way.

No matter the circumstance, the two always bickered about who was better, much to the dismay of everyone around you. It would happen everywhere - in class, in the hallway, during lunch, etc. If one person brought it up, then almost certainly the other would follow with an opposing remark. It was really... really... really draining upon those around them, and this time was no exception.

“Can you please shut up?” Silver groaned, groggily moving up from his spot at the doorframe. Classes had ended for the day, and most of the students already left the room. He was waiting for his underclassmen at the door, only to be met by the sight of your bickering. Again. “You guys are disturbing everyone’s peace and quiet.”

“I will only stop when she admits that Vil Schoenheit could only compare himself to Young Master,” Sebek said, pointing to (S/O). In return, the girl scoffed at him.

“Oh, will you stop acting like a child? Yes, your “young master” is one of the most powerful wizards in all of Twisted Wonderland, but what’s great power without any motivation to flaunt it off once in a while? At least Vil is more social with the following he has... if he even has any,” (S/O) crossed her arms, smirking before Sebek slammed his hands on her desk.

“How dare you insult the Young Master! He doesn’t need a following to be better than some model!” Sebek fumed, his face moving closer to (S/O)’s. She leaned back, uncomfortable with the lack of personal space. “As dorm leader, he has helped make Diasomnia the powerful force that it is today! Tell, me, how many times has Pomfiore made it to the top in the Magift tournament since Vil arrived? How long would it take until Pomfiore is at the top of Night Raven College’s academic standings? You claim that Vil Schoenheit is far superior, but all I see is someone’s pride getting the better of them and her not wanting to admit -”

(S/O) slammed her hands on the desk, suddenly standing up and causing Sebek to move back in shock. Her face scowled in anger as she stared into his green eyes.

“That’s exactly my problem with Malleus - it seems his only good trait is his capabilities as a wizard! Ever since coming here, I’ve only heard other students say how intimidated they are of him! If he really is as “great” as you say, then how come no one seems to invite him to anything if not because they’re scared of him? Vil might not have the same magical prowess as your master, but at least he worked his way to where he was. You just seem to pamper him to a point where it’s suffocating for him.”

Sebek was taken aback as she continued to stare, expecting another comeback. But despite the arrogance in (S/O)’s voice, doubt started to plague his mind for a moment. Was what she was saying true? And if so, then... could he possibly be to blame for his behavior? Or were you just saying this to get on your nerves? If so, then it was working. Too well, probably, as he failed to notice someone walking up to them from behind.

“I-” He tried to respond, but was taken out of breath as he felt someone push him from behind. At that moment, everything seemed to happen in a flash before Sebek knew what he was doing.

It wasn’t until a moment’s notice for which he realized the predicament he was in - leaning in beyond the desk, gripping onto (S/O)’s shoulders, his lips locked onto hers. Both froze at the sudden contact, their minds blank of thought. Neither knew how this was even possible, yet neither complained - or, rather, they were so confused that it seemed neither remembered how to complain.

It wasn’t until a second later that both pulled away from each other, their cheeks completely flushed a reddish-pink as they stared at each other confused. “Wh-What the...” (S/O) stuttered out, taken back the most by the aggressive action. She could not deny that Sebek was a very handsome man, but the kiss nonetheless left her in shock and, quite frankly, angry. She raised her hand, ready to slap him when she noticed that he had a very similar expression, as if he didn’t know what he did either.

Sebek turned back to see Silver standing in the doorway still, a look of surprise dawning his face. Trying to draw conclusions, Sebek’s face flared in anger, wanting to absolutely murder the one who pushed him. And in this case, he was able to deduct his conclusion quickly.

“You-” Sebek’s voice was dripping with venom, but he was cut off very quickly.

“That wasn’t me,” Silver quipped. “It was the old man.”

Sebek looked at Silver confusingly, taking a moment to try and understand who he meant. Before he could, though, (S/O) let out a small yelp as she looked up, causing Sebek to turn around follow her gaze. What he saw surprised him, as he failed to realize his superior up on the ceiling, smiling down upon them.

“Aw, it appears I’ve been caught,” Lilia said, faking a disappointed tone in his voice. “And here I thought I could help you get along...”

Sebek glared at Lilia, mentally cursing him for this act. He clenched his fists. “Lilia...”

“What the hell!?” (S/O) blurted out, her shock now replaced with resentment. After all, how dare this man force her to kiss a fellow student while they argued?

“Well, I saw how fervent you were in your heated discussion as I walked by. You two have a lot more in common than you think,” Lilia said. “I wasn’t trying to force you two into what you did, and I do apologize that it happened as is. It just pains me to see one of my underclassmen arguing with someone who was just as passionate about their dorm leader as he was. Can’t we all agree that both Vil and Malleus are great dorm leaders in their own ways?”

Sebek faced Lilia, ready to scold him, but then turned to (S/O) as he processed his words in his head. He can agree that (S/O) was indeed very passionate about Vil Schoenheit, and he respected how she was able to defend him to the bitter end. Much like himself, she was loyal to Vil as he was to Malleus, and likewise felt a physical attraction to her that she had towards him.

As he calmed down, Sebek awkwardly coughed, causing (S/O) to face him. “I suppose that we can agree to disagree,” Sebek said, causing her to tilt her head in confusion. “The fact is that we both care for our dorm leaders dearly, and that we are determined to keep their name in good faith. While I still do not agree on your statements towards the Young Master, our bickering isn’t helping anyone in the long run. I sincerely apologize for my behavior earlier, but I hope that we can still prosper as students in this academy. Can you still forgive me?” He asked, putting all of his sincerity into his voice as he raised his hand for a handshake

(S/O) was surprised by this. Not just because of his calm demeanor throughout his statement, but the way that he was able to admit that he was wrong. Throughout their rivalry, not once did either of them back down from their heated debates. It made her feel guilty after hearing his statement, remembering times where she would sometimes start the argument. (S/O) sighs, taking his hand in hers, a slight blush heating her face as she shook it.

“I guess I can forgive you for now. Despite my likewise attitudes towards your beliefs, I do appreciate that you are willing to set our harsh differences aside for the better of everyone. Because of this, I also apologize for my own brash and inelegant behavior, and I still hope that we can both continue to agree to disagree in the future.”

Sebek smiled as he let go of her hand, the first gentle emotion he was able to show since this argument. “I’m glad that we can both come to this conclusion. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I - huh?” He turned around, expecting to see either Lilia or Silver watching them, but both had vanished from the classroom.

Silver and Lilia wandered the hallways, traveling to their club activities. Upon further notice, Silver was eyeing Lilia with a questioning look on his face before speaking up.

“Tell me something,” he said.

“Hm?” Lilia hummed.

“How much of what you said was true? About them wanting to get along, and how much more they have in common than they think.”

Lilia looked at Silver, his face forming into one of intrigue with his lips curled into a smirk.“You ask that like I was lying about the entire thing. Such a cruel thing to accuse someone of, Silver,” he said. Silver knew something was up, but kept quiet about it. For Lilia was indeed mostly telling the truth, and did appreciate his underclassmen faring well with each other.

It’s too bad that Silver never got Lilia to admit that he intentionally got those two to kiss each other on purpose. Not that he cared much, anyway.

#twisted wonderland #sebek zigvolt #twst #twst headcanons #twisted wonderland request #twisted wonderland sebek #twst sebek #sebek zigvolt x reader #lilia vanrouge #silver #twst silver

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jeannereames · 5 years

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hi if it's not a too personal question to ask how did you come to be interested in history/antiquity/alexander..? I mean did you always like it as a child? or how did it start?

It’s not too personal, and in fact, I LIKE to tell this story, as I’m the definition of coming in the back door, which might encourage others.

Understand, I’m a chick from the other side of the tracks. My generation was the first to get a college education, and I’m among the few to go on to grad school, especially not professional *(e.g., law or med school). I was lower middle-class growing up. My father is from one of the two poorest families in Jackson County, S. Illinois before (and after) WWII. My mother was better off, her father a successful farmer and carpenter, but the Brouillettes had been Catholic (even if he wasn’t), and (worse) they had Indian blood.

There was no silver spoon in my mouth. I had better: wonderful parents who cheer-leaded me all the way. So if you disbelieve a father as great as Amyntor could exist? That’s MY parents. Amyntor-Berenikē are real, and their names were Ed and Idalee. Rise is dedicated to my father. Some of us get that lucky, and I’m HUGELY aware of my fortune, especially as I aged and realized my fellows didn’t have parents like mine. So Hephaistion’s desire to share his father with Alexandros? That was me. All my friends came to my house to visit my mother.

My love of history owes entirely to HER. She loved history, and understood it was about the stories of people. But my elementary and junior high history teachers made it about “kings-n-things” with lots of dates, etc.

So I HATED history.

I hated it all through regular school, then my tenure at UF, where (despite being a humanities major) I AVOIDED all history classes except one, an elective on the history of the Early Church. I think it’s pretty much a crime that a humanities major anywhere can graduate without a history class. WTF?

Yet it’s all the fault of poorly taught history. Plus, yes, younger students are less inclined to understand why it matters. Not all, but a substantial portion regularly return surveys saying history doesn’t matter because it’s the past, not the future.

Back to my clever mother. Instead of teaching me history, she told me about my family: the story of my ancestors, my people, including my tribe (Miami-Peoria). I was routinely hauled around to cemeteries as a kid, shown where my people were buried, and then told stories about them. Respect for Elders and the ancestors is a native thing. Yet I became fascinated, constructed family trees, and tried to trace back their stories, as most of my mother’s family were French who came in the 1600s/early 1700s, or Native Americans. My father’s family were more recent immigrants, but it all made a wonderful puzzle.

The story of me.

That’s history. The story of us, more broadly.

And so my clever, sneaky mother taught me to love history by coming in the back door.

Yet as a teen and undergrad, my interest in other cultures were largely Celtic and Scandinavian. I was introduced to J.R.R. Tolkien as a teen and remain a HUGE fan. My “home” fiction genre, insofar as I have one, is SFF (science fiction and fantasy), where a number of my friends publish. So I resisted the whole “Classical” field until quite late. Latin was the most popular language at my HS (Lakeland Dreadnoughts), and had the most active student group… so of course I refused to join! Never was a follower. I took German instead. In college, I took RUSSIAN, just to be different.

My undergrad degree was a BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in acting. My M.A. was in theology and early church history. While at the Candler School of Theology, Emory, I kept hearing about this dude, “Alexander the Great.” I had NO idea who that was. (That’s how bad my previous history education had been.) Yet as he seemed so pivotal in cultural transfer, east to west and west to east, I wandered over to the Emory library to check out a couple of bios.

By chance, they were N.G.L. Hammond’s King, Commander and Statesman, and Peter Green’s (original, Thames-on-Hudson, later re-released by U. Cal Press) Alexander of Macedon.

I literally couldn’t have picked two more different bio’s if I’d tried.

AND HE FASCINATED ME. Who was this KID, who conquered most of his known world by 32, but generated such different evaluations, positive to negative?

Like Alexander, I’m a bit inclined to … obsess?

So I kept reading, and reading, and reading (articles, not just books), and then got into Macedonia (which then in the 1980s, was mostly articles).

By the early 1990s, I’d decided I wanted to study him professionally, not just to write a novel about him, so on the urging of Judy Tarr, I called Gene Borza at Penn State. He was my #1 choice to study with (in the US) as I’d admired his honesty to reply to those who disagreed with him, not just ignore them. So Gene asked me what I’d read, and I started reciting my list, until he said, “Stop, stop! You’ve already read more than most of my current PhD students!” He encouraged me to apply.

Ergo, if my BA was in English, and my MA in Theological studies, and I’d originally intended to go on to a PhD in the latter, I sent off ONE application—to Penn State—for history.

Guess which one offered funding (e.g., a graduate assistantship).

I wound up at Penn State, studying Macedonian history with “Aristotle” (e.g, Gene Borza, whose resemblance to the philosopher is a wee bit uncanny). It was, I think, the best choice I could have made. I remain Gene’s “academic daughter,” and Book 1, Becoming, is dedicated to him due to Aristotle’s prominence, while book 2 is dedicated to my father, Ed Reames, because he’s the model for Amyntor.

So yes…there IS a backdoor for those of us determined enough. But be aware, the handicap never goes away. I face it every single day. My Latin and Greek wasn’t “good enough,” and I don’t have the extensive reading in Classics that someone with a BA in Classics would have. But I DO bring my diverse previous experience. I have a background in bereavement counselling and ER on-call duty that allows me to look at Alexander’s mourning and such events as the Philotas Affair with experience most of my colleagues (however good their Greek and Latin) don’t have.

So be prepared to justify your existence to your colleagues who had Latin in high school and pursued a BA in Classics or ancient history. Don’t apologize.

And those of you who DO have the above, remember, there are a couple of us out there, scrappy and “previously untrained” who loved the field enough to work our asses off to get a degree, and eventually, a job. So unlike some of my colleagues at Penn State, don’t snort and look down on your unusual fellows. Help them out.

I’ll also note that of the students I entered with? Only two of us received the PhD. Tim Howe, my academic brother who came with better prep, teaches today at St. Olaf’s in Minnesota. But dammit, I fought my way through. And I finished, and I’m at a uni that, with my colleagues, created an Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at the BA/BS and MA level. I’m damn proud of that.

The field has changed since I applied to grad school in 1991, I won’t lie. Tenure-track jobs in the US, especially in ancient history and Classics, have turned into unicorns. Other countries are different. But if you are determined enough, and damn stubborn enough, you might be able to carve your own path, as long as you keep an eye on the current state of the field. I won’t lie to anybody about how few ancient history and Classics jobs are out there on H-Net these days. BUT don’t let the afternoon-tea set make you feel less than them: “imposter’s syndrome” for pursuing a PhD in ancient history or Classics. Some of those Classics blue-bloods won’t get a job, at the end of the day.

I am THE definition of an “imposter’s syndrome” faculty member who succeeded. And I don’t give a good goddamn what anybody thinks of me. I excel at what I do, and I’m proud of it.

#classics #Classics in the back door #ancient history #stubborn ancient historians #realities of the field #asks #Jeanne Reames #ancient Macedonia #degrees in history #advanced degrees in history

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last week, congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib captured headlines for breaking with House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi on an emergency border aid bill that lacked protections for migrant children.

This wasn’t the first time the so-called “Squad” broke ranks. Or the first time their public disagreement with House leadership has led to sniping in the press (Pelosi told New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd that “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”)

But it’s not just Democratic leadership taking aim. Republicans have tried to paint “the Squad” as part of the “radical left,” and the direction the party is moving in. And on Sunday, President Trump sparked a firestorm — at least among Democrats — when he tweeted that “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

So what is it about the Squad that has captured the attention of both Republicans and Democrats? Let’s try to tackle this in two parts: 1) What role do we think the Squad has in pushing the Democratic Party in a new direction? 2) And what, if any, do we think will be the electoral repercussions in 2020?

To get us started, what do we make of the news surrounding the Squad and their split from Pelosi and House Democrats on the emergency border aid bill?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Well, I can start from providing the view from poli sci Twitter, which tends to be a fairly pro-party group of people (and leans Democratic/anti-Trump). So in response to the Twitter fight between the House Democrats’ account and AOC’s chief of staff, there was a lot of talk like “have these fights behind closed doors, don’t have a big, public blowup.”

But I disagree. Party infighting should not be done in a smoke-filled room. That’s just not what people want from politics anymore, and I think when that does happen, it contributes to further institutional distrust and disengagement.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’d note that AOC has a Trump score of 18 percent, meaning that she’s voted in line with Trump’s position 18 percent of the time. But according to her data, you’d expect her to vote with Trump about… 0 percent of the time based on how liberal her district is.

So she’s actually proving a bit problematic for Pelosi, in the sense that she should be a guaranteed vote, but Pelosi is only getting her ~80 percent of the time. Except none of this has really mattered since Pelosi has room to spare in the House, and a lot of legislation that passes the House has no chance of passing a GOP-led Senate anyway.

sarahf: Is there at least an argument to be made that Pelosi and the Squad should take fewer swipes at each other over their disagreements, as too much of a focus on intraparty fighting can’t be good for the party?

julia_azari: So here’s my galaxy brain take.

natesilver:

julia_azari: It’s good for the Squad for Pelosi, at least, to take swipes at them. After all, part of the anti-establishment brand is to be in tension with, well, the establishment. And it’s possible that leaders like Pelosi know this! What I’m not really sure about is how good the Squad (so much shorter than typing all their names) is for the Democratic Party.

I don’t think they’re a problem, but it’s too early to gauge their party-building potential. And obviously, they make some people nervous. But if the goal is to engage young people, women and people of color, and keep the left flank of the party somewhat happy, they seem like a good bet.

I am really long-winded today. #sorrynotsorry

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): It would be smart for the party establishment to think of this as natural tension between the wings of the party.

The problem is I don’t think they actually do, which is one of the reasons why this is all so interesting. (The House leadership’s official Twitter account attacked AOC’s chief of staff over the weekend, with the implication that she should fire him.)

sarahf: To Julia’s point about the Squad’s party-building potential, isn’t there an argument to be made that they don’t even need to have that? Their ethos is that they’re here to do away with the old system. They agitate for change; they don’t need to bridge consensus within the party, unlike say, Pelosi, who has a very different role to play.

And the fact that virtually all of the 2020 Democratic candidates have a position on the Green New Deal is a testament to their effectiveness at pushing the party in new directions, no?

julia_azari: Right. Which maybe Pelosi likes and maybe she doesn’t. Obviously, moving to the left carries risks. But (and this is where I got into it with a bunch of people on Twitter on Sunday), it’s not clear to me that Democratic leaders actually want to go back to the 1990s and early 2000s.

Yes, the party was more “professionalized,” and less split internally, than it is now. It also won two plurality elections and lost to George W. Bush. Not to mention, voter turnout was low.

So one lesson you might learn from the 2008 period onward is that the party does well with fresh faces, even if it also has to win suburban swing districts that might not view AOC and Rashida Tlaib all that favorably.

perry: But the Democratic establishment (I don’t know about Pelosi, personally) seems to think that the prominence of these four women is not a natural, healthy tension, and instead is broadly bad for the party.

And I think their preferred outcome is that the AOC wing basically stays quiet until December 2020 (after the presidential election). That’s where the real tension is.

julia_azari: We’ve (and here, I specifically mean academics and the media) way overemphasized the concept of party unity.

sarahf: I guess I just don’t understand why the Democratic establishment is making this into such a big deal. But I agree with Perry that they definitely would prefer the AOC wing of the party stay quiet, especially when polls like this are leaked. (Axios wouldn’t disclose the group that conducted the poll, so there’s a lot we don’t know about it, and its findings should be treated with skepticism. But it reportedly found that many likely general election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education had a negative opinion of AOC and socialism.)

julia_azari: For the record, that Axios piece is extremely misleading.

sarahf:

It’s just hard for me to believe that these four women really would have that much of an impact on 2020?

natesilver: I kinda come back to Occam’s razor on this. When you have a bunch of new members who want to push the party in a more ideological direction, it usually entails electoral risk. But the benefit, potentially, is that you also shift the party’s platform in that direction.

perry: Yes, but so many party establishment people want to take away any unnecessary election risks–and I think they would argue AOC talking about getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security, for example, is an unnecessary election risk.

natesilver: It’s also probably a very marginal electoral risk in a world where Donald Trump is president and there’s much bigger news all the time.

julia_azari: Part of the problem is that the lessons of 2016 aren’t clear. You could say that 2016 showed that there was a real push to move Democrats to the left. Or you could say that 2016 was about how Democrats lost groups of voters to Republicans (e.g. the diploma divide among white voters). And those forces push the party in different directions.

perry: The party establishment is probably overstating the rise of the AOC wing in terms of affecting the 2020 elections. But their risk assessment, I think, is driving these tensions–leading Pelosi to bash the AOC wing fairly often, for example.

natesilver: But it’s not crazy for the party establishment to be worried about it! Sometimes I think everyone in this discussion is not always clear about what they think will be electorally advantageous versus what they do — or don’t — like policywise.

julia_azari: Most of this in relation to the Squad is marginal, though, no matter how many hot headlines Axios posts with polls that don’t actually say anything about AOC being the face of the party or about swing states.

natesilver: Journalistic malpractice on Axios’s part TBH to publish a poll without even listing who conducted the poll.

We don’t even know who leaked it. We don’t even know if the poll was real. We should be that skeptical when basic facts and details about a poll are missing like that.

sarahf: That’s fair. And I know we’ve talked about this before, but I think part of what we’re seeing play out here, especially with AOC, is there is now a group of politicians that aren’t willing to play by the old rules. And they will use their large social media followings to get their message across, and on their terms.

So maybe party leadership is scared of losing control?

And so we see Pelosi snipe about how they’re only four votes.

Maybe the Freedom Caucus and the headaches it has caused for the Republican Party has so scarred Democratic leadership that they’ll do anything to stop this faction of their party from growing.

But is this kind of fear misplaced? How much is the Squad really moving the party to the left?

natesilver: Clare said this yesterday on the podcast, but the Squad are very effective at getting media attention, and the media is quite happy to play up the “Democrats IN DISARRAY!” storylines. So in that sense it does seem like a mistake for Pelosi et al. to hit back at them.

perry: About a third of the 235 House Democrats (CNN has this number at 82) support starting an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Ninety-five support the Green New Deal; 118 support Medicare for All. So just in terms of raw numbers, the positions of the AOC wing are much broader than four people.

I think the big shift for Pelosi is that she has never had a vocal, powerful group saying that she is too far to the right. For basically the entire time Pelosi has led the House Democrats, her biggest tension has been with the right flank of the party — some conservative Democrats in the House thought that she was too far to the left.

But now, Pelosi is being attacked from the left in a serious way, for the first time. And I actually think she and Biden are responding in similar ways to these attacks from the left.

My sense is they both see themselves as liberal icons–the man who helped elect the first black president, the woman who pushed through a huge health care reform that extended insurance to millions. And I think this criticism from the younger generation of Democrats makes them mad. Pelosi seems indignant at times, so does Biden.

julia_azari: Biden and Pelosi also managed to establish themselves as liberals when cultural/LGBT issues were on the rise in the party, and you didn’t have to do anything particularly radical to be liberal enough on economics and race.

In 2019, it takes more to be a liberal icon.

natesilver: I mean… I don’t know that the Squad always pick their battles all that well, and in that sense they are pretty Freedom Caucus-like. On the other hand, they have a lot more star power than the Freedom Caucus. There is a lot of political talent there.

And they’re all pretty young. So a lot of my critiques of Bernie Sanders’s campaign, for instance, i.e. that he doesn’t have a good plan to expand his base, definitely doesn’t apply to the Squad when they can unify leftist Democrats with nonwhite Democrats.

sarahf: Something I think we’re all touching on here is the fact that it is four women of color pushing the party to the left and challenging the status quo. And that matters. Each of them have made appeals to their background and how they represent people who historically haven’t had a seat at the table.

And this probably, to put it bluntly, does make certain older vanguards of the party uncomfortable, because they consider themselves to be liberal, and that now they’re forced to reckon with the idea that they’re maybe not as liberal as they think.

perry: I want to come back to something Nate said earlier that I think is essential.

“Sometimes I think everyone in this discussion is not always clear about what they think will be electorally advantageous versus what they do — or don’t — like policywise.”

The AOC wing at times says its ideas, like Medicare for All, are both the right thing to do on policy AND will help Democrats electorally, by either increasing turnout among people who might not otherwise vote or appealing to swing voters. Whereas the establishment wing often says a policy is bad on substance and that it will hurt Democrats’ chances in 2020.

To me, both sides are overconfident in saying that their policy views are the best electoral position, too.

natesilver: I get annoyed by this sort of question for a couple of different reasons. On the one hand, I think it’s generally bullshit to think that a policy that polls as being quite unpopular will magically turn out to be electorally helpful because it motivates the base or whatever.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of bullshit in which more establishment/centrist Democrats will deride a policy for being unpopular, when their real motivation against it is that they don’t like the policy.

perry: I know it’s our job to analyze elections. But I think it’s really hard to figure out exactly how policy ideas and outcomes affect election results. So I find claims people make suggesting “Policy X is unpopular so Candidate Y will lose” to be way too overconfident at times. At the same time, we can make some judgements.

For example, “Medicare for everyone who wants it’ (the basic position of Biden, Pete Buttigieg and other more centrist Democrats) is probably a safer political position than “Medicare for everyone and change the whole system” (the stance of AOC and Sanders). I say that even though Medicare for All might be a better health care policy.

natesilver: “Medicare for everyone who wants it” is indeed quite a bit more popular than “Medicare for all,” and one of the reasons “Medicare for all” polls well is because people assume “Medicare for all” means “Medicare for everyone who wants it.”

julia_azari: So my view on the policy thing is complicated. Nate has the Occam’s razor view that I think makes sense, but here’s another galaxy-brain take. I spend most of my time in Wisconsin, a state with a long anti-establishment political tradition, and around a lot of younger people (my students), so my sense of how popular some anti-establishment and left-leaning policies are is probably inflated. But in general, I think most people are NOT sophisticated on policy specifics, but they are sensitive to scary images and wording. There’s even evidence that policies that sound too left-leaning or disruptive are especially vulnerable to scary images and messaging. So while it might seem like a lot of people are not happy with the status quo, that does not mean major, risky policy change isn’t still intimidating.

perry: That’s well put. Medicare for All is very vulnerable to scare tactics.

sarahf: Especially when abolishing private insurance enters the equation.

natesilver: I don’t know. I sort of agree with Vox’s Matt Yglesias that people are learning the wrong lesson from Trump. He was actually perceived as a relative moderate by voters in 2016.

perry: I understand many voters said that Trump was more moderate than Clinton.

But I just have a hard time with this idea that the candidate who ran calling for a ban on Muslims traveling to the United States and suggested that he would “lock up” his opponent was the moderate candidate.

natesilver: IDK, I think we’ve shifted from a media environment in which a lot of outlets took an (implicitly center or center-left) “view from nowhere” to one in which the media is more outspoken, and the difference between partisan and nonpartisan media is a little blurrier.

And I think that’s shifted the assumptions about whether centrism is electorally advantageous in a direction that claims that, actually, elections are all about turning out your base. But I don’t think there’s actually any evidence that how you win elections has changed.

julia_azari: I don’t think I read Matt’s piece but that’s not gonna stop me from saying I’m not sure I think the discussion around moderate candidates is useful. Even if Trump was thought of as a moderate, he ran in a way that criticized the status quo.

Basically I’ve become one of those Twitter trolls who reads the headline and then makes a critique.

natesilver: Trump also won independents 46-42 though!

sarahf: We can’t downplay just how much Clinton and Trump were disliked in 2016, though. Yes, Trump won, but that might say more about how we think about women in politics more than anything else.

natesilver: What if Clinton had run as more of a centrist, though? Would she have gotten more than 8 percent of the Republican vote? The Democrats had a pretty darn liberal platform.

julia_azari: My suspicion is that it’s a wash, but I may be discounting the impact of Democrats being perceived as too left/liberal.

sarahf: If Clinton had higher favorables, I don’t think it would have mattered how she ran, i.e. centrist or super liberal.

perry: So that gets to the real question. Would Democrats be marginally better off if AOC

and company were a little less prominent till December 2020?

sarahf: Yes, I think that’s the argument Pelosi and leadership are making. I just don’t think it’s particularly salient. But I also haven’t seen the attack ads yet, I suppose.

perry: My own, non-data judgement, is yes, Democrats would be slightly better off if AOC and her allies were less prominent in the run-up to the 2020 election. Why? Because having issues of race and identity (like immigration policy and four very liberal, female people of color) being central to the presidential election is hard for Democrats. They have become the party of people of color but most voters are white and this is especially true in key swing states (in particular, Michigan and Wisconsin). Also, Trump is likely to run a 2020 campaign about race and identity that raises the question of who should represent America–forcing voters to take sides.

Pelosi, I assume, does not want the 2020 election to be seen by the public as a battle between AOC’s vision of America (even if Biden is the Democratic nominee) and Trump’s vision of America. And I think she is right to be concerned about that. This is not a new challenge for Democrats. Hillary Clinton was probably not helped by the rise of Black Lives Matter preceding the 2016 election, and backlash to the civil rights movement arguably helped Richard Nixon win the 1972 election.

natesilver: I guess the counterargument, which folks were sorta alluding to above, is that Pelosi can push back against the Squad to show that actually she’s the “reasonable,” moderate one. I’m not sure I buy that counterargument, but it’s an argument.

julia_azari: YES, THE GALAXY BRAIN TAKE.

My read on this is that this stuff is always bubbling under the surface, also. Like you can’t indefinitely ignore race issues because they’re tricky politically.

natesilver: Democrats derive certain benefits from having a more diverse coalition, one of which is that the coalition is simply broader — more people identify as Democrats in this country than Republicans. It also entails certain costs, including tension among different parts of your constituency that can have racial undertones (or even overtones).

The hard part for Democrats right now is that nonwhite voters are significantly disempowered by the Electoral College, and especially by the Senate.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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leonawriter · 6 years

Text

To Change A Sombre Morrow - [part 18]

Read it on AO3 - Tumblr masterpost

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII

Characters: Genesis, Angeal, Zack, others.

Summary: In which Genesis suffers from a migraine, and continues to be an unreliable narrator.

...

"If you could only change one thing with all this... would you still do it?"

Genesis looks away from the cityscape tinted with green, a slight smile on his face as he remembers a similar conversation with someone else, some time ago. Everything seems to be the past coming back to haunt him, circling back in on itself recently, though. So this makes as much sense as anything.

For a moment he can hear half-familiar voices passing by underneath the roof they were sat on, a familiar place to Genesis' eyes not too far from Seventh Heaven. If he wanted to, he could turn his head this way or that, and pick out where his apartment was, the place Cloud had started to rent... and if he looked far enough in that direction there, he could see Midgar.

"Only one thing?" He turns toward Zack, and for a moment he sees a young man with bangs that fall in front of his eyes, and a custom Second's uniform that marked him out as answering directly to one of the Firsts. He blinks, and-

-now, the Zack sat next to him is older, most of his hair out of his face save for a few errant strands, a scar on his cheek, and First's blacks. Zack doesn't look at him, but that's fine, Genesis thinks, he prefers it this way. "I'd never be done with just one thing," he says, well aware of the irony.

But, it's true. He has too many regrets to ever stop, and the opportunity was right there, in front of his eyes.

He had wrongs that needed righting. Mistakes that needed fixing. Far too many of them were more than a simple work in progress.

"So that's how you see things, huh," Zack says.

It takes all of Genesis' willpower not to visibly wince at the dismissive tone of voice, from the one he'd inconvenienced so much, put so much pressure on, and who carried Angeal's legacy.

"And you? It's only fair, after all."

"Huh? Oh - you mean, if I was the one who went back?" Zack laughed. "I guess... I have ideas, but it's... what's that word you used a lot?"

Genesis quirked an eyebrow, not sure what Zack was talking about, not even sure how this Zack would have heard him talk enough outside of their far from friendly encounters, to know anything outside of LOVELESS.

"Did I ever say? I tried to read that play, you know. To get inside your head. Why you were doing all that. It... didn't work much." A pause. "Did you know, one of those fan clubs of yours put together this book, made out of everything you'd put together about that missing act? They even published it."

Genesis shook his head, more out of amusement at the idea, than any sort of disbelief. He'd never paid that much attention to those women back then, especially after he had split with Shinra. They'd had an idealised version of him in their heads, one that had never faded, if a few reactions from middle-aged women in Edge and Kalm were any indications.

The reality was much harsher, and likely didn't measure up to the Genesis that they'd followed so religiously.

"I never got through much of either of them," Zack continued. "Too much going on, you know? Couldn't... focus." And then- "That's it - academic! I mean, after all... I'm not like you, am I? You're more of a special case."

They sit there in silence, for a while.

Genesis watches the pale green swirls of mako-smoke drift between the buildings and gather around Midgar, before heading out into the wastes, again. It's almost hypnotising, strangely familiar, although watching for too long causes an ache to form behind his eyes.

The wind ruffled his hair, and it was tempting to lean into it, let his wing spread out and let the wind carry him wherever it wanted, as free as he'd ever been.

He's jolted out of such thoughts when he feels Zack get up to stand, feet touching the thin air at the edge of the roof, and he watches as Zack brings Angeal's Buster sword from off his back with one hand, drawing it up in front of his face just like Angeal used to.

Did.

Again.

"You're playing a dangerous game, you know," Zack says, and Genesis' mouth dries out. He'd heard that tone of voice before, when Zack had steeled himself for a fight he hadn't wanted to be a part of. "I beat you before," he continued, almost as if reading Genesis' mind, "and I'll do it again, if I have to."

Of course, he thinks to himself. Of course.

And yet, he cannot help but almost hear the words-

Even if the morrow is barren of promises, nothing shall forestall my return.

It was his sacrifice to make, after all. At least this time it would be made for the right reasons. Or so he hopes.

The wind rises, ruffling both hair and feathers. The pressure builds, and he raises a hand to the bridge of his nose, to the spot between his eyes.

"You know what's coming next, don't you," Zack says, swinging the heavy sword back into place.

He screws his eyes shut from the pain now, the heel of his hand pressed against his eyelids, creating golden spots and fireworks in the darkness. A whistling, high-pitched noise in his ear that he wished would stop, pulling him off balance and dragging him into disorientation.

He'd felt like this before - not even just once - if this was...

Goddess, no.

A prayer. Even just one thing, and it would be this.

"Genesis?" He almost didn't hear the voice. "Stay with me. You can do this, okay? You've just got to-"

To-?

To what-?

"Genesis?"

Someone is holding him down, and for a good vicious moment all that matters is getting free of them, intent be damned, because he might feel like death has chewed him up and spat him out again not for the first or even second time in his life, but he won't be restrained like that, never again, ever-

"Get ahold of yourself - before you've got the entire camp coming down on us!"

His feet are swept out from underneath him in a familiar move that he should have been able to evade and counter, but his legs instead gave way underneath him, landing him hard on his backside with a wince, and the sure knowledge that he was going to have bruises, even if just for the next few hours or so, even with his ability to heal now returned far more back to its normal - or rather, what his normal should have been - than even at his return to Midgar after his trip to Nibelheim.

He doesn't look up. He barely has the wherewithal to realise that his wing had somehow come out while he'd been thrashing around or asleep, and the extra appendage disappears, even though he misses the comfort and security of being able to curl it around him, let it hide at least part of him from view.

Angeal. Angeal was the one who'd woken him up.

There'd been a nightmare - some details sticking out in harsh relief against the fuzzed out parts that no longer made any sense. What he did remember, was enough to make his muscles start to shake again, his stomach twist, his heart burn.

"You're playing a dangerous game, you know," he recalled, the older voice still clear in his mind.

The tent door was pushed aside just as Angeal started to move closer. He tensed, and by the sound of things, so did Angeal.

"Er... what even happened here?" Zack's tired voice sounded loud in his ears. "There's..." A yawn escaped the younger SOLDIER. Genesis didn't think that Zack had ever been relaxed enough to do such a thing, before. It should have felt encouraging. Instead, he merely felt that he was taking advantage of some nebulous idea of innocence he had no right to interfere with. "Feathers?"

Panic at the realisation that his wing had shed took over, forcing his eyes open to look around. Feathers were, indeed, strewn all over the place. There would be questions-

"If anyone asks, tell them there was an accident with a mis-packed experimental chocobo summon."

In the time it took for him to turn around in disbelief, Zack had disappeared again.

"Do you have any idea how mortifying that is? Me, Angeal. You're letting him tell everyone that I of all people-"

"Would you really prefer to explain to everyone that no, they're not some black chocobo you accidentally summoned that we had to hold down-" and there his body went, tensing again for no reason, "-but yours. They might not think it's the full story, but given the truth, they'll prefer something like this." Angeal took a few paces in the other direction again, and then sat on the floor, his back against the simple pallet bed that'd been put up in Genesis' tent. He laughed, a vaguely hollow sound. "Remind me never to try that again, by the way. Or get on your bad side."

Genesis looked away, in an attempt to mask another flinch at the reminder. Put that way, perhaps a chance of humiliation was preferable.

Silence hung awkwardly and heavily between them, uninterrupted by the noises from outside, save for one or two oddities.

"I... don't react well to being restrained," he admitted in what he hoped was an off-handed way.

As if things such as this happened all the time.

"I'll bear that in mind."

Angeal's tone was even and non-judgemental, even with the obvious curiosity.

"And I'll have you know, I would never force you to stay or leave against your wishes, old friend."

He never had. He had accepted, and respected, and eventually agreed to disagree to the point of understanding that since neither of them would budge an inch, then words would no longer be adequate at times. Their swords had clashed instead, then.

Which won't happen this time, he promised himself.

"...That still doesn't explain why I came in here in the first place because I'd heard you screaming."

He didn't answer. Mostly because he was only now aware of that himself; it certainly explained why his throat felt so raw, at least.

The rest of it was that he had his suspicions, and the last thing he wanted was to have to admit that no matter his intentions, no matter how he had ended up in the past in the first place... there was every possibility that he was just as much the dangerous monster that he had once been somewhere around five years ago.

A little longer, that was all he asked. Just a little longer.

...

Morning unfortunately dragged itself into existence slowly, and painfully. Genesis' body still had a bad habit of shaking feverishly at the least useful times, which given that they had so little time at all was of course all the damn time, and often accompanied by a splitting headache that simply wouldn't leave him in peace, making the daily rounds of having to deal with rowdy SOLDIERs and army troopers grate on his nerves more than usual.

Perhaps there was a certain sense of irony in that his one solace also happened to be the one thing he had least been looking forward to; the meeting and planning tent, which had been the scene of Zack being let in on the least believable part of his story just the previous night, would be in the middle of camp, yes, but it would also be devoid of anyone other than himself, Angeal, and Zack. Unless they specifically requested otherwise.

His PHS buzzed in his pocket, and given it was only a mail, he was sorely tempted to ignore it, just to put off having to deal with yet another problem, another person wanting to pick his brain for something, another deadline-

"You know what's coming next, don't you."

He stumbled, his balance shaken for a moment, vision swimming as spots danced in his eyes at the reminder of what had started this entire headache of a morning off in the first place.

"Sir?" He looked up, and into a SOLDIER's helmeted face. Somehow, he'd wound up leaning on something just to stay upright. "With all due respect, sir, you look like hell."

Breathe. Do not snap and send a fireball aimed at the idiot's face.

Although perhaps a brave idiot, for saying it to his face, rather than behind his back, he had to admit.

"I'm well aware of that fact," Genesis said through gritted teeth, holding back both the headache and the cutting remarks, "SOLDIER...?"

Something about the voice seemed familiar-

"SOLDIER Second Class, Brele, Sir," came the awaited name and rank. "Brele Raphen, really, though I dunno if you'd remember a couple of barrel makers and their kid."

Genesis blinked, disoriented, the logic of knowing that in theory the people of Banora had to still be around in this time, warring with the fact that he simply hadn't thought about it, hadn't interacted with anyone other than Angeal, who'd survived long after the town had been destroyed.

Casting his mind back, he thought that perhaps he could remember a couple of older folk who'd made barrels, that they'd had a son somewhat younger than he had been; and yet that was twenty years ago, give or take. The memories were faded. Both with time and the need to forget.

Though, even that paled in comparison to the one singular fact that was staring him, quite literally, in the face - that SOLDIER Brele was here. Now.

That he would have...

"I mean it though, sir. If something's wrong and you need to go back, that's what SOLDIERs Hewley and Fair are here for."

It wasn't as though the idea wasn't tempting, now that it was out in the open; as he'd said, he knew full well that he likely looked like death warmed up - the irony of it not escaping him entirely, given that the last time he'd seen these men as themselves, he had been a man marked by death.

He could. He could leave it to them. Perhaps have it appear that his departure from the situation was entirely out of his control, which would free him up to focus on something else.

But by doing that, by essentially walking away-

"Running away, are you?"

-he would merely be left with the exact same problem that he'd had in his original timeline, Yuffie's face coming all too easily to mind.

Set of problems, to be more accurate, he thought to himself, holding back a grimace while remembering the many numerous times that he'd encountered Zack when Sephiroth was supposed to have been there... when he himself had used Zack to his own ends.

"I came here prepared to fulfil my mission, SOLDIER Brele," he said through gritted teeth, "and I do not intend to leave until I have completed it."

The SOLDIER - someone he had shared his hometown with, no matter his feelings on the place - hesitated, and then nodded.

Genesis turned toward the main meeting tent, where Angeal and Zack should be. He barely made three strides before he heard the SOLDIER's voice again.

"You should write home sometime," Brele said, the Banoran accent that Genesis had worked so hard to cover up, and that Angeal had lost more than kept, showing through a little stronger. The reminder that Banora was still standing was hard enough. He didn't need- "My ma said in her last letter she thought your folks were starting to worry, though she didn't know why. Maybe when we're all back in Midgar-"

He didn't listen to anything else he had to say.

Regardless of how his body felt, he pushed himself the rest of the way toward the meeting tent, all the way to one of the simple foldable chairs that were out and ready for him, and collapsed into it.

"Genesis? What the... Angeal? A little help here!"

Heavy footsteps, but Genesis' eyes were sore, spots dancing in his vision.

"If you say you're fine," he heard Angeal's voice say, "then I'm calling bullshit."

Genesis snorted, which was evidently the wrong thing, because-

(His mind throwing up images of the village, of home, of the trees, of the graves-

-of the bodies, and his sword-

-dripping red.)

-bile rose up, the intensity of the memories and what and who he'd been mixing with the pressure in and against his mind that had been causing him so much pain, and he only just made it off the chair, a vague sensation of a familiar hand on his arm, unsure if he should be relieved that he was only capable of dry retching due to not having eaten, rather than the far messier alternative.

"Genesis...?" His vision cleared slowly, but even as it did, he could make out the concern in Angeal's face. "Please, tell me, if that was..." He spoke quietly, eyes darting toward Zack for a second, "what you mentioned, before. If that's..."

He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting back the anxiety that came with the mere suggestion of what he thought Angeal was getting at.

He wasn't degrading again - he couldn't be. He was almost certain, now. Besides, he knew what had caused this, every last thing.

Shook his head, just slightly. Slow movements. Thankful for once that despite not having thought of cutting his hair since arriving in his past, it wasn't long enough that he might need it held back at times like these.

"No," he said, voice hoarse. "I was..." he winced. There was no good way to put it. "No hero. Before." Looked away, before he could see Angeal realise what this could possibly mean, for him to say such a thing.

There was no answer, for the longest time. But despite the abiding fear that Angeal would, no matter what he might have said before, turn away from him, all Genesis could do was to use the time to get his breathing back under control, and to attempt to stop at least some of the yet worsened shaking in his muscles.

"Then..." He's startled by the fact that it isn't Angeal who speaks, but Zack. "That's what you're here for now, isn't it? If you did things wrong last time, you've just got to get back up and try again, no matter how many times it takes. That's what I think, anyway."

In case you hadn't noticed, I think he's started to believe in you as well, now. So don't let him down. Angeal's words to him, mixed with his own.

Well, that didn't take long, he wanted to say, but in a way that wasn't true, because no matter if it made sense or not, Zack... didn't appear to be judging him.

Zack had saved him once, after all. Even after everything he'd done. After everything.

I beat you before, and if I have to do it again, I will, he remembered from the dream, and if anything, the words gave him some small solace, that no matter even if things went entirely wrong, he could rely on that much, at least.

"I need to get out of here," he said eventually. Not simply out of the tent, or gone a while - out of Wutai entirely. The mission needed to end.

"That's what we're here for, then," Angeal said, a hand coming into Genesis' field of vision to help him up, bringing attention to the fact that he'd fallen onto his knees. "Because it seems like nothing good comes from you being left to your own devices."

He winced again at the pointed jab, but reached for Angeal's hand, and let himself be pulled back up again.

...

He could still remember the way they'd all been sitting around at the bar when the subject had been brought up.

One minute they're talking about Corel wine, the next they're mentioning something about the Corel reactor, and it was hardly as though this had been the first time he had connected the location with Marlene's father, or the knowledge that the reactor blowing had been the cause for the loss of Barret's arm.

It had, however, been the first time he'd heard that everyone believed that Shinra was to blame, and he hadn't been able to completely hold back a laugh, just at the sheer irony.

He'd been used to the cold looks and glares aimed in his direction, by then, enough that they hadn't phased him. It had been early enough on that after realising who he was and what he'd done and enabled, not many of them would give him much warmer than 'faint suspicion' even at the best of times.

"The hell you laughing at now?"

He could see Barret's eyes being drawn to his old SOLDIER uniform, and especially the old logo on his belt. A smile touched his mouth, unable to help just a little of the old hubris touching his pride.

"You don't know the irony?" Of course they didn't. They were all looking at him like angry beached fish. "I wasn't there, in case you had it in mind that I had anything to do with it, by the way." He'd been getting weaker and weaker by the year, and sometimes, it had felt, by the month. If he'd been involved, he'd have been exhausted for days afterward. Not that they needed to know that. "I knew the people who were, however. Just enough to get the gist of things, at least," he added lightly, before raising his glass to his mouth again.

"So now you're saying you knew-"

"Barret, wait - Genesis, what do you mean by "irony"? Or... "enough to get the gist of things?"

Cloud hadn't been happy either. Later, he would realise that it would have stung, the idea that someone that he had brought into the group could have bene withholding information, especially when he'd still been a potential threat, living among them on trust.

But at the time, he'd just let his smile grow a little wider, as long as he had even something as small as this over them.

"We only met twice," he said, drawing the words out. "Once not long after news of my desertion had spread, and once not long after the incident at Corel itself." He brought the glass up to his lips once more, wetting his throat, and allowing himself to remember. "Do you have any idea how many anti-Shinra factions there were? Not many. It was a dangerous way to exist, so of course a little networking was to be expected. Hollander was far more interested in the offers that man gave, of course," he said, distaste and bitterness flavouring the words, "but I restrained him. Hardly out of pure intentions. More to the point, Fuhito was asking for Hollander's help as a scientist, and I could hardly have him distracted when the entire reason I had deserted in the first place was so that he could find a cure so that I would stop dying."

He paused to finish his drink, against the flash of anger at remembering how Hollander had never, not once, had the impression in his mind that the degradation could be cured.

"And? What's any of this got to do with what happened to Corel?"

"Because," said a drawling voice that even after all this time was plenty recognisable enough, "Fuhito was the old head of the first AVALANCHE. Isn't that what you were aiming at?"

Genesis' eyes had narrowed, a decision made in a matter of moments while the others were asking just how long Reno of the Turks had been listening in on the conversation.

"Quite," he'd said, maintaining a genial air. "And the girl you were looking for? Elfé, was it? How did that work out for you? The last time I saw her, she still had that summons materia somehow infused into her arm."

"You know, I've got no idea what you're talking about, on that one."

"Infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess... far less so your attempts to lie about something I'm clearly already well aware of. She was with him both times, after all, and I know a summons materia when I see one. Given what I was able to realise from just two meetings, the most likely outcome is that she died. One way or another."

The atmosphere went from tense to frigid, with Reno's grip tightening on the rod he carried with him everywhere.

"She ain't dead, yo."

"Oh," Genesis said, not finding the Turk's anger nearly as worrying as the others did. He'd killed Turks far more willing to fight, Turks far more desperate, than this one. "It seems you do remember."

Cloud's hand on his arm stops him from saying anything else. Perhaps in Cloud's mind, as much to protect Genesis and the bar as anything or anyone else.

"Who's Elfé, Reno?"

Cloud's eyes darted over to Barret for a moment of some unspoken thought. Barret huffed, but backed down - likely from asking again what any of this had to do with Corel, no doubt.

He'd hardly been wrong, earlier - there was by far too much irony in the entire situation, and just how little the subject matter didn't have to do with Corel.

"Elfé was pretty much the old boss of AVALANCHE before everything went to shit, both for them and for us. Also? What he said. Turned out she had a real powerful WEAPONS-grade summons stuck in her arm, three guesses who put that in there, first two don't count." Genesis felt Cloud tense for a moment beside him, and given the disjointed memories that had leaked through to give him his own further experiences, he could hardly say he blamed him. "Of course, once we found that out, it was our job to make sure that thing didn't end up getting summoned, you hear me? Thing that big could've wiped out most of Midgar, same as the ones everyone had to face a few months later."

Genesis rolled his eyes.

"And how did that go for you? I did suggest when we first met that perhaps the safest option would be to simply take the arm off. A summons like what I felt, and she's lucky to be alive, let alone more than that."

Reno had grimaced, scratching the back of his neck for a moment underneath that rat's tail of hair he wore.

"Fuhito was the one who wanted to actually summon it, yo. That bit wasn't on us. Thing needed-"

"Support materia - in order to stabilise it. Correct? It's hardly basic knowledge but it's hardly forgotten lore," he finished, dismissively. "Let me guess, one of said support materia... was in Corel."

Silence stretched in Seventh Heaven as Cloud, Tifa, and Barret slowly pieced together a series of events, and Reno watched them do so, and Genesis found himself satisfied that he finally had some context for certain things that he had known of, and always wondered about.

"What can I say," Reno said at last. "Shit went down. That's all there is to it. And all you need to know."

"And the summons?"

Reno snorted.

"What, you miss the whole light show or something?"

"...let's assume 'or something'."

After all, if he didn't remember, then it was likely something that took place after... then. After the caves. After he was taken.

"Yeah? Let's just say the Turks took care of it, and that's that, alright?"

"That implies there was something for the Turks to take care of though... doesn't it?"

A moment later, Tifa nods, answering Cloud's not quite rhetoric question.

"I think I remember something like that - not long before I found you, Cloud."

"Then Fuhito succeeded," Genesis had found himself saying. Based on fragmented, vague memories of half-forgotten conversations, and what Reno himself had said just mere moments ago. Fuhito was the one who had wanted to summon it.

"Fuhito went and got himself spliced up with that materia he got his hands on, is what. And we-"

"What did you just say?"

"What, you suddenly got hearing loss or something? All I'm saying is, the guy'd been going on for years about how he wanted to 'cleanse the Planet' by 'ridding it of humans' or some bullshit like that, so I guess becoming some weird monster with scythes for arms wasn't out of the question, yo. You want details, though, you got the wrong guy."

"You... make it seem as though he kept his senses about him. After becoming this... monster."

"Huh? I told you, wrong guy for details. Sound about right though, given what I heard and all. Right up to when we got 'im good, at least. That good enough for you?"

Genesis could remember leaving. He could remember not talking for some time, and not taking any notice of where he was going, either, only the sensation of the wind between feathers, although the memory of actually leaving the ground was absent.

Fuhito, a man that Genesis had not trusted even on their first meeting, had kept his mind intact upon gaining power directly from a materia summons as powerful as the one he had felt in Elfé.

He, meanwhile...

Pride is lost, wings stripped away, the end is nigh... that, is the fate of a monster, he recalled himself having said once.

Perhaps events such as those merely showed one's true nature to the world, he wondered, and if so, then what did that say about him, no matter how much he had been making attempts to regain the pride that he had lost?

...

"This... plan of yours," Godo said slowly, as if tasting the words for their how bitter they were before letting them touch the air, "is reckless, and requires trust between us the likes of which I am not certain that you have earned, Genesis of SOLDIER. And more importantly, these are the actions of those who accept defeat, and we of Wutai are anything but."

It was two mere days later, and although there had been no further dreams of the same sort, the effects of that headache, the pressure that it had brought with it, had yet to fade completely, creating odd moments when his vision would blur or create sunspots without warning.

In some cases, the only way to move forward past the discomfort had been to push ahead in spite of it, but then - he had more than enough experience with that, no matter that he had desired to never need to again.

"Perhaps so," he admitted, "and yet, should we go through with this, one would not be the only one to have power over the other - after all, the need for such a plan rests squarely upon the fact that in order for my involvement to not be suspected, I need to return to Shinra. In which case, you would be able to ruin me just as absolutely as I could, you." More so, Genesis thought darkly, given that Lord Godo merely has Wutai to ensure the safety of, and I... should I lose Sephiroth's trust, the Planet itself is in danger. "Perhaps one might see such actions as cowardly, or dishonourable... but on the contrary, I cannot."

Godo drew himself up, and Genesis noted a slight narrowing of the Wutaian noble's eyes.

"So you say, and so you have said. And yet, are those not the words of those who would feel connection with the spirits of foxes, with weasels and snakes? We are not such, we who answer to Leviathan alone."

Genesis waited until silence had once more blanketed the room, until all eyes were upon him for his response.

"Someone told me very recently," he said, reflecting back to looking at his phone's screen as the text came, "that one cannot change anything if they are dead. I see Wutai and her people, and I see people who could rebuild, who could bring Wutai back to life. But there is more than just one type of death, Lord Godo." Betrayal upon betrayal... I lost myself in an abyss of my own making. Perhaps, the Goddess resurrected me in more than one sense, at that time. "This, is not death. It is courage, to pretend that your are something that you are not, to walk a path that you know you cannot survive walking indefinitely... in order to know that there will be a future for others."

"And if I should trust you and your allies, and even should no betrayals occur... if I should fall before my people are truly free?"

"Then," Genesis said firmly, meeting the other man's eyes, with his own glowing blue with determination, "we become the sacrifices in order for others to be able to fight for the Planet in our stead." If everything is not enough... I do at least know that I can trust them, to finish what I could not. "But we likewise cannot believe in such an outcome. We cannot afford to believe in failure."

Failure for Godo would mean the loss of his people, and their honour. Failure for me... would mean that I would have lost everything a second time over.

Just because I know that the world could survive, doesn't mean I'm going to let that happen.

Lord Godo of Wutai inclined his head.

Genesis could not help his mouth twitching, not merely at the taste of victory in the air, but at feeling one small step closer to, no matter his words, not feeling as though disaster of some sort in this place lay just around the corner.

#ffvii #final fantasy vii #ff7 stuff #genesis rhapsodos #Leona fic #to change a sombre morrow verse

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kalesandfails · 5 years

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apocalypse soon

Here are some things I have done in the past seventy two hours:

learned that Zyrtec is not a drug for me,

set a new precedent in which mommy eats dinner, too, rather than waiting on everyone for the duration of the meal;

weathered about a million Lily tantrums,

written a blog about the need for “left-learning” news sources (I call them “the good guys”) to stop dabbling in the objectification of “fresh new faces” and instead commit to engaging political agents on the subject of their ideas, then opted not to publish it, because what’s even more important than my radical feminist agenda is that

Congresswoman Ortega-Cortez is the rightest of rights when she is full-on ranting about the fact that we are destroying our planet and the window to actually prevent our children from dying horribly in a natural disaster is closing. Her speech had the exact right emotional tone for the particular problem about which she was speaking, which is not the specter of drug addicts getting to eat or brown refugees walking our streets with their families intact, but is the nearly-foregone conclusion of our species’ extinction.

I work in healthcare, and here’s the thing about that: it is very, very scary to acknowledge that you definitely will die, and it may be soon, and our bodies remind ourselves of that all the time, and hilariously enough, a lot of people make a lot of money selling us distractions from that fact and those distractions often accelerate the rate at which our bodies fail.

It sounds too horrible to say, this cigarette is directly increasing my odds of spending my last years unable to walk, incontinent, choking down liquids and cycling in and out of hospitals and nursing homes after my stroke. But it is actually true that smoking increases these odds of exactly this. It sounds equally horrible to say, my daughter might die in a flood or suffocated on the air or starved because of a worldwide famine before she reaches my age, but this, too, is not just a possibility but a likely natural conclusion of the trajectory we are on right now.

I completely understand the inclination to play Russian roulette with scary, painful truths, because I spent twenty years damaging my body in an effort to reassure myself that I could; that everything is okay and nothing is that scary, because look, I keep doing these things everyone told me would kill me, and I’m still here. It is tremendously reassuring, in a world where life is often very scary and confusing for even the most well-loved of us, this little performance of mastery over our collective fate that actually is just a grown-up way of closing our eyes against it. I thought all weekend about the finite nature of our lives, about our precarious existence, about how all we really have is the people we love and the moment we are living in, and then I snapped at my husband and my kids until they retreated under the covers with Youtube videos, because my homework was due and the night wasn’t getting any younger. Sometimes we’re petty precisely because really recognizing how precious and fragile our lives are is terrifying and we just need to watch a thing and not think about it.

People aren’t denying climate change, I don’t think, because they have thoughtfully weighed the evidence and determined that there really are two sides or the jury is still out. Because on the one hand you have over 97 percent of academic research that addresses the possibility of human-made climate change affirming that, yes, we are changing our climate, and on the other hand you have less than one percent disagreeing. You can imagine the group of scientists who took the time to review almost twelve thousand articles — 66% of which did not even address the topic of climate change since scientists “generally focus their discussions on questions that are still disputed or unanswered rather than on matters about which everyone agrees” (Oreskes, 2007) — bitching to one another about the fact that this is even something they have to do, as if a group of loud people whose money and connections afforded them media time and United States presidencies had decided that gravity was “just a theory” and they needed “to hear both sides”. As they just come out and say towards the end of the paper, the appearance of debate over climate change is the results of specific, non-scientist agents (for example, the Western Fuels Association), paying both marketers and the odd PhD eager to shill so hard, to intentionally generate that very appearance among scared and busy people. Who wouldn’t prefer the appealing lie (our actions have no consequences! we can fix everything!) over the peer-reviewed and scientifically credible truth (essentially: nope)?

Those of us who are denying climate change are doing it because they like the other guy’s story better. And who wouldn’t? But that’s not how objective reality works.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t need to “back up” her claim that we are in a state of emergency; that has been done, and done, and done again. And would-be moderates who want to give the appearance of even-handedness by criticizing her or the Green New Deal for its emotional energy and lack of nuance are perpetuating a completely inaccurate, but dangerously appealing, take on what is happening: that climate change is one political talking point among many and we have time to polish our proposals to address it until they are perfect and the moment is politically advantageous.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-nine years old: she’s not speaking strategically, she’s speaking as the single person in that room who seemed to understand that we are all literally going to die if this isn’t addressed right now.

And it is not her responsibility to learn the system and determine the best way to solve climate change, for Chrissakes. There are four hundred thirty four other Congresspeople and centuries of combined legislative experience to help her do that. She did her job, the most important one anyone has done in Congress that I can recall: she took the risk of pointing out, right now, when it is still possible to save our children’s lives, that their lives need saving, and we can fix the problem or we can pour our energy into emotionally gratifying but deeply nihilism project of denying reality or “taking a balanced approach”.

Democrats, listen: it will not matter if we win elections if we are all dead. We need to understand the existential dread underlying climate change denial, and then we need to broken-record, preschool-teacher, mom-AF that shit and just keep repeating the facts, the need, the urgency. We all need the reality of climate change to become as ubiquitous as the “border crisis” or the “silent majority”. I think if you take a stroll down memory lane you will find that the most resonant political “truths” have not been backed up by sophisticated analysis or a preponderance of scientific data (though, if that’s your thing, climate change has both)! In most cases, they haven’t even been true; they’ve just been things loud, dumb people have said a lot.

If we keep taking what we can get from our leaders, on either side, if we keep doing what we want and hoping for the best or focusing on “solve-able problems”, than you will die and I will die and everyone we both love will die because our planet will cease to be a place where people can live. When you’re diagnosed with cancer, you don’t refuse treatment because maybe, just maybe, the test was a false positive. You approach the diagnosis as though the data with which you’ve been presented with is true, or is likely enough to be true to necessitate action, however unpleasant. The Congresswoman, with her on-point lipliner and also her on-point assessment of the impending environmental devastation, is not all of us (we only wish). But she fucking should be.

#green new deal #climate change #alexandria ocasio-cortez #aoc

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imrainai · 7 years

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[@inkbluesea] Your writing is quite good for a beginner purple! You should keep trying, you could certainly end up a very skilled purple writer. Perhaps you might feel better about your writing if you look at what other purples write? Comparing yourself to greens will do you no good, and it would be a shame if you gave up just for being who you're supposed to be.

I’m glad you like my writing!

I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here, though I think it’s meant to imply that purple writers will never be as good as green writers. I think we might just be different. Like, if I only ever compared myself to Tapai writers, and wanted to be a better at writing in Tapai than anyone else was, then I would fail, because I’m not Tapai, I’m Voan. No matter how imaginative a person might be, at the end of the day, they still have to write from the perspective that they actually have.

At the same time, Voan writers aren’t worse than Tapai writers, and I don’t think purple writers have to be worse than green writers. Certainly there are ways in which green writers will excel–I’m never going to be better than @limmuda at academic writing, and I’m never going to be better than Tefam Kita at writing Blackout stuff, and there are lots of other green writers who will always be better than me at writing the particular things that they write.

But no matter how good a green writer is, they can ultimately only come at things from their own perspective. They can only tell the stories that happen to grow inside them. And because greens are only a small slice of the population, their stories will only be a small slice of all the stories that are growing on Amenta. There’s no green in the world who can tell the stories growing inside me. If I want them to exist outside myself, I’m the one who has to record them in a form that other people can interact with. Nobody else can do it for me.

I don’t think my stories will be the best stories in the world. They won’t be better than the best green writers, and they won’t be better than the best purple writers, of which there are many. But I do think they’ll have value. I think they’ll resonate with different people. I think that they will offer something to people that only I can offer. Other writers may have better things to offer, but they’ll never be better at offering the thing that I have, whatever that is.

So I don’t want to be the best green writer. I don’t want to be the best purple writer, either. I want to write the best possible versions of the stories that are growing inside me. I think I am a long way away from being that version of myself, but I think that I’ll get closer to it if I keep trying.

I’m glad that you want me to keep trying, too. :)

#amenta rp #asks

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hagiographically · 7 years

Text

summer qtr review/thoughts

buckle up kiddos its gonna be long -- this is mainly for my benefit tbh (tw for ed talk but as usual, no detail about behaviors)

but i feel like i tumbled less this summer and tbh i think that is ?? probably good

anyway

the quarter started off horrifically bad because i deteriorated a lot in florence. like, im so happy i went to florence and i experienced so many things and got so much braver and more confident, but i didn’t realize those positive effects until many weeks in, and they didn’t develop fully until i’d left

but i lost like..... at least 15 pounds without trying to or even realizing

surprise! italy is triggering for eating disorders....who knew....not this stanford-educated bitch right here....

anyway i was half dead when i got home to new jersey. i figured this summer i’d have to Actually Recover, and i’d dropped out of my program in south africa to be at stanford, catch up on my major, and get my shit together health-wise

That Did Not Happen, Unsurprisingly

having a disorder means.....the worse u get.....ur brain cares less about recovering....so I hit my lowest weight ever a couple weeks after getting back to ol’ stanf

it sukked cuz summer is triggering because it’s so beautiful and warm outside and like !!! shorts!!! crop tops!!! but anyway i hauled ass to the doctor to make sure i wasn’t going to die

she said “libby you are going to die very soon if you keep doing this”

but!!! that was the go-ahead i needed to flip the switch into Recovery Mode(tm) and i went to cvs the next day and bought hundreds of dollars worth of vitamins and supplements and safe foods because it was an Investment or whatever

and like......it’s been rocky. I’ve slipped up countless times. I gained 10 lbs in the first week and that was super scary lol so I relapsed, and then half-recovered from that, and since then it’s been a tug-of-war with the mental illness goblin

BUT that being said, the whole process has been kind of fun/motivating in a weird way, like I was a scientist and my body was the experiment, and I was just throwing data points into it and seeing what worked.

and ????? Some Things Worked !!! and it really awakens my sense of curiosity to see what things help me-- the nutrition and supplements helped my mood, energy, relationships (kinda? who knows what it would’ve been like otherwise), academics (same as relationships), confidence, etc. it even changed my personality i think, or at least minimized the things i didn’t like about myself and let me cultivate the things i like

like for example, i’m actually.....not an introvert i don’t think? i was talking to my mom about this yesterday -- she thinks she’s a 60/40 E/I and I’m the opposite, so we’re both ambiverts with different leanings. I identify as an introvert because I like solitary activities bc I’m used to being alone, but I realized this summer that.....being alone isn’t always good for me because it awakens mental illness goblin, but also I ??? really like talking to people and I’m good at conversations ??? I met lots of non-Stanf people from going out so much and it was always really refreshing and cool and I got energy from it....definition of an extravert

had conversations that really cemented my current values - got to talk about my classes and how much i loved them, how much the shallowness of bay area tech bothers me, how much i loved italy (florence is so hazy to me rn!! bizarre), regional differences in psychology (my passion tbh) and it just feels so good to care about things wow !! is this what it’s like to be neurotypical? no wonder yall are out there doin it

so I am not recovered in any sense of the word but I am so. much. better. I reduced a hella lot of behaviors, rarely felt depressed, and achieved pretty much everything i wanted, even though this was my sixth straight quarter of college and if i hadn’t done this self-imposed health regimen i don’t think i would’ve died, but i would’ve eroded and probably dropped out of school to go back to residential

should i be getting professional treatment? i think a lot of recovery blogs or experts would say yes, because they’re of the mind you can’t half-recover, and treatment comes before education, etc. and i don’t completely disagree and maybe once i graduate i’ll agree. but. i know that right now i want to be in school. i cannot fully recover on my own, but on my own is the only way i can get pieces of everything that i want.

i’m healthier and happier because i made the best grades i’ve ever gotten at stanford (easy-ass classes for sure, but i’m still glad i performed as well as i possibly could. it’s a point of pride for me that even though my illness can get really severe, it’s never impacted my grades.) and i still did lots of really fun things! it was less social than last summer, where i went out every other day, but i still went to santa cruz beach boardwalk, an ed sheeran concert, a gay club in SF, SO MANY bars in downtown palo alto (at the point where multiple bartenders recognize me), a play in redwood city, coffee shops and dinner dates and sunlit morning walks to class listening to jukebox the ghost and happy-buzzed from green tea.

i’ll just say it, my fashion was kinda lit this summer....i was very physically confident, which is mixed because i might be romanticizing unhealthiness even though i am healthier than before. who knows. i am in transit

i feel like i didnt socialize as much this quarter with my actual close friends but instead met lots of one-time people and like, it was really nice meeting new people, bc when the people are always changing, i can see which elements of me stay the same. and getting to know who i am now is so interesting because tbh?? ive been through a lot this year (and also with, like, life) it’s so weird thinking of myself As A Whole when anything more than a year ago feels like a fever dream or made up story....anyway!

i did get to see my friends fairly frequently and i’m grateful for every time i did because i’m v lucky to have anyone in my life when i change as much as the fricken weather

my friends who loved stanford before are more over it now, and its funny bc i used to hate it but now im used to the school so i dont anymore. im a senior, i know the school well, ive been a member of so many clubs, been to so many on campus houses, explored the area extensively, taken a variety of classes….im not totally out of FOMO but its so reduced that im confident with what ive done there, and my ego isnt as threatened by other people bc i know i have my own kind of value. it doesnt matter if its objective or not bc how i feel is ultimately what matters

like its not all about what i feel if i dont do anything about it. but ive done some stuff! and im trying to make the shitty interpersonal stuff better! its going!

was able to read and write a little bit which is neaterino ! and i liked my job at the library, it was fun and easy

anyway if i think too much about it i’ll trip out because thinking about life sends me into existential despair, but this was a good quarter. up there with sophomore spring for my favorite/happiest/best feeling quarter? probably even better than soph spring because i was sick for most of the spring. every quarter has ups and downs and this was no exception but the downs didn’t feel as debilitating and the air didn’t feel like a fire blanket for once, and now that i have some strategies under my belt i can’t imagine things ever really getting that bad for a while

#THIS IS LONG IM ANNOYING!#writing #stan #idk how i tag these #summer17

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cosmosogler · 7 years

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after this many instances, i can’t tell if being dressed up like an ice cream cone just makes my day horrible or if being dressed up like an ice cream cone is what makes me feel a little sillier after a horrible day.

i dunno. pastel colors are just cheerful. i like these shorts and they only go with the ice cream shirt and the pokemon shirt.

well. i tried to sleep early last night but i was kept awake by, hmm, the usual sort of memories that make your eyes snap open when you’re laying alone in the dark. snoop won’t protect me the way i know eve would. i could feel the, just... heaviness wearing into my face as i tried to settle in and get some sleep.

it keeps me up a lot of nights. weird things set it off. laying in certain positions. unpredictable trains of thought, or maybe my thoughts just get derailed every now and then. certain noises. makes it hard to get comfortable.

i don’t have to “bury the hatchet” with dad if he doesn’t acknowledge there even is a hatchet, right? because his behavior during the family vacation was unacceptable and he never said even one word about it except to be passive aggressive the last month at home.

i wonder if mom notices that i ask about my brother and sister and the dogs but not dad. honestly i don’t really care how he’s doing... i don’t have energy to devote to things i don’t care about and i don’t have the energy to pretend i do care either.

i actually don’t usually ask mother how she is doing either. i feel like that’s a bad habit to get into. i really don’t have any other resources right now though. since i’m three hours ahead of my family now i really can’t... find any good time of day to call my siblings and chat with them. not that i was talking to them that much at home anyway...

anyway i went to school. i left at 7:55, which is TECHNICALLY before 8. i had woken up while it was still dark, 6:30... it was hard to get moving.

no one was at the department when i got there except people who were actively teaching classes so i sat at my desk and tried to power through the quantum homework by myself. i did get a little help with the problem i had trouble with last night from an internet acquaintance, and i did the third and fourth problems by myself with not too much trouble.

jennica came into the office about 10 minutes before class and i asked her for help. she pointed out what i should focus on and i compared it to algebra distribution and she said “not at all.” then she proceeded to describe how to do the problem using algebra distribution and i got annoyed but i didn’t say anything at the time. quibbling about what to call the thing i was doing cost me time i needed. i tried to do the rest between mechanics and quantum and didn’t get it done. i had to turn it in anyway. i was a little over halfway through it. at least i ha all the other problems done.

after quantum i was hanging out with the other students in suzanne’s office and we were talking about how to manipulate operators because the professor had not been clear on what exactly he was doing when he showed us some stuff at the end of class. he’d skipped a step or two and we were trying to kind of reverse engineer his final equation. jennica disagreed with us about where we could put the operator, even though it was clearly shown in the book. then she started doing the exact same thing we had just done on the blackboard and continued to disagree with us while using the math we had just used. i got that angry static in my head so i went out to try to eat some lunch in my office.

i know she’s probably smarter than i am, or at least a more consistent worker, but it’s frustrating to argue with someone who agrees with you but won’t consciously agree with you. and it’s frustrating to argue with someone when you’re using facts from the textbook with the page open and they are saying “no, that’s wrong.” and then not explaining why they think that.

but she got the homework done and i didn’t. so.

anyway i was checking my emails while i was unpacking my lunchbox and i found the email from the physics adviser.

(aside- i instinctively spell it “advisor” and i can’t figure out why because every spellcheck keeps correcting me. i looked it up on google and the dictionary says either is fine but i don’t like the red line.)

so my test scores were so bad that i had to meet with him in less than two hours to discuss “schedule adjustments.” i responded the responsible way: by freaking the hell out. i paced around in my office for about 30 minutes before i gave up on trying to sit down and i went out to the counseling center for my group intake appointment. i also stopped by the pharmacy. and i tried to call mom four times. she didn’t answer. i talked to oz about it a little bit while i was walking and waiting at the center.

i know, deep down, that in my field any sign of weakness or inconsistency is basically death. getting sick will get you laid off when finances get low. being a woman will get you laid off when finances get low because if you’re a woman you have to be exceptional to be considered average. (white) men with the very same qualifications get priority.

i do not have the advantage of good health. i just don’t. this seriously hurts my ability to perform on a rigorous class schedule. this is why i think that i may not... get my phd. i am afraid that knowing i might not get it is what will cause me to not get it. i’m afraid that the lack of confidence is going to be the deciding factor here. but i can’t not know about this. it’s a very real handicap for me. when i am too stressed for too long my internal organs start permanently shutting down apparently.

ha ha, in a few years i’m not going to have any non-vital organs left. probably.

during my intake interview i started crying and said i was very unhappy today. i felt really bad for taking this interview and making it about this upcoming talk with the advisor. i had brought up that one of my goals for group would be to make the transition to graduate life... at that point i was worried about it still being “graduate” by the end of the day though.

you know, when i went to the pharmacy, i kept telling myself “i’m not going to need those later” in an effort to talk myself out of refilling my medications. i’m not going to need those later, it doesn’t matter, nothing means anything.

when i looked at the front door i sighed and said to myself, “but i will need them later, won’t i.” and that heaviness fell over my entire body again. i’m not afraid to die as much as i am afraid to survive.

mom finally called back as i was leaving to get to the advisor’s office back in the physics department. i told mom what was going on and she said “well, talk to him then!” and i dunno, i felt so brushed aside. i didn’t tell her i was afraid of losing my tuition waiver or my paycheck because of the change in course credits or whatever was going to happen.

the professor was very nice as usual. he did tell me that my prelim results were extremely worrying. i actually almost passed the thermo portion of the test, but i got essentially a 0 in literally every other subject. he wanted me to drop down into undergrad courses for two out of my three subjects. it ended up that undergrad quantum meets exactly during my classical mechanics lecture, so i got to stay in graduate quantum. he said that was very risky. i told him it wasn’t that i was deciding to take a risk so much as that looked like it was just how it was going to be. he said yeah.

he was nice about it... he told me that once the university had taken on a graduate student they couldn’t just screw them immediately and that he and the board had put a lot of effort into adjusting my schedule to make sure i had a chance to succeed. and retaking one graduate course next year won’t put me too behind schedule. but if i don’t get a b+ or higher in any of the courses i’m taking now i would be in a lot of trouble schedule-wise and gpa standard-wise.

i dunno. i feel like i didn’t actually have any control over any part of this situation. i feel like i got cheated out of the potential to do well on that test by my eight-month illness. i feel like i should have kept going anyway even though i could only eat so little that i had even lost a lot of weight.

feeling cheated is the worst. or, one of the worsts.

i feel like i don’t have any control over the direction my life is going in. i mean... i’m making choices, i’m making a lot of them every day and lots of compromises and calculations. but big picture wise i am severely limited by how sick i get and by how dumb i am. i didn’t have any choice about how my schedule was going to change. i didn’t have any choice in which grad school i got to go to.

i guess i made the choice to go to grad school at all. 2 choices is NOT very many though.

i chose to cough up a pile of money for snoopy’s well-being. mike told me that it is worth it, cats will definitely live longer if they are on the prescription diet after they get kidney disease. snoopy doesn’t have a lot of control over her life. i try to give her some say in what happens. i ask to pet her, i stop brushing if she doesn’t want to even if she’s still kinda grimy. it’s sometimes easier to figure out what cats do and don’t want than it is to figure that out with dogs.

i’m not gonna compensate for the lack of control in my life by grabbing snoopy’s though. i’m just trying to recognize that i can work within some parameters. even if i’m not happy about the way my academic life is already falling apart around me 10 days into the semester.

so i got a new e&m class and professor with the undergrads. his teaching style is a mess but i already know the material very well from this part of the course. i’m kind of surprised and shocked that he is doing this part of the course so early- why aren’t they working on point charges and forces BEFORE they do flux and green’s theorem and stuff like that?

he asked me to meet with him tomorrow after lunch. so i’ll be doing that i guess. i need to look up his course web page and syllabus...

after class i was feeling REALLY bad so i went home. i said hi to snoopy and cleaned her litter box and sat around for a while. then i made spaghetti for dinner. it was missing something, and i’m not sure what it was, but i know i didn’t have it anyway. i’m thinking i should use a different kind of marinara sauce.

then i ate a ton of oreos and listened to a taz episode. it was really good... the podcast, i mean. the oreos had gotten a little stale. i forget that it’s humid here and food ages differently.

i had meant to get to some homework from my to-do list but i spent the night diddling around on the computer doing basically nothing instead. i also had ice cream because i just really wasn’t feeling good at all emotionally and i wanted sugar.

tomorrow i need to teach two labs in a row!!! hopefully it will go better than my first one, which did not go well at all!!!!!

i’m not sure how to proceed here. i didn’t really... read anything tonight. like the lab manual, which i did want to brush up on before i tried to teach the lab again. there was all kinds of weird stuff in there that we didn’t do in the practice lab last thursday and i wanted to be more familiar with it. maybe i can do that before i leave tomorrow. i’ll try to get up a little earlier...

man, i don’t want to sleep at all. i remembered my dream last night. i kept getting talked over by neckbearded dudes. i couldn’t do anything without getting interrupted, and also i was in a part of “dirt college town” that i had never been in before and it was difficult at best to navigate. at the end i was wandering around in a swamp (which was also in a computer?) and there were the nerds trying to “find secrets” and also there was a bear. i wanted to be alone i think. well, i do now.

#tw suicide

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careergrowthblog · 7 years

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Children are human beings, not labels

I am fascinated by the way politics interacts with education. Often what politicians ask for is distorted beyond all recognition at the implementation phase. One example of this was the 1997 Labour manifesto, it promised “We will encourage the use of the most effective teaching methods, including phonics for reading and whole class interactive teaching for maths” and yet while the government made some short-lived progress in maths, a report found in 2006 that the evidence on phonics was still being widely ignored. A bigger issue under that government was behaviour. The 1997 manifesto promised that:

Teachers will be entitled to positive support from parents to promote good attendance and sound discipline. Schools suffer from unruly and disruptive pupils. Exclusion or suspension may sometimes be necessary. We will, however, pilot new pupil referral units so that schools are protected but these pupils are not lost to education or the country.

In practise, behaviour was undermined. And the way it happened was a classic example of how good intentions can be distorted by the education system and turned into something terrible. Labour’s education secretary, David Blunkett, was blind and in his youth had an unpleasant experience of a school for the blind. He wanted the disabled to be taught in mainstream schools as much as possible. And it was this commitment, that came to be known as “Inclusion” that was used to undermine Labour’s policy on discipline.

By the time I started teaching in 2001, it was already well established that Inclusion meant 2 things. Firstly, that special schools were a bad thing and should generally be run down and only used for children with the most severe problems. Secondly, that if a child was badly behaved they should be kept in lessons and in schools as much as possible. In my second year of teaching a senior figure from the Local Education Authority came to my school and told all the staff there that this academic year there would be no exclusions. That year, order broke down in the school. It was impossible to get any acknowledgement of even some of the most unpleasant behaviour. I have a particularly strong memory of a new teacher being spat on, and nothing happening. I also recall some concerned parents coming in, unable to believe their daughter had called me a dickhead when I asked her to move seats, not because they thought their daughter was incapable of the offence, but because they couldn’t believe she wasn’t excluded for it. When parents come in asking why their children aren’t being punished enough, you know you have a problem.

But what had happened to cause discipline to break down was never intended. A perfectly reasonable desire to include the disabled had been distorted by those who believe that children cannot make bad choices. If you believe that children are natural saints, then all their bad behaviour must have a cause beyond the control of the child. You can blame society; you can blame their teachers, or you can claim that they have some medical, or psychological problem that has to be identified and treated. We went through a period where the standard response to children behaving badly was to try to find a label that fitted their “symptoms” and produce paperwork about how we were dealing with it. This was often done by complete amateurs. In that first school I worked in, an IEP stated that a child might have suspected “Turrets”. In another school I worked in, a SENCo made a provisional diagnosis of “Tourects”. Both children had sworn at teachers repeatedly, and an adult who had heard that Tourette’s Syndrome was a condition related to swearing, but had no idea what Tourette’s Syndrome was or how to spell it, had decided that might be the cause. That’s where we were.

Eventually the tide turned and the policy of Inclusion was abandoned. People started defending special schools, and from 2007 they stopped dying off. A number of different reviews found the SEN system to be bureaucratic and amateurish and concern was widely raised at how many children were being labelled. A government Green Paper stated that:

Although the proportion of pupils with statements of SEN has remained relatively stable over time, there has been a considerable increase in recent years in the number of pupils with SEN without statements,9 from 10 per cent of all pupils in 1995 to 18.2 per cent or 1.5 million pupils in 2010.

There has been a marked increase in certain primary need types of SEN in recent years.For example, the numbers of pupils with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties has increased by 23 per cent between 2005 and 2010, to 158,000 pupils; the number of pupils with speech, language and communication needs has increased by 58 per cent, to 113,000 pupils; and the number of children with autistic spectrum disorder has increased by 61 per cent, to 56,000 pupils.

Reforms took place. On behaviour, there was a longer fight, but it became a political issue and there was far more acceptance that trying to cover it up in order to avoid exclusions was not the way forward. Exclusions are now rising as schools take behaviour seriously once again. The category “‘behavioural, emotional and social difficulties” which seemed to assume that poor behaviour was a special need was replaced with “Social, emotional and mental health difficulties” and the 2014 Code Of Practice stated clearly that “difficult or withdrawn behaviour does not necessarily mean that a child has SEN”. Some schools do still have a tendency to claim that poor behaviour indicates a special needs, and a high rate of SEN diagnoses among the excluded remain a concern, but things have moved on.

Incredibly though, there is a vocal minority who have still not accepted that changes. I was widely condemned by Twitter educationalists when I encouraged teachers to share their experiences of schools that won’t exclude.

Some claim the policy of Inclusion from 10 years ago was never abandoned. There are still consultants out there telling schools selling advice on reducing exclusions. No school needs advice on how to do this, it just means tolerating more bad behaviour. When I wrote a blogpost entitled “What happens when schools don’t permanently exclude?” where teachers described their experience of schools that wouldn’t act when teachers and children were put at danger, I was condemned by a number of educationalists and consultants for letting the truth be known. Reaction to my most popular tweet ever, showed the divide between consultants and those who have to deal with bad behaviour in the classroom.

https://twitter.com/oldandrewuk/status/940612227148800001

There is an activist minority, who ignore the fact that the SEND Code Of Practice makes it clear that poor behaviour does not imply SEND, and that if SEND is a causal factor in behaviour that should be identified, not assumed. They claim that as The Equalities Act calls for “reasonable adjustments” for those with disabilities, we must tolerate bad behaviour because we can assume it is caused by SEND. They look towards broad diagnoses like Autistic Spectrum Disorder and claim that almost any school rule is unfair to a theoretic child whose autism stops them behaving. They also argue that almost any demand, no matter how insane, is a reasonable adjustment and, therefore, teachers who disagree are breaking the law. The SEND Code Of Practice, by contrast, is clear, that nothing done to include those with SEND should prevent “the efficient education of others or the efficient use of resources”.

As teachers we have to teach the children in front of us. That means if there behaviour is bad we have to confront that behaviour, not tolerate it on the basis of a label. Children with SEND need boundaries as much as, or sometimes more, than other children. These should be set with love, but set to ensure everyone is safe and able to learn. Clear boundaries work a lot better than fuzzy ones, particularly for children with SEND. There are two things I always remind those who think that the badly behaved are actually have SEND and are the victims in all this. The first is that exceptions should be exceptional. We should never abandon the school rules because one, often theoretical child, might be unable to comply. If there is an extraordinary case, it should be treated as extraordinary – all schools and all teachers do that. The second is that behaviour is on a spectrum of seriousness. Those who refuse to draw any lines are, by omission, defending the most horrendous acts. It has been reported that there are 200 rapes in schools in a year. Does any principle justify including rapists in class? Is there a SEND that makes being a rapist, okay? If we want children to be safe, they need an environment where no child, whatever their needs, can just do what they want regardless of the consequences.

As a final point, the abuse I have encountered online since my tweet above has been incredible. Those people who label anyone who disagrees with the now abandoned policy of Inclusion as hating children with SEND, should be challenged for their name-calling. My closest friends include two who went to special schools as children and others with SEN. It is not prejudice that makes one view the badly behaved, even those with SEND, as responsible for their behaviour; it is respect for their humanity. And those of us who care about the children we teach with SEND, know that conflating them with the badly behaved, would be a gross insult to some of the most delightful children we work with. Both the badly behaved, and children with SEND, and, of course, children who are both, need the love and support of their teachers and help with specific needs. They don’t need virtue-signalling non-teachers writing them off.

Children are human beings, not labels published first on http://ift.tt/2uVElOo

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bisoroblog · 7 years

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Developing Students’ Ability to Give and Take Effective Feedback

When Emerie Lukas was hired to develop and teach a STEM Foundations course to middle school students at the Dayton Regional STEM School, she was starting from scratch. The stated goal of the course was to prepare students for more rigorous work in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes in high school, but Lukas knew that meant far more than academic preparation. She needed to teach her students how to give and take effective feedback, how to solve conflicts, how to organize themselves, and how to present, discuss and communicate their ideas. She knew without these qualities students wouldn’t be prepared for a rigorous STEM environment.

To get at some of these non-academic skills, Lukas thought she might be able to use strategies from “Six Thinking Hats” by Edward de Bono. “His idea with ‘Six Thinking Hats’ is that you can train people to approach a problem in a methodical, organized way,” Lukas said. De Bono used his strategy to coach employees at Fortune 500 companies, but Lukas thought she could adapt the strategies to her middle schoolers and in the process help them learn to give and take effective peer feedback.

‘So even though it was bumpy, and it wasn’t always easy, the quality of work improved enough so it seemed like we needed to get better at doing this.’Elisabeth Simon, high school art teacher

The hats and the colors that go along with them can seem a little confusing, but their purpose is to help students think concretely about the kind of feedback they are giving. “Yellow hat” feedback is positive. “Black hat” feedback helps point out specific parts of the work that aren’t meeting the stated goal. This is not the time for suggestions on how to fix it, however, since there may be more than one solution. The “green hat” is when students can suggest ideas for fixing some of the issues raised during black hat feedback. These three hats are used most frequently, and some teachers Lukas has trained use only these ones.

The “red hat” is what Lukas calls “a breath of fresh air”; it’s an opportunity for students to share subjective impressions that aren’t necessarily related to the goal. Perhaps it’s something they really like or a general impression they have about the work. The “blue hat” is to step back and look at the big picture. When kids are getting used to critique, the teacher often wears this hat to connect something in the critique to a bigger theme or put it in context. But when kids become skilled in critique they might also “put on the blue hat” for a moment to explain what skill they’re trying to develop, the trajectory of their learning, and where they want peers to focus critique.

The white hat almost never comes up, and can be a bit hard to understand, but it’s meant for objective observations. “Its purpose in my classroom was to point out things that you’re not sure if the presenter intended to do them, but you’re noticing and you have no judgment about,” Lukas said. For example, if kids are designing websites and the homepage background is blue, but another page is green, a white hat comment might point that out so the presenter is aware, but it isn’t something that necessarily needs to be changed to improve the work.

Training kids to give effective critique is one of those teaching strategies that takes some time on the front end, but can save a lot of time once students get good at it. It’s common for students to give unhelpful, general or unkind feedback that doesn’t do much to advance a peer’s goals for the work, but Lukas found when she carefully trained students on some conversational “commandments” and attitudes around peer critique, 12-year-olds could give feedback as well as any adult. Even better, when kids got feedback from peers, she found they internalized it more.

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But incorporating peer critique into the classroom does take time, which is most effectively spent on bigger, meatier projects that students are invested in improving. Lukas advises teachers she works with to use the adapted Six Hat feedback strategy only on assignments that require students to do several drafts, so they have time to incorporate the feedback they received.

“You can’t just front-load all of it,” Lukas cautioned. She knows it can seem complex at first, but she tells teachers not to teach the six hats as a rigid structure that students have to remember, but rather to introduce new elements as they naturally arise in class. “I don’t think [students] absorb it or see the value of it until they value critique,” Lukas said. “As they buy in more and more to the process, they care more and more about doing it well.”

The success of peer critique depends on a lot on some basic ground rules to ensure both the presenter and the person giving feedback are on the same page and getting something out of the experience.

GROUND RULES

Pick work that matters. Getting peer feedback on worksheets that students aren’t invested in improving is probably not a good use of time. But when teachers buy into using peer feedback as a way to improve the craftsmanship and depth of more complicated projects, they may be surprised at how insightful students can be.

Be kind. Lukas emphasizes that both words and body language matter here, and sometimes the teacher has to help kids fake it until they make it. When students aren’t used to the process, she presents it to them as though she’s offering them a code to effective adult communication. At first, following the rules starts out as a performance, but over time kids internalize it and it becomes part of them. She teaches students to nod as a peer presents, to validate what a peer said with specifics before disagreeing, to make eye contact. The word “should,” is forbidden. Instead phrases like “Did you consider?” “Maybe try” and “What if” can go a long way to promoting kindness, and help prevent the person receiving feedback from getting defensive.

Be helpful. This ground rule requires that the teacher, or students themselves when they are more adept at the process, choose a discrete goal for feedback. Lukas often chooses a skill that “not one everyone has mastered, but also not one that everyone sucks at.” When she trains teachers on the Six Hat strategy she notices that often teachers pick too many goals, focusing on all the elements of their rubric, instead of honing in on the skill they really want students to improve with the specific project being critiqued. Setting a concrete goal helps keep the conversation productive and leads toward next steps for the presenter.

Be specific. When kids don’t know how to give good feedback they may say something like, “Good Job,” which doesn’t help improve the work. The “copy and paste” test is one way to help students understand what it means to be specific. If the feedback could be copied and pasted onto someone else’s project, it’s not specific enough. Good feedback points to concrete evidence in the piece of work.

Keep it moving. The goal is to give objective feedback that doesn’t make the presenter feel defensive. Curbing redundant comments is one big way to keep the process moving. Providing a way for students to validate a former comment on paper or with some sign or quick sound are good ways to do this. “There should be a way in a well-designed activity to validate and reinforce things that are redundant,” Lukas said. It’s helpful for the presenter to know if many people agree on a point, but it can be done quickly.

Hold everyone accountable. This ground rule is meant to ensure that feedback-givers are being kind, helpful and specific, as well as to help the presenter think about how to use the feedback. It could be a reflection on the three pieces of feedback a student plans to incorporate in the next draft, or a conversation with the teacher about next steps. Or it could be a shareout to the class, thanking them for the feedback, reiterating what they heard and committing to actionable next steps. This helps all the kids see that the exercise wasn’t a waste of time. It’s also important to have accountability for those critiquing. Lukas explains critique to the kids as sacred process, something that requires maturity. She tells them that if they aren’t talking they should be writing their feedback, since there’s only a limited number of time for oral feedback. “Everything subliminally or not is about reinforcing the cultural value of what we are doing,” Lukas said.

And, while calling kids out in front of other kids is a controversial teaching move, in this process Lukas believes it’s important to openly address when a student is being snide or mean. She’ll just say something like, “I’m not convinced that’s the level of kindness you would expect in your critique.” She says since one of the goals of this process is interpersonal skill development, the only way to deal with mean feedback is to talk about it openly and in the context of validating the process.

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

All these rules and hats can seem a little overwhelming, but teachers who’ve made peer feedback a centerpiece of their classrooms say they take what they want and leave the rest. Lukas helped all the teachers at Dayton Regional STEM School integrate the practice into their content areas and has since moved on to consult with other districts too. The approach is being used in elementary, middle and high schools with good effect.

“When we first started it was really bumpy,” said Elisabeth Simon, a visual arts teacher at Yellow Springs High School. Simon began using the Six Hats for peer feedback when her school moved to project-based learning and there was a greater emphasis on deep projects that necessitated craftsmanship, revision, and thus critique. But kids weren’t used to the process and thought the formal structure was silly. Students often took feedback personally and didn’t incorporate it into their work. It felt like a waste of time to Simon. “It’s easy to give up as a teacher,” she said.

But as she was incorporating peer critique into her classroom, Simon was also experiencing the process herself in staff meetings. Every other week the faculty at her school engage in a “tuning” process, where a few teachers present a project they plan to use in class and get feedback from the group. “Experiencing it is powerful and it helped us believe that if we stick with it, and believe in it, we find it powerful and our students will as well,” Simon said.

She eases new students into the process by starting with a fairly low-stakes assignment. She might do a gallery walk, and have students post “warm and cool” (yellow and black hat) feedback on Post-Its next to the work. “Their heart and soul wasn’t in it in the first place, so it doesn’t feel as scary,” Simon said. Then she gradually adds complexity, until students are expert givers of feedback.

“Usually what I have to do is help the people giving the feedback to frame the feedback well so that it’s objective, it’s helpful, so it’s around the student’s goals,” Simon said. She grades the feedback itself at first, until students know how to do it well. She says it also helps that the whole district is incorporating project-based learning, so incoming freshmen are already better at giving and receiving feedback than previous classes she’s had.

“We saw their work improve, too,” she said. “So even though it was bumpy, and it wasn’t always easy, the quality of work improved enough so it seemed like we needed to get better at doing this and they need to get more effective at it.”

AP Studio Art portfolios exhibited on Simon’s class website.

It might seem obvious that critique should be part of art class, but before Simon adopted this strategy she didn’t ask students to give feedback on each other’s work because “I didn’t have a good set of tools to depersonalize it. I didn’t have a good set of tools to give feedback that was meaningful. So the feedback was very superficial.” Instead, she’d often ask students to assess their own work. Meanwhile, her assessment focused on the quality of the final product. Now she’s much more focused on the process: “Are they growing? Is the work improving? Are they making the changes that they recognized they need to make after a critique?”

The focus on growth has had the added benefit of infusing more equality into her classroom. Now, a very skilled artist can receive helpful feedback on a personal goal from a less technically proficient student, and grow from that process. Similarly, the less skilled student can grow in his goals, which may be different.

“In my experience, it’s invaluable. It’s the best thing to improve their work,” Simon said of the critique process. She remembers vividly when her AP studio art students set themselves the goal of producing a professional quality book of art. They had been through several rounds of peer critique and felt they were close to done when they had a critique from an outside expert that was harsh. The expert said if students wanted the work to be at a professional level it wasn’t enough to tinker around the edges — they needed to start over.

“They got deflated,” Simon said. “They got a little prickly, but then a few days later when they came back to class and I put it in their hands, what they decided to do was follow all the suggestions that person had given.” It took time to get over the disappointment, but the students were invested enough in the goal that eventually they took the feedback. “They didn’t think they had it in them, until someone else said it,” Simon said.

ELEMENTARY STUDENTS AREN’T TOO YOUNG

“They love it. You have to teach them to love it, but they love it,” said fourth-grade teacher Allie Beers. When she learned about Lukas’ adaption of the Six Hats she thought it was a bit complicated for her students, so she just uses the yellow and black hats, but calls them warm and cool feedback. When she’s teaching students how to give feedback she emphasizes being kind, helpful and specific, hitting home the message by praising the feedback students give, not the work they do.

She teaches students who are receiving feedback to say “OK, thanks,” to all feedback, even if they don’t like something someone said or are feeling defensive. Ultimately, the way the work will change is up to its creator, and the feedback is only meant to help each person get to their best work. With that framework as a guiding star, Beers has found her students work harder and with more intention when they know their peers will be giving them feedback.

Beers says in the short time she’s been intentionally using peer feedback her biggest challenges have been helping students to take the feedback well — some are better at this than others — and getting them to implement what they heard. She’s tried modeling the implementation of feedback with the whole class before setting them off to try on their own, but she thinks she can get to even better quality work with a few tweaks.

“Part of the problem I had last year was I didn’t say, ‘Hey, someone is going to look at your work again so you need to make sure you’re applying it,’ ” Beers said. She thinks if she plans for an extra revision and work cycle she’ll see better results.

Asking students to critique each other’s work can be an effective way to build their metacognition about the qualities of good work and whether or not those qualities are on display. All these teachers reflected that the act of giving feedback to a peer helps students to think about their own work more critically. And teachers can see how well students understand the criteria based on the type of feedback they give. But students don’t necessarily come to school equipped with the skills to engage in this process in a mature and helpful way — they have to be trained.

Developing Students’ Ability to Give and Take Effective Feedback published first on http://ift.tt/2y2Rir2

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perfectzablog · 7 years

Text

Developing Students’ Ability to Give and Take Effective Feedback

‘So even though it was bumpy, and it wasn’t always easy, the quality of work improved enough so it seemed like we needed to get better at doing this.’Elisabeth Simon, high school art teacher

youtube

The success of peer critique depends on a lot on some basic ground rules to ensure both the presenter and the person giving feedback are on the same page and getting something out of the experience.

GROUND RULES

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

AP Studio Art portfolios exhibited on Simon’s class website.

ELEMENTARY STUDENTS AREN’T TOO YOUNG

Developing Students’ Ability to Give and Take Effective Feedback published first on http://ift.tt/2xi3x5d

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davidastbury · 7 years

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March/April/May 2017

Margaret …1965 She had a flat in the All Saints district of Manchester, quite near the big hospital. On summer evenings, with the window open, the noise of the ambulance sirens would have bothered most people, but she didn’t mind. Her friends had given up trying to persuade her to join them in pubs – she preferred to stay at home during the week, reading or listening to music. The man from downstairs was a problem. She shouldn’t have encouraged him at the beginning by letting him in, but he was lonely, and she had felt sorry for him. But later he brought his drug kit with him and she had smoked. They would watch television and giggle – but afterwards she hated herself. So she stopped answering the door when she knew it was him – she didn’t want to see his worried face and his trembling hands; his dirty matchboxes and silver paper. So she would sit reading – any book would do – and look up when an ambulance passed – her face tightening with concern for the poor person being rushed to hospital.

Sandra .... (who was married to George) Sandra was George’s first wife, the one he loved most, the one he forever regretted leaving. He married at least four more times and lived with many other women. I served as ‘best man’ at his first and second weddings – we were close friends. Sandra basked his adoration but he didn’t fully meet up to her specification. She hated his name. George was not a great name to have in the early 60s – it was uncool and lumpy and forever linked with grey newspaper photographs of our chain smoking monarchs. The name was dumped upon him by his uncle George, childless himself, who assured the parents that if they named him George, he would make sure that the ‘little lad’ didn’t go ‘without’. This was a nudge-nudge way of telling them that the boy would inherit a portion of his butchering empire (a chain of shops in Burnley). The baby was inducted into the Church of England with the name George, but he saw nothing of his uncles’ estate when the sad day of his passing occurred. There was of course Georgie Fame who was high in the charts with clever rhythm and blues music – and the genius at Manchester United, George Best – but Sandra hated the name, and that was that. The other thing that bothered her was that George was thin and she hated thin men - she wanted a fat husband. Once, when we were drunk and George wasn’t around, she said that only fat men turned her on – I nodded with deep understanding. Her plan was to make George fat. The size of her meals increased gradually and she bought larger plates. Great offerings of slices of beef topped with suet dumplings, knobbly mountains of mashed potatoes, heaps of canned peas in what looked like green ink, boiled to death carrots – all swimming in a flood of watery gravy. I can only surmise that seeing her husband struggling to get into his clothes caused her to want him to struggle out of them. It was during that period that George emerged into his full heritage of faults. That first marriage winkled out all his weaknesses and compulsions and the two of them – both nineteen and without a clue about what life was about – looked like giggling kids who spent their time shoplifting.

Victoria Station – at night An old man is shouting at the ticket kiosk. I’ve seen him before, and he was shouting then. Everything annoys him, you can see it in his face – the face of someone who has taken a lifetime of being pushed around - of not fully understanding what was being done to him – of not being able to find the right words – of not being in control of his own destiny - of not being valued as a human being. But the hangdog years are finished and have been replaced by a rage at what the world has done to him – so he’s out on the streets looking for trouble. People are stepping back – it could get physical. They are enjoying the entertainment but don’t want to be hurt if things get out of hand. They find it amusing – a dishevelled, hunched up old man shouting at a glass grill.

Him! No matter how many disagreed with him he wouldn’t budge an inch. At the centre of his thinking was a conviction that whenever everyone is in agreement, something must be wrong. He had been like that at school and it had developed and intensified over the years - his opinions made life difficult, and few shared his relentless scepticism. He often felt isolated because he couldn’t believe in shared values. The idea of religion was attractive but he knew he would only disagree with the members, and to be honest, the concept of utopian goodness was irrationally repugnant. He never learned to debate and as far as I know has never converted anyone to his viewpoint – but he has been true to himself and consistently taken the side of anyone and anything that has drawn public hostility. No matter how loud the braying of the mob (using his phrase) he has always stood beside the underdog, always helped the lost cause – always.

Restaurant near the University I know nothing about him, but I’ll tell you this – he is clever! He has a look of Einstein - you cannot look like that and not be clever. The people at his table sit in awe at his knowledge and the flow of his perfectly chosen words. The nice thing is that he wears his erudition lightly; he isn’t pedantic or bombastic – he’s a nice clever man. A few minutes ago he left his group, lots of handshakes and good wishes, and passing my table, had a quick word with the cashier and then across to the curtained alcove to collect his coat. I saw him retrieve it and give it a good shaking, as if admonishing it for failing him in some way. Then he shouldered his way into it. It was instantly clear that he would have difficulties – I think the sleeves were too tight – too tight to pass over the rather bulky sleeves of his tweed jacket. Presumably the overcoat had a satin lining which enables it to slide over the garment underneath, but excessive tightness would eradicate this feature. He inserted his right arm and tugged the front of the coat, which is the right thing to do, but he failed to reach far enough down the sleeve – his hand did not appear. Instead he attempted to ‘shoulder’ his way into the left side, which resulted in the neck area becoming trapped in his upper back. I could see that his arms were pinned, with very restricted movement, and whilst his coat would not move upwards to cover his upper body, the knobbly bulkiness of his jacket would not let the overcoat ride up – nor was there sufficient looseness to tug the coat down and start again. So he stands, red-faced and helpless. The only solution is for someone to grip the back of the coat and vigorously jerk it upwards, releasing the trapped collar and enabling his shoulders to fit where they should.

Cadences and Complexities She was giving a series of talks and he, as an old friend, had been invited. The series had the snappy title ‘American Literature: A Personal Survey’ – in which she tried to chart the development of what had once been a branch of English literature until, blossoming so successfully, it became the tree itself and ‘English’ literature became the mere branch. This was her big theory; she had written books on the subject. He found it very pleasant to be sitting among the huddle of academics in the small, dignified hall. A satisfactory number of her students – a few friends like himself – and a ragbag of enthusiasts who preferred going out in the evening to sitting at home watching television. He enjoyed the sound of her voice - the pleasant tone - the rising and falling of the long (sometimes Jamesian) sentences – the modest, understated humour, all combining to make the lecture a very pleasing experience. She was also easy on the eye – she was very nice to look at. So deeply was she absorbed in her subject that people might assume that there was no other side to her personality, yet there was nothing ethereal about her physical presence. The tilt of her head as she spoke and the interesting self- consciousness of the way she perched on a corner of the polished desk, showed that cerebral issues did not totally occupy her mind. He was familiar with her themes; he had read one of her books long ago and it was coming back to him. He even composed a point for the end of the lecture - when she asked for questions. But then he rejected the idea – being aware that he would be showing off, as people usually are at such moments. He was old enough to know better – and anyway, she would know what he was doing – and he would know that she knew – and he would know that she knew that he knew. How Henry James would have loved this! So instead he let his mind drift away to wherever it wished, and a memory from early childhood materialised. He had been six or seven years old, and his parents were talking about something they had just bought – a set of ‘foam rubber’ cushions. These were viewed as the very latest items from our burgeoning post-war technologies. Unlike convention cushions, their composition made them ‘want’ to spring back to their original shapes – which was quite magical. Once left alone – and then quite often when left alone – he would remove the covers and handle the cushions with an innocent wonderment. He loved their forceful resistance to being squeezed – their patient tolerance to his grip – their deceptive appearance of weight, when in fact they were so soft and resilient and accommodating.

Clothes She used to have an unchanging appearance when at home. She always wore the same clothes, or so it seemed when he tried to remember. Always pale blue jeans and a red top – a T shirt in summer or a jumper in winter, but only in the house - she dressed differently when outside. Over the years the jeans would be loose fitting, or flared, or skinny and then flared again, or whatever the fashion stipulated, and the tops were always bright red – a loud red – a troubled red. The colours suited her, fitted in with her personality – clothes to slob around in – for listening to Blondie or Madness, or sprawling in front of the telly, eating crisps, hair a mess, skin blotched. That was a long time ago, but then something odd happened – he started to adopt this look himself. He now wears the same colour of jeans and pullovers in the same shade of red. It was something unconscious – he had never thought about it, and it was a while before he recognised the habit. It simply feels right, as if the clock had been turned back, as if the fun and optimism has never gone, as if she was still there – still in the house.

On the Train Summer 1964… (all change) They were very young and talked about getting married. They were so pleased with each other! She had told him, more than once, how he was exactly ‘her type’ – and she went into detail explaining what her type was. This pleased him hugely – her specification was quite demanding, and yet when thinking it over, a question crossed his mind about the exclusivity of his qualities – was she drawn to these features in other men? And then there was a crisis; she had been away on holiday with her friends and met someone new. She quickly told her boyfriend and there were tears and they decided to call it off. The new boyfriend travelled up from Northampton every weekend and she probably told him how he was exactly her type. After a few weeks it all went wrong and they decided it to give each other some ‘breathing space’. During this period of quiet consideration she by chance met the first boyfriend and told him that she was again free. He was delighted to hear this and the two of them resumed their relationship and once again started to talk about getting married. He told her that he was going to Wales to visit family and wanted her to go with him – she gave some excuse which he accepted. Early Saturday morning he rushed down the steps of the local station – he had to travel to Manchester and then on to Crewe and then to Wales via Chester. But as he rushed down the stone steps there was someone rushing up them – and he knew instantly who he was – you see, he was exactly her type.

We were never particularly close, but we once shared a lot of friends and were at the same inevitably found ourselves sharing conversations at all sorts of parties and events. Conversation was pleasant but it never broadened out or developed further; we just drifted on the fringes of each other’s lives. And the years passed. He must have enquired about what was happening to me, and via the same friends I looked into what he was doing – a roller coaster ride of businesses and divorces – much more eventful than my own demure history. So in recent weeks, finding ourselves face to face again on several occasions, we effortlessly slotted into our comfortable positions. We have talked about the past, the people we have known (very few, for various reason, are still around) and the things we did. He is eager to go into detail as if it all means a lot to him. His wife watches and listens, knowing she is excluded from the code being used. She sees no reason for his curiosity, his eagerness to hear me speak of car journeys, theatre trips, dinner parties but slowly I understood. Others probably know him better but he doesn’t want to be with people who know everything – it is nicer to be with someone with partical knowledge. But more than that, I knew the person whose name must not be mentioned – his first wife.

He didn’t care much for poetry – he told me that more than once. But when that dog of his died he wrote a lot of verse, all at top speed, all very raw and hurt. I commiserated with him and mentioned a pet cemetery on the moors near Leeds, run by a lovely couple who burst into tears with every new client. So his dog has a grave with an impressive slab of marble for protection – inscribed with one of his poems.

The Eye Test I was in the semi-darkness, perched on a leather seat having my eyes tested, and at the end of the examination the optometrist took photographs of the back of my eyes. The results came up on a huge screen. It was incredibly beautiful – like a lost throbbing planet or some wonderful splash of colour inlaid with a filigree of red webbing. ‘That is so beautiful’ I said to the optometrist. ‘Yes it is’ he replied – ‘but then all the human body is too, wouldn’t you agree?’ I was thinking about this when the door opened slightly and a crack of light slid across the consulting room. It was his receptionist- she put her head round the door and softly said – ‘Excuse me...’ We all laughed.

As usual I am (in the words of Charles Dickens’ Sam Weller) ‘as dumb as a drum with a hole it in.’

Pret a Manger The cup was empty and she wanted to play with it – her elder brother, about seven years old, wouldn’t look at her as she pretended to drink. And then the cup slipped through her fingers and smashed noisily on the floor. The little girl was wide-eyed – so many shiny fragments scattered over the tiles. The man crouched down and carefully began picking them up, laying them neatly onto a paper napkin. A waitress rushed over and started to help, and he smiled apologetically – he was picking up the pieces and realising, with sadness and happiness, that he would always be picking up the pieces.

There is a little girl in many of Picasso’s Minotaur series – she is usually carrying flowers or holding a light. She also appears in other works. She is all important. This is Conchita, Picasso’s sister, who died of diphtheria in 1895 when she was seven. As she lay dying, her 14-year-old brother made a vow to God. He said he would never paint again if her life was spared. She died; he painted.

(John Richardson) At the Jewellers She went into the shop to collect her ring, which had been repaired. As she explained to the jeweller, it had once belonged to her grandmother’s mother and had been passed down to her – it was loose on her finger and also needed the mount tightening. She was pleased with what he had done – she stretched her arm out and admired the way the light caught the blue stone. The jeweller watched her and noticed that the colour of the stone matched her eyes. She was about twenty and was delighted at her ring being ‘old’. This amused the jeweller and he wanted to say that the gold is much, much older. No one throws away gold - it is continually melted down and takes on new shapes, new objects of beauty. The gold of her ring, now sitting so prettily on her elegant, tapering finger, may once have been stolen by the Spanish Conquistadors, or part of Charlemagne’s treasure or it may have adorned Nero’s plump pinky. It was at such moments that he loved his job. He held up his hands and said: ‘May God Bless you and give you many, many years of health to enjoy it.'

Russell at Thirteen An old photograph, developed by Boots – colours bleaching into a brown/orange – but I can still see him okay. Smiling across the years, faithful to the simple love of his gorgeous puppy - his older sister - his mother who smoked like Audrey Hepburn - his genial, often absent father. It’s a lovely group picture, all of us together, including the puppy. I’m next to his sister – his older sister – his dazzlingly pretty older sister - and I’m so happy that I’m nearly falling off the garden chair. But she never looked at me - she was always in profile! And we all sat in the sun; Russell at the front with the puppy licking his face, each of us smiling into the future.

There is a country lane with high hedgerows and rippling green meadows and ponds and buttercups and bulrushes and a stone house with no roof. On summer afternoons I would walk home from school with my friend Russell. We would cross the meadows and the long grass was as soft as hair and we would laugh together, our voices ringing in the bee loud stillness. And a while later I returned – not with Russell but with someone else. And the green of the meadow and the green of the leaves and the green of everything was changed forever – because I had seen the green of her eyes.

On the Train Only the deeply unhappy can be so happy. And the man opposite me belongs to an exclusive society for the truly wretched – because like all the other members he has been guided into a comfortable room marked ‘private’, and given the bad news, and from then on nothing will be the same. Members can spot each other – total strangers – a glance in a café – in the queue at a check-out – or in the street; and sometimes a quick ‘me too’ nod at each other, but they don’t need to say anything; they don’t want to know each other, they don’t want to hear the other’s story. But I can say for sure that they are no longer bothered by everyday worries; all the anxieties of the past are finished forever. Time itself becomes compressed and each day shines like a miniature lifetime. The relentless ache is transformed into an appreciation of everything – every detail is a delight! And there is joy in simply being alone – doing something exciting alone – like leaving the house before the postman comes – and ensuring no more bad news by dropping the mobile phone into a drawer and rushing out into the street – to the sunshine – to people who don’t know you – to life itself!

A hundred years ago – (not very long ago, my grandparents generation) it was noted that the performance of boys in schools plummeted in the higher forms. The boys knew that as the school leaving age approached they would soon go into the army and be slaughtered in the trenches. I suppose it became difficult to see the relevance of irregular verbs with something like that at the front of your mind. Every week the headmasters would struggle to read the latest list of former pupils who had been killed. These schools produced the officers, and in those days the officers led from the front, so their casualty numbers were higher pro rata than the ranks.

Seventy-odd years ago my own parents spent the last summer of peace tearing around the Linconshire lanes on a Norton motor bike. They saw the young airmen in the evening pubs, drinking and singing despite knowing that their chances of survival were slim. They smoked very heavily – cigarettes were called ‘gaspers’ and ‘cancer sticks’ – but who gave a damn when you were going to be killed anyway?

Euston Station Amazing. Thousands of people and I see a face that fifty years ago used to belong to my friend Russell. When he didn’t need it anymore it was given to someone else, because that’s how it goes. I cannot prove it; but then no one can disprove it. And seeing a face like that, right back from my past, gives you a bit of a shock and that’s putting it mildly. It is all about how we used to feel about life, and our eagerness and how it was taken away, how it was secured with a spring-steel clip and how much we want it back – if only we could – if only we could.

Politics The annual school Speech Day was coming up, and at the age of twelve he was selected to be one of the welcoming party for the Mayor and his lady wife. It meant standing in the entrance hall with the senior staff and greeting the assorted dignitaries, and then later being on the platform helping with the prize-giving. He refused. His parents did their best to understand why he didn’t wish to accept the honour and concluded it was a matter of shyness and lack of confidence. They told him that they accepted his decision and were so nice about it – but hinting at a deep disappointment – knowing that he would pick this up. Gradually this had an effect and a few days later he announced that he would be late home because there was a rehearsal of the opening ceremony and he was needed. But two years after this, his sister was in a similar situation – she was proposed for something and she refused. She glared at her parents and gave an emphatic and resounding ‘no’. And that was an end to it.

James O’Brian ‘Big Jim’ (1921? – 1992) On his last day at school Jim’s headmaster said to him – ‘It is difficult to predict your destiny, but my guess is that it will be at the end of a rope.’ A few years later Jim was in the army – ‘Out east’ – and his unit, under Lieutenant-General Percival, surrendered to the Japanese army. This was in February 1942. He then found himself working in gangs in the Burma jungle. The conditions were hellish and he must have decided that any escape must be done very soon, before he lost his strength. He had a go, and was recaptured – and although he survived whatever it was they did to him, he never talked about it. Back in England he found employment as a building site labourer and he did this work for the rest of his life. He never married, lived in one-room flats, and each weekend spent most of his wages on drink. Everyone knew him in the pubs, he had no close friends but he was respected. One Friday night, when the pub was loud and smoke filled, a young man in a suit made a joke about Jim. People were laughing. Jim slid off the bar stool and went across to him. He raised his dirty, stained left hand and put it in front of the young man’s face, and then, elegantly, flicked the front of his hair.

At the Takeaway Three queues, slow moving. Scruffy man at the head of my queue and he’s having a problem with money - he doesn’t appear to have enough to pay for what he has ordered. I can only see the back of him; he has a bulky, canvas bag over his shoulder and he appears to be one of Manchester’s hundreds of rough-sleepers. Woman at the head of side queue goes across and presses paper money into his hand; the assistant passes over the meal on a plastic tray. Whatever other characteristics the woman possesses, she is certainly kind-hearted and generous. Everyone who knows her will be also be aware of the many other aspects of her personality – the kindheartedness and generosity will be blurred, obscured. Yet the homeless man will see only her goodness, and in the ‘true’ scale of things - the things that really matter – it could be said that he knows her better than anyone else.

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kenyonexeter-blog · 7 years

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Cheeseburger in Paradise: An Emotional Journey Through Ground Beef Offerings In The City Of Exeter

by Fletcher Hartman

Many people say that there’s no point eating burgers in England, that the English can’t cook ground beef and put it between bread the way we Americans can. Obviously, those people are right. And yet – we persevere. I have had no less than three hamburgers in and around the city of Exeter, and knowing that future Kenyon students will arrive here and sample the British “hamburgers” as I did, hungry for their one most national foodstuff, I feel called upon to catalogue them. Your first Exeter hamburger is going to be terrible. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it stacks up – you’re going to go to the Ram as a group on your very first week and order a hamburger, and you’re going to hate it. The Ram is a comfortable, dim space on the second floor of the Forum, a space trying to be a real live British pub that happens to be in an academic building. If you take a wrong turn headed into class you might walk into it by mistake. It has a good location, good atmosphere, but something about the Ram is like going to a funeral inside an airport. “How did we end up here?” you’ll ask, as people around you sob and eat cheap French fries. “I wasn’t expecting things to turn out like this.” That frisson of the uncanny will be present when you eat your burger, too. The patty will look normal, but taste more like sausage than hamburger, and the fries will be served in a classy metal dish to mask the fact that there are six of them. Before you got your hamburger, you and the rest of the Kenyon program will have been crowded around a table, sipping local cider and excited about having already found a cool student pub. “This is the life,” you’ll say, reveling in this country’s pub culture, its communality, its lowered drinking age. “I bet we’ll come here all the time.” Then your burger will arrive and something in that happy moment will shatter. The Ram burger is a masterpiece in non-Euclidean food science; a cry for help from a country that has never made hamburgers but knows it is expected to generate them anyway. This hamburger will turn to ash in your mouth. This hamburger will make you feel that you have wasted your money, and your dream of returning to the Ram weekly, surrounded by friends, will wither and die with the patty in your hands. There will also be no cheese on it. Two stars. Your second Exeter hamburger will be an import. You’ll have been adrift in the city for some months now – trying to chisel your way into British people’s established friend groups and laughing a little too loudly when they say things like “well dry” – and you’ll be walking down Queen Street one evening (maybe a little bit drunk) when you see it. It’s a red and white sign, spectre-like in the English fog, the manifestation of a long-ago life lived in America, and it says, “FIVE GUYS: BURGERS AND FRIES”. You’ll walk in almost before you make the decision to eat there, and while you’re ordering, you’ll feel like you’re home again. They have hamburgers and fries and milkshakes like they are supposed to, and like in every Five Guys, the walls are covered in newspaper testimonials from American cities – Louisville, Hartford, Santa Fe. The Yankee in you will experience a deep connection with the place for its similarity to the affectionate, shabby burger joints of your home country, places with blue-plate specials where the waitress calls you “sugar” and carries a coffeepot around for refills. Any similarity to that greasy-spoon Elysium, though, will disappear when you bite into your burger. The lettuce is obviously wilted, the famous Five Guys secret sauce appears to be unmodified mayonnaise, and the patty – of course – is tasteless and emotionally taxing. The Exeter Five Guys burger experience is an uncanny valley – a bit like one of those dystopian movies set in an alternate America, where flags and eagles and other such iconography become hallmarks of some evil government that legalizes crime one day a year or turns people into Soylent Green. It reminds you of the comfortable reality you live in, but with the unsettling truth that something is wrong lurking beneath. That wrongness is bound up in many things about this quasi-American establishment – the fact that you pay in pounds, for example, or that the French fries are still being called “chips” – but most of what is so terribly incorrect is the burger itself. Two and a half stars. The third and last burger you eat will be at the Firehouse. You’ll have been in Exeter for a tiny bit too long now, going to “modules” and playing cricket against people who have been playing cricket their whole lives. In Exeter you will have learned, as you did in Ohio, the way that new places soften as they become familiar. Exeter may not be home, but you have hobbies there, routines, some small semblance of a community – you know your way to the Waterstones down the road, where books live, and how to get to the pub in town that feels the homiest. (This is the Old Firehouse, tucked in around the corner you turn if you’re walking to the High Street from home, and if you haven’t yet been I implore you to go. The Firehouse, with enormous square pizzas and candlelight and ciders that are a bit too strong for their own good, is probably the new place that becomes the softest of all.) And it’s at the Firehouse, if you choose to go, that you will finally have a hamburger that is at least worth buying. You’ll have a visitor in town – somebody really special, maybe somebody who’s only visiting for a couple of days – and you’ll drag them there to see it, and you’ll discover that it’s too early for them to be serving their signature pizza. “What the hell,” you’ll say. “Let’s get some burgers.” By now you’ve been here long enough to know not to expect much. The English, you have finally realized, simply cannot make a good burger, and what you are ordering is actually some kind of ground beef toastie in disguise. Even the Firehouse, which (because you are only now turning twenty-one) is your favorite bar you’ve ever been to, “Wow,” you’ll say, grinning across the table at somebody you haven’t seen in a while, somebody from home that you’ve been missing a whole lot. “This burger doesn’t even suck that much.” And it doesn’t. The bun is one of those fluffy brioche ones, and there are pickles on it, and the meat isn’t even a complete disaster – but even that barely matters. Here in the Firehouse, with somebody you care about, any burger would make you happy. For the first time in Exeter you will bite into a hamburger and feel satisfied with this alien country – like in the right pub, with the right person, on the right night, you could be happy here. You’ll finish your burger, and you’ll stay there drinking and talking and laughing long into the night – because the best burger in England is the burger you share with friends. Five stars. That said – compared to your first hamburger back in America, though, the Firehouse offering is basically garbage. I’m sorry to be blunt – your first hamburger post-Exeter will be way, way better. Scrap what I was saying about the burger you share with friends. You could get a hamburger at Arby’s. You could get a hamburger at Radio Shack. It’ll be delicious. It’ll be mouthwatering and bursting with flavor and taste like home. American burgers, it turns out, are cooked with fattier meat than English ones, and for some reason this is the critical difference that takes a burger from good to great. It may be radically unhealthy, but it’s that unhealthiness that makes it inimically American. You’ll be reminded of all the good stuff you left behind when you went to the great nation of England, and though you might be missing your temporary home country (with all the charms of value-added tax and whatever the hell Yorkshire puddings are), when you take that first bite it’s finally going to sink in that you’re home again. Some Exeter locals may disagree with me on this one. There are good burgers in my city, they may tell you, and it may well be that there are. But to that I say: if you’re ever in Boston, Massachusetts, call me up and I’ll take you to Saltie Girl. It’s a seafood bar on Newbury Street and they have a hamburger there that has gruyere and guacamole and lobster meat on top of the beef patty. I’m buddies with one of the bartenders, and if we’re extra nice, maybe he’ll comp us some lobster burgers and we can box ‘em up and walk a little ways and eat ‘em by the river. Because the best burger is one you eat in your home city. Preferably down by the water, and preferably gifted by a good friend. And – with nothing but love to the Old Firehouse, New North Road, Exeter, Devon, UK – preferably it’ll be friggin’ cooked right.

#march #writing #john fletcher hartman #portfolio

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worldupdatereviews2017-blog · 7 years

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Hiya, Pc Scientists! Prevent Hating on the arts

New Post has been published on https://worldupdatereviews.com/hiya-pc-scientists-prevent-hating-on-the-arts/

Hiya, Pc Scientists! Prevent Hating on the arts

AS A Laptop technological know-how Ph.D. student, I’m a disciple of big information. I see no floor too sacred for records: I have used it to observe everything from sex to Shakespeare and earned angry retorts for those tries to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I used to be given, as a teen, weapons both elegant and lethal—algorithms that could pick out the terrorists most well worth targeting in a network, locate someone’s dissatisfaction with the authorities from their on line writing.

Laptop science is wondrous. The problem is that many human beings in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that subjects. You notice this when recruiters at profession fairs make it clear they’re simplest interested by the Pc scientists; within the salary gap among engineering and non-engineering students; inside the quizzical seems humanities college students get when they dare to show their majors. I’ve watched remarkable Pc scientists show such woeful lack of know-how of the populations they have been reading that I laughed in their faces. I’ve watched military scientists gift their deadly improvements with childlike enthusiasm at the same time as making no point out of whom the weapons are getting used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can provide an academic talk on a way to shoot a person but can’t motive about whether or not you must be shooting them at all.

The reality that so many Pc scientists are ignorant or disdainful of non-technical tactics is worrisome because, in my paintings, I’m continuously confronting questions which can’t speak back with the code. After I coded at Coursera, a web education company, I advanced an set of rules that could advise training to humans in component primarily based on their gender. However, the corporation decided now not to use it when we determined it might push ladies away from Laptop technological know-how instructions.

It turns out that this effect—in which algorithms entrench societal disparities—is one that takes place in domains from crook justice to credit scoring. That is a difficult catch 22 situation: In crook justice, as an instance, you’re faced with the reality that an algorithm that fulfills primary statistical desiderata is likewise plenty more likely to rate black defendants as high-threat even when they may now not cross on to dedicate every other crime.

I don’t have a strategy to this hassle. I do know, but, that I won’t find it in my algorithms textbook; I’m ways much more likely to discover applicable information in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work on systemic discrimination or Michelle Alexander’s on mass incarceration.

My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. should I write a Pc software as a way to download the communications of heaps of young adults laid low with eating disorders published on an anorexia recommendation internet site? Write an application to publish nameless, suicidal messages on loads of university forums to peer which schools offer the maximum assist? My solution to these questions, incidentally, turned into “no”. however, I took into consideration it. And the consideration and peril of computer systems are they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that could hurt heaps of people.

Possibly it’s more green to permit Computer scientists to do what we’re nice at—writing code—and have other human beings alter our merchandise? This is inadequate. Coders push products out at blinding velocity, regularly cloaked in industry secrecy; by the point, legislation catches up, hundreds of thousands of human beings could be harmed. Ethics education is needed for experts in different fields in the element as it’s essential for doctors and legal professionals as a way to act ethically even when no one’s looking over their shoulders. In addition, Computer scientists want to assist craft policies because they have the necessary technical know-how; it’s tough to regulate algorithmic bias in word embeddings if you have no concept what a phrase embedding is.

Right here are a few steps forward. Universities should start with broader training for Laptop technology students. I contacted eight of the pinnacle undergraduate programs in Computer technology, and observed that most do now not require students to take a path on ethical and social issues in Laptop technology (even though a few offer optionally available courses). Such guides are hard to teach well. Laptop scientists regularly don’t take them seriously, are uncomfortable with non-quantitative wondering, are overconfident due to the fact they’re mathematically top notch or are satisfied that utilitarianism is the answer to the whole lot. but universities need to strive. Professors need to scare their college students, to cause them to experience they’ve been given the talents not simply to get rich however to break lives; they want to humble them, to lead them to realize that however proper they might be at math, there’s still a lot they don’t recognize.

A greater socially focused curriculum might no longer best make coders less possibly to reason damage; it additionally makes them more likely to do properly. top faculties squander a long way too much in their technical talent on socially vain, high-paying interests like algorithmic buying and selling. As Andrew Ng, a Stanford Computer scientist, admonished a roomful of Stanford college students he changed into looking to recruit to Coursera: “You have to ask yourself, why did I have a look at Laptop science? And for a variety of college students, the answer appears to be, so I will design the latest social media app…I consider we will construct matters which can be extra meaningful than that.”

There are many steps tech groups need to take as well. Businesses have to explore the social and moral troubles their merchandise creates: Google and Microsoft deserve credit for studying algorithmic discrimination, for example, and Fb for investigating echo chambers. Make it easier for outside researchers to evaluate the influences of your products: be transparent approximately how your algorithms paintings and provide get right of entry to statistics underneath appropriate statistics use agreements. (Researchers additionally need to be allowed to audit algorithms without being prosecuted.) Ask social or moral questions in hiring interviews, not just algorithmic ones; if hiring managers asked, students might discover ways to answer them. (Microsoft’s CEO become as soon as requested, in a technical interview, what he might do if he noticed an infant mendacity in an intersection: the plain answer to pick up the toddler did no longer occur to him).

corporations have to rent the human beings harmed or excluded by means of their products: whose faces their Pc vision systems don’t apprehend and smiles their emojis don’t seize, whose resumes they rank as much less applicable and whose housing alternatives they limit, who’re mobbed through online trolls they helped organize and do little to govern. rent non-Pc-scientists, and bring them in for lunchtime talks; have them ask the worldviews of the group of workers.

It’s possible that taking note of non-Computer scientists will slow the Silicon Valley machine: Various worldviews can produce an argument. however slowing down in locations wherein reasonable human beings can disagree is a good factor. In a generation in which even elections are won and misplaced on digital battlefields, tech corporations need to transport less speedy and spoil fewer things.

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